A leading academic has mounted a scathing attack on the Government's flagship education policy to eradicate extremism.

Sir David Watson, Professor of Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education, said that citizenship teaching in schools and at university was nationalistic, politically slanted and disguises what it is to be a citizen.

The compulsory lessons in schools to promote Britishness and citizenship teaching at university fail to create an inclusive, democratic society, he said. He also called for an overhaul of the test that all foreign nationals must pass to gain British citizenship.

“My sense is that citizenship education has broadly got it wrong,” Professor Watson said.

“A brittle, nationalistic, quite possibly politically slanted view of what it is to understand and project rights and responsibilities as a member of a democratic society is unpersuasive,” he told delegates at the North of England Education Conference today.

Classes on the role of government, ethnicity and the influence of media on society, “disguise a much more generous, contemporary and global sense of what it is to be a citizen,” he said.

“We need a clearer and more international view of what good citizenship behaviour consists of,” he added.

“It should include much more international sensibilities and should be disengaged from the political sensibilities that it has got at the moment,” he told The Times.

Citizenship lessons became compulsory in 2002 for all pupils aged 11 to 16. Children learn about ethnicity, religion, race and national identity through studying immigration, the Commonwealth, the Empire and devolution, extending the popular vote and women's rights.

At the time, Gordon Brown said: "There is a golden thread that intertwines the unshakeable British commitment to liberty with another very British idea: that of duty and social responsibility."

Professor Watson said today that citizenship education should become broader and more inclusive to give pupils and students a much more rounded view of their history.

The professor — a historian and former Vice-Chancellor of Brighton University - also called into question the Government’s use of the citizenship test which, he said, included “crazy stuff that is very political and culturally specific”.

Since their introduction, citizenship lessons have come under fire in academic research as teaching versions of “morally ambiguous” British history to encourage patriotism and loyalty to Britain. A study by the Institute of Education questioned the drive towards teaching of citizenship to inculcate children with a sense of national pride. It said: "To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption. And there's the rub for patriotism.

"Countries are morally ambiguous entities: they are what they are by virtue of their histories."

An Ofsted report in 2006 judged one quarter of schools “inadequate” for the quality of their teaching of citizenship. In many schools there was "insufficient reference to local, national or international issues of the day and how politicians deal with them", it said.

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