Young People, Citizenship and Democracy Education: What the Evidence Tells Us

Eddie Playfair is a Senior Policy Manager at the Association of Colleges, helping to represent and support England’s Further Education and Sixth Form Colleges specifically on the 16-18 curriculum and student engagement and development. Eddie taught in schools and colleges in London from 1983 to 2002 and was then a college principal for 16 years, in Leicester and most recently in Newham, East London.

Dr Matt Henn is Emeritus Professor of Social Research and is based within Nottingham Trent University’s Department of Social and Political Sciences (SPS). From 2012 to 2023, Matt was the SPS Research Director and chaired the Department’s Research Leadership Team.  Matt is an active member of the Citizenship, Democracy and Transformation Research Group and the new university Centre for Policy, Citizenship and Society.

Matt has expertise in conducting research in the field of citizens’ engagement in democratic life stretching-back to 1998 when he was commissioned by Nottinghamshire County Council to complete two linked research projects on youth and civic engagement. Since then he has worked on numerous funded youth civic engagement projects, publishing widely in such areas as youth and civic education, young people and democratic engagement, and citizens, education and the climate emergency. A full list of his publications can be found here.

Dr James Sloam is Professor of Politics at Royal Holloway University, where he is director of external engagement and impact for the School of Law and Sciences. At Royal Holloway, James is also leader of the Politics in Action module, which gives politics undergraduates the opportunities to work on one-day-a-week placements with political institutions or civil society actors and produce academic research on these experiences.

James’ research focuses on youth, citizenship and democratic engagement. He has published widely on this subject and has led several recent projects for the Greater London Authority (Education Department) on youth engagement policy and ways of amplifying youth voice in the capital. James has also explored the relationship between education and democracy both in the UK and internationally. His list of publications can be found here. In 2019, he lead-authored a report for the GLA on Young Londoners Priorities for a Sustainable City and contributed to the Education Department’s Handbook on Working with Children and Young People as Partners.

Dr Ana Isabel Nunes is a Lecturer in Social Research Methods, based at Nottingham Trent University’s Department of Social and Political Sciences.  She is the module leader for Theory and Methods at undergraduate level and Researching Political Issues at postgraduate level. Ana is the University’s co-leader of the Citizenship, Democracy and Transformation Research Group.

Ana completed her PhD in 2019 under the title, “The development of a valid and reliable instrument to assess young people’s political (dis)engagement in Britain and Portugal: a psychometric approach”.  She has specialist knowledge of researching young people as ‘hard-to-reach’ and ‘lesser-heard’ voices, especially in students of citizenship education and youth civic engagement.  She uses a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods in this research and has specialist expertise in designing questionnaires and statistical methods of analysis.  A full list of Ana’s publications can be found here.  Ana is currently leading a research team for a project commissioned by the Nottingham Contemporary that considers young people’s political engagement through the arts.