Changing the face of politics
Democracy cannot function if there is inequality in participation, yet social differences in political engagement are widening across England’s social classes, particularly in the early teenage years.
How does this deficit feed into the overall trend of disengagement from democracy?
“The English education system is providing the most unequal access to learning political engagement across Europe” is the unfortunate conclusion on the state of our nation, according to work from IOE and the University of Roehampton, which shows that students from disadvantaged homes are much less likely to take part in political activities, and also feel less able to contribute to open-minded classroom discussions than their middle class peers.
This thoughtful and challenging research aims to promote education and understanding, through which the IOE continues to explore the effect of a widening gap in political activity and encourage schools to offer and reinforce equal opportunity for engagement. Ultimately aiming for reforms to the education system to mitigate and reduce these inequalities.
IOE sits at the compelling intersection between policy, education and culture, so is thus perfectly placed to investigate such an important societal issue. By focusing on our cornerstones of collaboration, curiosity, and courage, we raise the collective consciousness around inequality in political engagement – and explore how these inequalities are countering the basic values that our country holds dear. Ultimately, the social order and social cohesion of our society depends on evenness and is negatively impacted by disengagement, or worse, alienation.
While working-class people in many countries have lower levels of participation in aspects central to the democratic process, such as voting and joining political parties, the class gap is particularly pronounced in England. Internationally, there is strong evidence that the poor feel “alienated, powerless and distrustful of mainstream politics”, and that this may have fuelled the success of recent populist campaigns, including the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. Social class has also been found to be more strongly associated with likelihood of voting in the UK than in other developed countries, and comparative analysis across six European countries found that England had a greater split in political participation in school by social background than any of Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Poland and Italy.
In the words of Professor Jan Germen Janmaat from IOE, “democracy cannot function if there is inequality in participation” – and if middle class people are participating more than working class people, democracy gets skewed towards the interests of the privileged. There are possible ways of counteracting this phenomenon, however.
In “Education, Democracy and Inequality: Political Engagement and Citizenship Education in Europe”, researchers Professor Jan Germen Janmaat (IOE) and Professor Bryony Hoskins (University of Roehampton), investigated the part schools might be playing in varying levels of political engagement among the population.
Hoskins and Janmaat analysed the results of a survey of more than 3,000 English secondary school pupils to find out their levels of engagement with activities in school which could support them becoming engaged with the political process.
Key findings
- 62% of children who said they had more than 200 books at home had voted in student council elections, while this figure dropped to 30% among those with fewer than 10 books at home.
- 6% of children whose parents had left school at 16 had taken part in mock elections within the past year, the figure was double that 12% – among those whose parents had degrees.
- Children of parents with degrees were 50% more likely to take part in political activities at school than those whose parents left school at 16, and 40% more likely to do so than those whose parents left school at 18.
- Political activities in school and an open classroom climate were strongly associated with students saying they were likely to vote, to join a political party or to engage in a legal political protest, all of which are “accepted forms of political engagement”.
"Our analyses revealed disadvantaged youth to have significantly less access to these highly important ways of learning political engagement compared to their more advantaged peers," Professors Hoskins and Janmaat conclude.
Professor Hoskins and Professor Janmaat suggest that part of the reason may be that schools serving disadvantaged communities may be focusing on the “basics” of literacy and numeracy, with democratic education largely confined to statutory citizenship classes, taught separately from other subjects. Tightly-managed disciplinary policies designed to keep order in the classroom, rather than encourage a climate of open debate where different points of view were welcomed and discussed, may help boost pupils’ exam results but mean that participation in civic education may make students less likely to get involved in the democratic process as young adults.
Professor Janmaat said: “By focusing on the ‘basics’ of education in this way, schools serving disadvantaged communities are missing out on chances to help their pupils become more politically engaged. The backgrounds of such pupils make them less likely to be politically engaged in any case. So, these educational policies are likely only to be widening the engagement gap between working class children and those from middle-class backgrounds.”
While all our work at IOE aims to embrace distinction and celebrate differences, this work in particular hopes to have far-reaching impact by encouraging equal participation in democracy from those who might not have otherwise had their voice heard, ultimately leading to policy change, culture change and the reduction of polarisation across society.
The solutions offered in these findings allow us to envision a new future in which the education system is reformed to mitigate and reduce inequality. These include improving society’s understanding of the widening gap in political activity, driving progressive policy changes and making citizenship education compulsory for all young people up to the age of 18.
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