Personal, Social and Moral Education

Fred Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367458126
• eBook ISBN: 9781000044683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1994, this book enables primary school teachers to take steps to make Personal, Social and Moral Education (PSME) central to the work of their schools. Links to the National Curriculum are implicit and explicit throughout the book, and the author covers ways in which whole staffs are to be involved in the development of PSME. Case studies of good reflective teaching are taken from many curriculum areas and from rural and urban schools. The author draws out the lessons they impart with insight, precision and principle, emphasising the values of openness, encouragement, sensitivity and respect for the children and adults engaged in the development of personal, social and moral values.

CHPATER ONE
A human box

In the beginning was the word

St John 1.1

My box is made of people It is a humen box

Perry Lamprell (Holdbrook CP School)

This chapter takes the form of two case studies. I visited Holdbrook CP School, Hertfordshire and Cavell First School, Norwich and made extensive notes. Then I sent my notes to the headteachers, and later integrated their comments into my text. Another school, Kexborough Primary in Barnsley, regrettably, I never saw. I’d heard about it from my editor, and spoke at length to the headteacher on the phone. And then I received material from them that I incorporated into this chapter and also chapter 2. Again, I sent drafts to the headteacher.

I used a tape recorder at Holdbrook, and found the results technically less than useful. Perhaps a school as busy as Holdbrook is difficult to record in. On my second visit, I promoted my fallback method, notebook and shorthand, to first method. I always showed my notes to the teachers quoted. In the rest of this book I use case study material in a more fragmented way, finding innovative practice in areas related to, or grounded in, notions of PSME, and making notes as quickly as I could. Large parts of my data are the words of children, either written or spoken. Malcolm Ross said of a previous book of mine ‘…like Eliot’s garden, the book is full of voices, mostly the voices of children…’ (’Children’s Vision’, Times Educational Supplement, 19 March 1993). I am often surprised at how rarely that can be said of books about schools.

Kexborough PS has spelt out a curricular model. As I write, the current Secretary of State for Education has suggested that all schools should fly the Union Jack. Now, appropriately if fortuitously, this model resembles that flag in its construction: the subjects fill the triangles around the edge, and PSE is at the core.

Sue Mulvaney, headteacher at Kexborough, also sent me some clearly articulated school rules. The most striking moments in them are when we see children expressing their concerns with only the slightest adult interference. On the one hand, ‘Do…Be pleased with yourself when you manage to complete a task or learn something new’ and ‘Do…As the teachers say’ and ‘Do… Stand still when the bell goes’ are rules composed by children seeing the school through the eyes of their teachers (and children must see schools thus on occasion, or teachers’ lives will become intolerable). On the other hand, in rules like ‘Don’t…Push, kick, nip, smack’ and ‘Don’t…Chase anyone unless they want to be chased’ we catch a glimpse of the schoolyard as it is for the suddenly oppressed. And in ‘Do…Keep your saliva to yourself’ we see a happy combination of the child’s fear of being spat at and the teacher’s propriety: saliva, not spit. Through all this we can glimpse an authentic, negotiated, semi-legal system.

The Barnsley Profile places the school in its society. Sue Mulvaney explained to me how everything we do as teachers is related to the environment; that to know a school you have to know about the place where it is. To another headteacher, the setting was irrelevant. ‘What do you want to know about all that for?’ Indeed, some powerful schools effectively cut themselves off from their environment: Ί don’t care what the government says. I’ve got my parents and my governors with me, my test results are OK’. That was the headteacher of what I have caricatured in my introduction as a ‘hessian and teazle single party state’. Such schools give the impression of being states that have made unilateral declarations of independence from their local authorities, and which survive, nourished (if that is the right word) by the charisma of the headteacher and the discipleship of the rest of the staff.

The flag is an appropriate image to fly here. Some school-states have free trade and open border posts; they are multi-lingual in all sorts of ways, and travellers, tourists, journalists are welcome. You never feel in these schools that some senior government official is listening to everything you say. Other schools protect their trade, their intellectual ideas, and shield themselves from the influence of other teachers. They put up high borders, stamp your passport on entry and, though they may well be multi-lingual in a literal sense (’There are Bengalis, Sikhs, English and a German family here’ said the headteacher of one of the UDI schools referred to above), there is only one educational language spoken. It is the language of the school’s central government, and travellers and tourists are either not welcome at all or journey under serious restrictions.

