‘For people so young they had so much to offer’: implementing active citizenship in the UK undergraduate social science curriculum

Citizenship education is not restricted to schools and there have been a number of publicly funded initiatives to develop citizenship education in UK universities and higher education colleges. This paper contributes to the developing literature in this area with reference to evaluation research undertaken in relation to one module, ‘Citizenship and Identity’, delivered to first year social science undergraduates at a Higher Education Institute. This module included an active citizenship element in which students worked jointly with local school pupils at several conferences held at the HEI. We discuss the undergraduates’ reflections on their involvement in the module, including the school participation element, in relation to Faulks’ recent critique of citizenship education and also the local context.