ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the range of influences on education policy for citizenship education. We advocate the adoption of a policy sociology approach to highlight the political nature of policy making. We draw on the notions of ‘travelling’ and ‘embedded’ policy (Ozga and Jones, 2006; Jones and Alexiadou, 2001) in outlining cross-national, national/regional and local influences on the enactment of policy. Consideration is given to the broader political context of citizenship education within contemporary debates about the ‘new social democracy’ and ‘new localism’. At the local level, we identify some tensions in current policy frameworks that contain contradictory messages for practitioners and pupils, particularly the (mal-) alignment of the three message systems of schooling – curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (Bernstein, 1977).
