University wins £250,000 grant to teach citizenship

A consortium headed by the University of Southampton is starting work on developing on-line activities to encourage citizenship among university politics students. The three-year programme will include activities on political literacy, community action and civic responsibility and will build on work already underway in schools.

The grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has been awarded to the Universities of Southampton, Keele and Liverpool John Moores.

Project Director at Southampton, Dr Graham Smith, explained: "We want to devise relevant and challenging material that teachers and tutors can access on-line. For example, activities will investigate how over time different types of people have been excluded from citizenship or examine students' civic awareness and how they can participate in university affairs."

The team will learn lessons from the experience of citizenship education in the National Curriculum in schools and hope that the online material will be used to complement existing modes of teaching.