The UK citizenship test needs urgent reform

Blog post by Anna Tuckett, Brunel University of London, UK
 
The Life in the UK test is well known for the triviality of its questions. Less discussed, however, is the racist and exclusionary message that the citizenship test communicates about ‘authentic Britishness’.
 
The current Labour government has recently announced plans to ‘refresh’ the citizenship test. This must include the reversal of changes implemented by the Coalition government in 2013, which replaced practical information with selective history and general knowledge. Based on 24 questions, topics now include the Bronze Age, cricket, the Tudors and Stuarts, the Bayeux Tapestry, pantomimes and the Scottish judicial system (among others).
 
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in private training centres that help applicants prepare for the test, my Identities article, ‘Still whitewashing Britain: race, class and the UK citizenship test’, argues that the UK citizenship test equates Britishness with a White, middle-class identity that ignores migrants’ existing participation in British society and excludes much of the British citizenry. 

There are no state-funded classes to help candidates prepare for the citizenship test, yet for many, reading the Life in the UK Test Handbook independently is not sufficient to pass. Many individuals take the test several times (at significant personal cost), while others decide that they are unable to pass independently and seek help from private training centres.
 
Students attending the training centres where I conducted fieldwork were from diverse backgrounds in terms of their age, nationality and length of time in the UK, but they shared a need for assistance in order to digest the Handbook’s information and complete the test. Most people in the classes had low levels of formal education and were employed in low-paid work such as retail, care, security and catering.
 
The Life in the UK test highlights many of the tensions and contradictions that surround the boundaries of Britishness in contemporary Britain. The Handbook on which the test is based is described as ‘A Guide for New Residents’, but many of the people I met had lived in the UK for decades and were already ‘integrated’ participants of their local communities.
 
My respondents may not have been regulars at the local pub, but they all worked, paid taxes, watched popular television shows, chatted to their neighbours and sent their children to local schools. Yet many I met had failed the test, and so sought help from a training centre. They failed because the Britain represented by the Handbook is one of Roast Beef, the Proms and the Monarchy. It is elite, White, antiquated and unrelatable for most of those taking the test, as well as for many existing citizens.
 
While citizenship test procedures have been identified as discriminatory and restrictive, less attention has been given to how the contents of the test are also exclusionary. In the case of the Life in the UK test, those less familiar with stereotypical White, middle-class, English culture find the test more challenging than those who are familiar with this version of British culture. This is reflected in the high pass rates of White Anglophone candidates, as well as those with higher levels of education who are familiar with formal testing procedures and able to independently study.
 
In this sense, the current citizenship test must be viewed as embedded within long-standing immigration and nationality policies that, since the 1960s, have been enacted to equate Britishness with whiteness by removing and restricting racialized British subjects’ access to citizenship.
 
The 2024 racist rioting, which saw outbreaks of violence against racialized Britons and migrants across the UK, highlight the dangers of weaponizing the issue of immigration. The citizenship test was, in theory, introduced to produce social cohesion. But in its current form it is an expression of a particular ideology of Britishness – one rooted in racism – that fosters alienation and division.

---

Image credit: Author’s own.

---

Read the Identities article:
Tuckett, A. (2025). Still whitewashing Britain: race, class and the UK citizenship test. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2025.2593189   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

Immigrant citizenship: neoliberalism, immobility and the vernacular meanings of citizenship

​Intimate citizenship: introduction to the special issue on citizenship, membership and belonging in mixed-status families   OPEN ACCESS

From foes to friends? Fighting against women’s ‘half-citizenship’ through gender-mainstreaming citizenship   ​OPEN ACCESS