Who’s listening to whom? The UK House of Lords and evidence-based policy-making on citizenship education

The 2017–2019 House of Lords’ select committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement made a number of bold proposals to reinvigorate citizenship education in the UK. However, the public and academic debate surrounding the Lords’ report and its recommendations has been startlingly muted. To tackle this lacuna, this article analyses a range of ‘policy documents’ alongside the Lords’ report to make three distinct contributions. Firstly, this article is the first detailed analysis of the Lords’ report and what it says about the state of citizenship education after two decades of varying policy narratives and implementation. Secondly, I take the Lords’ report as a ‘window’ onto policy-making under the Conservative and Coalition governments since 2010. I find that the Government approach to citizenship education and affiliated programmes such as the National Citizen Service is out-of-step with the thoughts, experience, and advice of ‘the policy community’. By contrast, the findings presented here highlight the potential for the House of Lords to play an important new role in the policy process. Thirdly, this article is methodologically innovative, insofar as I combine qualitative data collection with computational text analysis that is still rare in policy studies undertaken in both education and political science.