'we Can be Much More Mature Than Them Sometimes, so Why Not Give Us a Shot or Give Us a Chance?': Resisting Representations of Childhood through Citizenship Values

Since 2014 ‘fundamental British values’ (FBV) have been promoted in schools in England. This statutory requirement was established as a means of ‘preparing pupils for life in modern Britain’ through developing their understanding and practice of four values: democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. The framing of this requirement is such that these values are implicated problematically in securitisation, safeguarding and citizenship policy. I trace the interrelated effects of this policy framework and argue that promoting this set of values to children is fundamentally undermined by their framing, the school settings in which the values are delivered and children’s positionings in society.

To explore children's perspectives and experiences of the values I conducted ethnographic and participatory research with pupils across three contrasting schools in the South West of England. These perspectives have been largely overlooked in the FBV literature, which has tended to focus on the effects of the policy and on mapping school's different approaches to FBV promotion. In this session, I present empirical findings to show how children had variously internalised ‘what it is to be a child’ (according to intersecting classed and racialised subjectivities) and how FBV enabled them to reflect on, recognise and then resist this internalisation. This in turn enabled children to start to challenge a) their access to and fulfilment of the respective values and b) the enduring colonial logics underlying representations of childhood as ‘vulnerable’, ‘irrational’ and ‘not-yet-citizens’. These processes of reflection, recognition and resistance were enacted through pupils’ relationships with space and in the context of the easing of pandemic restrictions.