Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

The citizenship curriculum at both Key Stages 3 and 4 is currently being redefined and much has been said recently about the contribution that history could or should make to citizenship agendas and to the broader educational aims of the school curriculum. It is timely therefore to reflect on fundamentals, in the light of current curriculum proposals and of experience to date at the borders of history and citizenship: indeed, it is urgent that we do so, given pressures on the curriculum time and resources available to history and the foregrounding of citizenship by policy makers. In this article Peter Lee and Denis Shemilt, whose seminal work in history education will be familiar to readers of these pages, explore issues that are presupposed by much contemporary discussion of citizenship but that are rarely addressed with the explicitness that they merit. Lee and Shemilt show that there can be no meaningful understanding of citizenship without an historical dimension and they explore the properties that this dimension must have if it is to be robust and educationally valuable.