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The purpose of this paper is to assess students’ social representations of forced migration as a relevant social problem in the last year of primary education and the opportunity for its curricular inclusion. The study was carried out by means of a questionnaire, filled in by 6th-year primary education groups (11–12 years old) (n = 70), in a state-supported private school in the city of A Coruña (Galicia, Spain). The questionnaire was supported by three pictures of forced migrations from the media. In this case, the children had to interpret the pictures through a series of questions that sought to investigate their representations, the causes they identify in this social problem, their opinions, and possible solutions. Finally, the opportunity for the inclusion of social problems as curriculum content was addressed. The study shows that the students are in favor of migrants, that they use concepts from the social sciences in their arguments—albeit simple ones, and that they are in favor of the curricular inclusion of social problems, in which they develop representations through different sources of information.

Citizenship Education could play a pivotal role in creating a fairer society in which all groups participate equally in the political progress. But strong causal evidence of which educational techniques work best to create political engagement is lacking. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of controlled trials within the field based on transparent search protocols. It finds 25 studies which use controlled trials to test causal claims between Citizenship Education programs and political engagement outcomes. The studies identified largely confirm accepted ideas, such as the importance of participatory methods, whole school approaches, teacher training, and doubts over whether knowledge alone or online engagement necessarily translate into behavioral change. But the paucity of identified studies also points both to the difficulties of attracting funding for controlled trials which investigate Citizenship Education as a tool for political engagement and real epistemological tensions within the discipline itself.

The place of religion and how it should be employed in education for citizenship is currently an issue in Europe. The challenges of increasing diversity are the underlying factors. The conception of maximal citizenship (a critical model of citizenship) gives a significant framework for analysis and scholarly perspectives about several European contexts on this matter. However, there is hardly maximal citizenship in Finnish contexts in scholarship. Hence, this work searches for the elements of maximal citizenship in educational policy for young people by employing the policy relating to citizenship in Finnish religious education (RE). Focusing on grades 7−9 of basic education, its primary data is based on selected national policy documents. The data were analysed using critical discourse analysis. The main findings suggest that citizenship in Finnish RE is only somewhat compatible with the characteristics of maximal citizenship. This reveals some policy shortcomings that could negatively affect the potential of critical-mindedness of young people and equal opportunities in a democracy. Hence, some suggestions that could improve the situation are embedded in the paper. Nevertheless, a linguistic conception of citizenship in Finland vis-à-vis a recent development in national educational policy seems to push the conception of maximal citizenship in a relatively new direction. Furthermore, an explicit use of the “Convention on the Rights of the Child” in Finnish curriculum broadens our conception of maximal citizenship in general. Moreover, while scholars generally agree that maximal citizenship is essentially “critical”, this piece suggests that every “critical” approach to citizenship education is not necessarily “maximal”.