Words are all we have: Holdbrook JMI, Hertfordshire

There is a reproduction on the wall of the headteacher Alan Parkinson’s room. A small boy wearing dungarees holds a book on his knee, and looks out over a tenement block, similar in some ways to the flats that surround this school. All around the room is the apparatus of the modern headteacher: curriculum guidelines, a Personnel Guide, National Curriculum files, a Primary Teacher’s Resource Pack. On the floor is a guitar, which, with the little boy, seems to be at the centre of things, and over the desk has been roughly stuck a piece of work by a young child. It is easy to imagine the conversation: Mr Parkinson, do look at what Anne’s done today…That is really lovely, Anne, can you tell me about it?…I would very much like to have your work in my room …Is that all right? Can I take it?…I’ll stick it here, look…thank you very much indeed…

We’ve based our PSE on the work of Chris Watkins at the Institute of Education at London University, the seven expanded selves: bodily, sexual, social, vocational, moral/political, self as a learner and self in the organisation…[see Introduction]. We fleshed that out in lots of staff meetings to see what it meant for us, where we could actually bring each of these things into practice, and then extending it, the mathematical, the scientific, the artistic self, and we’re at that stage now where we’re saying, “what does a mathematician, a scientist, an artist do…?”, hampered and harassed as we are, of course, by the present National Curriculum…

I suspect Alan overstates this slightly, as one does when one feels oppressed. Later, the deputy headteacher, Annabelle Dixon, puts it differently: ‘We try not to let our curriculum be constrained by the National Curriculum…We were encouraged by what someone, was it Duncan Graham?, said early on about the National Curriculum not being the only one…’

Alan continued:

When we did this looking at the selves…we looked at the headings that were there and said where shall we start, social selves, we were just opening the file at random, social selves, communicating with family and friends in community and receiving feedback, where does this happen in school?

So as a staff we asked: where we might be doing this? At a simple level, taking and bringing messages…talking in class in group situations… teachers listening to children and expecting an answer, taking criticism, working together for assemblies, this all still needs to be written up. That was our way of saying where we’re putting PSE in at present…we haven’t got to the stage (’Thank Heaven!’, said Annabelle later) of saying Thursday afternoons, this is PSE…

We actually do a lot of work on the central concepts: working in groups, problem-solving, an essential part of what we’re doing all the time. We have assemblies where the children do them…three weeks ago, two seven year olds produced an assembly, organised the rest of the class, got them into groups…

As I redraft this chapter (April 1994) the rhetoric of the bland voice at the centre, the plain, phonily blunt politician, is all about ‘the basics’, though the meaning of that word is subjected to often intemperate debate. While for conservative politicians and educators ‘the basics’ consist of grammar, arithmetic and the simple distinction between right and wrong, for Alan Parkinson they are working in groups and problem-solving. Or, to choose an example from another school, long ago and quite far away, when a child writes

my sister said does that mean she’s gonna die and I sat there and cried my eyes out I was so shocked, and the doctors and nurses were really nice they were crying to because they thought she was so buitiful

(see chapter 2) is it more ‘basic’ to correct spelling or to share memories of the death of a baby sister? Working in groups, problem-solving, dealing with love and death - these are the ‘basics’, which are, above all, opportunities to learn about our own nature, and the way we relate to fellow human beings. Alan continued:

PSE is feeling you have a stake in society, isn’t it? Teaching children what’s right and what’s wrong…[questioning look]…well, what is right and wrong? All our philosophy here is about starting from where the children are, what the children need to understand, to understand themselves, to understand their society…Then you can begin to tease out what is right and wrong…

This part of Alan’s comments came when I put it to him that most local authorities, if they were doing anything about PSME at all, were treating it as a control system. His vision of the issues is different. The roots, for him, are downright political - that is, they are based on a democratic model:

We have a meeting… we sit in a circle… I started it off with third and fourth years; when the school got a bit smaller, it’s with all the juniors, every Wednesday. It’s been very interesting. We have a chairman [sic]. It’s flagging a bit, next term we’ll have a bit of structure, someone’ll bring something in that’s prepared. We always take it seriously, bring things back to the staff…the first issue that came up was soft toilet rolls! We’d never thought of that…and that’s important, nothing should be hidden, just because it feels, well, funny, or trivial…

