A class of 13- and 14-year-olds are sitting unusually still. The leg-twitching, sniggering and cheeky comments that have peppered the start of their lesson stop abruptly as the pupils' attention is drawn to a TV screen featuring a tearful widow whose husband was brutally murdered. They sit gripped, clearly disturbed as she attacks the justice system that failed to keep her husband's killer behind bars.
Today's citizenship lesson is on "victims of crime". Using press clippings, video footage and questionnaires, the teacher, Marcus Bhargava, aims to give the topic relevance to students' lives. He must know he is heading in the right direction when pupils start to share their own stories of relatives who have been murdered. "She can't have her say because she's gone," pipes up a soft-spoken 13-year-old with a nose stud, whose cousin was raped, murdered and thrown in the local canal.
Citizenship classes are a favourite at Pimlico school in Westminster, London. Few schools are as successful when it comes to teaching this relatively new subject. In fact, a quarter of secondary schools in England are failing to offer pupils adequate lessons in citizenship, according to a recent report by Ofsted. There have long been concerns that teachers are ill-prepared to teach the classes. Although growing numbers of schools are entering pupils for a short GCSE course, the report concluded that too few schools taught it as a subject in its own right, with many lumping it in with other course subjects.
Covering topics such as law, the electoral system, human rights and economics, citizenship classes became compulsory for pupils aged 11 to 16 in September 2002. Sir Bernard Crick, one of the architects of citizenship in schools, said the subject should educate children in how to be politically literate using real issues.
Inspectors identified widespread misunderstanding over what was required and said only a minority of schools taught citizenship "with enthusiasm". While some were ticked off for lack of commitment and poor knowledge among teachers, leading to dull or irrelevant classes, others merely assumed that the good behaviour of pupils meant they were "doing it already".
According to Miriam Rosen, Ofsted's director of education: "Citizenship is still seen as the poor relation of more established subjects, but it requires teachers to be highly skilled and able to deal with contentious and sometimes difficult issues." Ofsted said schools must develop specialist citizenship teaching. The Department for Education and Skills, which was also urged to increase the number of places for initial teacher training in citizenship, said it was training 1,200 new citizenship teachers over the next two years. And inspectors called on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to offer a full GCSE course, as well as A-level courses.
Pimlico school has had a fully trained specialist department since 2005. Bhargava, 30, a former history teacher and now head of citizenship, believes teacher training is key to the success of his department, which now includes three other teachers. "There was always this issue of how you get teachers in anything from science to music to teach it properly. How do you have enough subject knowledge if you've got 25 periods of your own subject to teach? What I found was that I could put out all the briefing notes I wanted, really detailed lesson plans, and yet the feedback was variable depending on the knowledge the teacher had to begin with and the ways in which they were creative with the resources they were given. "
"There were a lot of students who said, 'I don't like it. The teacher hands out the resources and we just have to get on with it.' If you get a load of resources on government and parliament, and you're told just to get on with it, it's as dull as ditchwater. Issues that could be quite exciting were becoming dull to students."
The turnaround at Pimlico came when, in 2002, Bhargava began to take PGCE citizenship trainees. "They brought enthusiasm for the subject and a fresh approach," he says. "Rather than just being a period a week with their form tutor where they kind of looked at stuff that was going on in the world, it became a subject in which they could see they were making progress and could use what they were learning to inform change."
He adds: "People will question whether there is a place for citizenship classes. But I don't see where or how else you would discuss these things. If we are trying to have a Britain that is diverse, with a sense of unity, if there is voter apathy, if young people are increasingly not involved in the lifeblood of their communities, how do we address that?"
Students learn how to mount campaigns and challenge decisions. They go out on to the street, do vox pops, make trips to prisons and police cells, and write to their local MP. As part of their coursework, some of Bhargava's GCSE students set out to improve the way sex education was being taught in school. They identified the problem, trained as sexual health mentors and eventually taught a group of year 8 students. "I want them to have the willingness to transform their society," he says. "I think it has to be that grand aim. If they don't come out feeling that they have the ability to change society, then we haven't done our job."
Discussions do occasionally get heated. "The good thing and the very difficult thing is that there usually is no right answer," Bhargava says. "Sometimes you have to let things go a little bit pear-shaped." He hardly flinches when, during a discussion about what punishment is best for perpetrators, a slip of a boy shoots up his hand and hollers, Jerry Springer-style: "Hang 'em."