In June 2015, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and Women’s Affairs issued an updated version of the General Ordinance for Citizenship Education as a Cross-curricular Educational Principle in schools. The General Ordinance points out in particular that “Citizenship education needs to be an essential part of school from the moment a child enters the education system, and to play a key role in all subjects and activities at the school itself from the beginning of compulsory schooling – in particular in the context of school democracy. School should be a place of democratic action as an everyday practice. This allows children and young people to experience at an early age that they not only have a right to participate, but also that each and every individual can bring about change through active commitment”.
The document is also intended as a guideline for training and continued education and constitutes a recommendation for other measures of citizenship education. Since the ordinance was first issued (in 1978), schools, society, and politics have evolved. Political communication, media coverage and channels of information have also been transformed. Not least, in 2007 the active voting age was lowered to the age of 16. These changes need to be addressed by new methods of teaching and through up-to-date political references. Besides the tasks of Austrian schools listed in national law, the cross-curricular educational principle on citizenship education is based on international recommendations and guidelines such as the Council of Europe Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.