At this year’s Annual Conference, ASCL launched a year-long project on Ethical Leadership in Education - you can read more about the background to this in Carolyn Roberts' article Shared Values in issue 96 of Leader magazine.

In a series of eight blog posts, and to add further context to the subject, Carolyn will pose questions relating to this proposed new commission.

Carolyn begins by asking what is the value of the child in contemporary British society (or, why do we worry about children all the time)?

I get a steady stream of emails from the outside world about the young people at my school.  Sometimes they’re wildly abusive: “these are the worst children anywhere”, with added Anglo-Saxon. 

Sometimes, they are surprised by joy: “I was on the train with 60 of your children and they were lovely” (subtext: a relief not to be knifed before Lewisham). Sometimes, they are from regular fans on the lines of “one of your students saved my life again”.

Correspondence betrays the prejudice of the writer towards young people and these comments can be disparate, ill-informed, random. 

Feared, controlled or loved?
We don’t have a clear understanding of the role of children in UK society, or a clear view of their status or value.  Are they entirely their parents’ responsibility?  Are they proto-adults, in limbo, waiting to take full responsibility for themselves?  Are they to be moulded to society’s (economic) needs?  Are they to be feared, controlled or loved?

In the days of performance table mania, I used to listen with interest to headteachers way more successful than me.  Sooner or later, explaining innovative use of the examination system, they would say something like “I’m just doing this for the bairns” and “they only get one go at education”.

They assumed that the sole purpose of education was to get a passport into adult life, and that any means of getting that passport was justified because it would help children live more prosperous lives. If learning and development were undermined by short cuts and dumbing-down, then so be it; a necessarily evil in an unjust world.

Human institutions   
Kant said that children do not choose to be born, and that making children’s lives bearable is a necessary consequence of procreation. Over the last 150 years we’ve stopped sending them down mines and up chimneys, poisoning them with phosphates in match factories or sending them to be slaughtered in huge wars. 
We keep them in school longer and consider their physical needs and, when we have the time, their views. They’re probably safer than ever before from physical violence and starvation.

But as we’ve done this, we’ve replaced dismissal of children as fodder for a range of different cannons to obsession with moulding them to use and conformity. Of course it’s the case that we want children to be good, to be kind, just fair, honest and optimistic. We’d like them to be happy, but then we leave them to the mercy of the market and we shove as well as nudge parents into decisions that may be harmful.

Some further questions to consider:

• Is it right to send children to school so early in the UK – aged three or four rather than six or seven in Scandinavia? 
• Is it right to measure their development by testing? 
• How can we rescue poor children from being assigned to poverty all the days of their lives?
• What is the purpose of an educational elite, and why should all our education tend towards its production?
• What are we to do now that we have created, pathologised, marketised and encouraged anxiety and mental illness in the young?  

John Rawls said that we should set up human institutions as if there was a veil of ignorance between us and the structure we erect, as if we didn’t know if we, the participants, were rich, poor, male, female, advantaged or constrained; the same system had to be fair to all. Have we managed that?

So, what is the value of the child in contemporary British society? As a human being valued for herself as she is? As a commodity to be monetised?  As a resource to be measured? As a potential danger to be controlled?
Once we’ve decided, how do we design and sustain the schooling that that serves them best? And if we have to lose 3% of it, what do we cut?

Get involved
In 2018, ASCL would like to be able to propose a Code of Ethics for Education so that together, we’ll be able to talk to the public clearly about the ethics we want to pass on to our young people.

In order to achieve this, we need your help. If you would like to be involved in any way, or if you would like to share your views on this important issue, please email codeofethics@ascl.org.uk