Whole school planning

Development planning in the curriculum context needs to take current provision as a starting point. In most schools, aspects of each of the areas of the citizenship programmes of study will already be addressed. The purpose of development planning for citizenship is to find responses to the following questions:

• Where are we now with regard to citizenship education?
• What changes do we need to make?
• How shall we manage these changes over time?
• How will we know whether our management of change has been successful?

In order to meet these broad objectives, some kind of review of current provision is necessary. This will involve a curriculum audit.

The curriculum audit should investigate three areas of future provision planning:

• The degree to which citizenship is already taught within current provision.
• The effectiveness of this coverage.
• The extent of departments’ willingness to develop new work on citizenship or to extend existing work.