Lessons in citizenship are still inadequate in more than one-in-10 English secondary schools, eight years after the subject was added to the national curriculum, Ofsted suggested.
The education watchdog said that the worst schools had done “little or nothing” to introduce classes to children.
Lessons in almost half of secondaries overall were no better than satisfactory, inspectors said, leaving “important gaps” in pupils’ knowledge of key issues such as politics.
Citizenship become a compulsory subject in 2002 to teach children about national identity and break down the barriers between different faiths and cultures.
In a report, Ofsted said “encouraging progress” had been made towards establishing the subject as part of the curriculum.
But in some schools teachers seemed to struggle to confront sensitive subjects such as nationality, ethnicity, and allegiance.
“Occasionally, teachers did not go much further than considering stereotypes of Britishness such as ‘What brings us together as a nation?’,” said Ofsted.
The report - Citizenship Established? – also told how a lesson at one school designed to tackle immigration and the reasons for population movement led some pupils to “assert ideas tantamount to racism”.
Ofsted, which visited 91 secondary schools as part of the report, called for a rise in the number of specially-trained citizenship teachers.
Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector said it was “important that the good practice featured in the report is replicated more widely”.
Some 10 out of 91 schools had inadequate teaching, the report said.
“In these schools, citizenship had been misunderstood or ignored, or its development had been so constrained by other priorities that its effectiveness was severely limited,” said inspectors.
“As a result, the students had little knowledge or understanding of citizenship; it was invisible in the curriculum and little understanding was evident of what was required to provide an appropriate citizenship education.”
The report added: "Students’ knowledge was often uneven in schools where citizenship provision was no better than satisfactory.
"While students at these schools knew a good deal about some aspects (such as human rights) there were important gaps in their knowledge, for example in political understanding. This reflected an uneven quality of teaching, only partial coverage of the curriculum, and a lack of focused leadership."