About the Citizen Schools Award

Do you want recognition for the great work you are doing in Citizenship?

Do you want to raise the profile of your work across the school and community?

the Citizen Schools Award is coming soon...

The Citizen Schools Award seeks to draw together a number of key citizenship education tools and intellectual developments and directly apply them to a quality assured status that schools can work towards achieving. In so doing, we are seeking to establish a coherent, national platform for citizenship education within schools – a means to recognise and celebrate best practice, reward innovative and cutting-edge work, to provide clear guidance as to how schools can become ‘citizenship-rich’, and to broadcast the tangible impacts of schools which prioritise and translate both their belief in the transformative role of citizenship education and their statutory responsibility to create responsible citizens into action.

Between September 2009 and March 2010 the wider policy community (including Sir Keith Ajegbo, Tony Breslin, Don Rowe, Chris Waller, Pete Pattisson, Jan Newton, Liz Craft of QCA, Scott Harrisson (formerly of OFSTED), David Kerr of NFER and John Lloyd) will be begin work on an advisory panel to establish the criteria and mechanism by which schools participating in the programme can achieve the Citizen School Award.

It is likely the award will involve an application process, whereby schools show how they meet the specific criteria, a period of ajudication, and a process of review across time. The aim is to minimise workload on schools, but arrive at a mechanism and set of criteria which represent quality active citizenship.

Our partner through this work will be the Association for Citizenship Teaching, the professional subject association for citizenship, who are likely to administer the award once developed.

The award will be formally launched in time for the September 2010 academic year. Schools taking part in the 2009-2010 Citizen Schools Pathway will be the first to have the opportunity to apply.