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.

This is the third in a series of eight blog posts, where Carolyn adds further context to the subject and poses questions relating to this proposed new commission.

What are schools for?
Anywhere between Clapham to Clitheroe, if you were to get on an omnibus of any kind and ask this of the passengers, the answers would be the same:

• To look after children.
• To develop well-rounded characters. 
• To teach children how to be good citizens. 
• To prepare children for adult life.

I’d bet you a quid that you’d be at the terminus before anyone on this helpful and loquacious bus said “to get children through exams”. 

That’s not to say that exams aren’t important. Exams are a measure of progress, a societal rubber stamp of a young person’s aptitude for learning, retaining and applying the kind of information we teach in schools. A highly developed society needs citizens with a range of skills, so schools do their best to match the child to the learning for the common good.

The drama of existence
It takes a long time to grow a human being. Adolescent brains are re-forming themselves at the same time that we are teaching them French and physics and their relationship to society is changing and developing. The defining relationships of the home are overtaken by an independent relationship with the world.  The drama of their own existence, as Freire had it, is potentially all-consuming for a teenager.

It is at this time that we put them together in large groups in institutional buildings and give them to skilled public servants to form them into sensible and useful human beings, while pushing a bit of poetry and algebra into them. Teachers are public intellectuals with advanced interpersonal skills and a liking for children.  It is a rare combination and should be treasured by society (but that’s another matter).

Schools make their own decisions about how to achieve the impossible (as described above), but how do we judge if those decisions are right? I’ve written before about knowledge and about community expectations, so this time I’m thinking about behaviour. 

In Tom Bennett’s useful report Creating a culture: how school leaders can optimise behaviour, he describes good behaviour as “broadly desirable”. That is, conduct that society values:  independence and maturity.  He praises school leaders who are excellent role models who make schools safe and happy places, and case studies refer to the mechanisms for producing mature, independent behaviour.

Boot camp or minimal rules?
That’s where the question arises. Is boot-camp-silent-corridor the blueprint for all, or is minimal-rules-reiterative-intervention method the right way? As long as behaviour is good, does it matter how it is managed? What status do we give proxies such as blazer-and-tie uniforms? 

Do we know what the social bus rider thinks? My hunch is that good manners and consideration for others are very high on society’s wish list for the young. They are very dependent upon the home: what does society want schools to do about children where its behavioural norms have been disregarded from a very early age? What does in loco parentis mean if the biological parent is violent, neglectful, criminal or anti-social? 

We want schools to do the best for our young. We want children to learn how to behave in a way that will build up our common life. We want to have a way of measuring how well schools do this. In recent years we’ve made mistakes when too much weight has been put on one sort of measure, and we should avoid poor proxies for good behaviour.   Our work on ethical leadership will rest upon a shared understanding of virtuous behaviour. It’ll give us good heart for the hard journey schools embark on to achieve this with and for our children.

In the future? An ethical conductor for every bus!

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