It’s trying to create a sense of empowerment, that’s what PSE is about, realising the places to go to be able to develop yourself and to develop yourself within the community…

I think you need a framework, an individual framework for each school, each set of teachers…you set the framework by the way you set the agenda in the school, you set up a co-operative group… iťs got to be a practical framework that is seen to work, if I’ve got no moral framework I can’t do it…How a government, by the way, can bribe parents out of the state system and talk about rights and wrongs is beyond me…

Alan here raises his shoulders in a theatrical shrug. He represents a widely held view about current government policy. This is a secret from policy makers, and influential people outside education. They are simply unaware of the depths to which the credibility of government policy has sunk in the eyes of many teachers.

I asked Alan, did he use a curriculum audit:

An audit?…No. Admittedly, we found that ‘answering questions when they arise’ didn’t work for sex education, so you do need something like that for some things, but mostly it’s covered in a moral framework…. Annabelle and I had a day to thrash things out…an overlap model with the child in the middle, and around the child are all the relationships that child has got with parents and teachers, etc., in the school…language skills, because language skills help to develop relationships, without language they thump each other. Words like ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’…we teach them to say Ί disagree with you’ not ‘you’re wrong,’ THUMP!

In the hall there is no graveyard silence as the children come into assembly. Instead, there is a quiet, social noise of words (more words - everything at Holdbrook is concerned with words and what they can do), of mutual greeting. Nobody polices the room, or walks round the back, ‘riding shotgun’ (as one teacher memorably, horribly, put it to me on my first day in a headship). The displays on the walls are, Alan had told me, all the children’s: HOLDBROOK ART GALLERY heads a panel of paintings based on painters in National Curriculum Art. ‘The displays are not so pretty as they might be’ says Alan, and later Annabelle says,

We’ve got some very accomplished art teachers here who could put up wonderful displays, but we feel it’s more important that the children should have control…What do children learn from such glamorous presentations done by adults? There is a place for such displays as giving an example, but that should be their purpose.

I have already said something about display in the introduction, and if I’m labouring the matter here, this is because children, parents, visitors (not to mention PSME-hounds) have, inevitably, to read the signs and symbols on the walls as part of a school’s experience of teaching and learning. Those frames (often frame after frame after frame) tell us, for example, that here a piece of learning has been finished. Image after image after image - derived, however distantly, from an artist perceived as great - tell us that staff in a school value received opinions above current ones, especially the opinions of the learners in the place.

I am reminded of an infant school in Sheffield. The headteacher believed in the centrality of play to learning, and eventually the staff moved to a position where many of the displays were interactive: children could play with them, manipulate them. The same principle stands at Holdbrook. The displays are run by the children. PSE (at least as conceived by teachers like Alan and Annabelle) and play have this central idea in common, that the teaching role is to provide experiences that show us the children are moving from a partial understanding to a less partial one. This role contrasts with the currently fashionable one (at least as far as policy documents are concerned), in which the teacher is really a junior Quality Control Officer managed by more senior officers. In this model play is inefficient and therefore irrelevant because, depending as it does on the child’s thinking and feeling, it doesn’t necessarily go where the teacher wants it to go.

There is no compulsory uniform at Holdbrook (Joan Webster, at Cavell, I note later, also felt strongly that uniform was an infringement of children’s rights); and there is that working class feel: boys in Spurs football gear and track suits, girls in disco wear: short skirts, tight trousers.

’Can we come into assembly?’ say two cooks to Alan. ‘Course you can, you know you can’. I am sitting now at the back of the hall with my notebook. Every item in the assembly is applauded, including a seven-year-old girl’s performance of ‘Busy Bee’, the earliest recorder exercise, which is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Dedication Page
• Introduction: A Way in
• Chapter 1 A human box
• Chapter 2 Talking about birth and death
• Chapter 3 Jumping the steps: the child’s point of view
• Chapter 4 Evil in return: violence in schools
• Chapter 5 Replacement radiators and flower smashers: talking about gender
• Chapter 6 Combating racism
• Chapter 7 Stories: talking about PSME
• Afterword
• References
• Index