Citizenship education for a sustainable future: a mixed-methods exploration of views surrounding education for sustainable citizenship held by young people in Northern Ireland

Focusing on Citizenship Education (CE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) within the Key Stage 3 (KS3) Learning for Life and Work (LLW) curriculum in Northern Ireland (NI), this research explores the extent to which 14-15 year old young people (YP) in NI exhibit features of ‘sustainable citizenship’ (SC) and how CE and other factors influence this. A literature review develops a new characterisation of SC as a pragmatic framework, characterising sustainable citizens (SCs) as those who think about how people interact within environmental, social, and economic aspects of the world and who are critical of how life is lived in order to change the systems that perpetuate unsustainable behaviour.

Drawing on a children’s rights-based approach, working with an advisory group of YP (n=11), this mixed-methods study included: a survey with YP (n=1136 ) across 26 schools; seven focus groups with YP (n=72); semi-structured teacher interviews (n=7). Statistical analysis indicated that Nature Relatedness (NR) and Competence for Civic Action (CCA) account for the majority of the variance explained for SC, with NR contributing most.