Schools are always involved with political learning. The nature of tha
t political learning, though, is always likely to change and in recent
years there have been very significant shifts. This paper argues that
the National Curriculum has deliberately neglected to promote profess
ional forms of political learning which will be termed political educa
tion and replaced them instead with education for citizenship. The bul
k of this argument is based on an analysis of literature although use
is made of data gathered from a small sample of experts in the field o
f political learning.