How can we place Personal and Social Education at the Heart of our Curriculum?

The headline last week that St Andrew’s University, third oldest university after Oxford and Cambridge (and recently named the top UK University in the Good University Guide), had introduced compulsory modules on sustainability, diversity, consent??and good academic practice was met by a good deal of public consternation and suspicion.??At the heart of the concerns voiced in the media was the statement that, in order to matriculate, students had to agree with several statements, one of which involved accepting ‘personal guilt.’?

St Andrew’s may be in the vanguard, but are not alone in treading this path, despite the reaction from academics, students and politicians who described the report variously as ‘grim policing of thought and behaviour’?and?‘the antithesis of what university should be.’??The statement that ''Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias’??in particular, was seen as contrary to free speech and, according to one academic, nothing less than a form of indoctrination.

There is little doubt that the way the feature was presented didn’t read well. The word ‘mandatory’ and phrase ‘accept personal guilt’ rang alarm bells that we were, indeed, seeing yet another manifestation of the blame culture, another Orwellian strike against the very bastions of intellectual thought and freedom, our universities. In their defence, the University suggested that the students had requested the modules and had in place for several years now, and?that they were developed to align with St Andrews' strategic priorities (diversity, inclusion, social responsibility, good academic practice, and zero tolerance for GBV) and help develop skills and awareness valuable to life at university, and beyond.?The media having made the snatch and grab headline, then largely ignored the arguments for the defence; it was ever thus. Yet in provoking a reaction, it did raise an important issue, albeit inadvertently, especially as many businesses and workplaces now require their employees to be similarly compliant about a whole raft of policies to do with respecting others.?

If, indeed, these requirements are so important, as St Andrew’s clearly thinks they are, it raises the question: why does a university see the need to make these mandatory at tertiary level and not earlier?? Schools, of course, will say, we do all this, wheeling out their PSHEE (Personal Social, Health and Economics Education) curriculum, their School Values, the RSE programme (Relationships and Sex Education), as evidence.??They are right to do so; most schools work hard at this aspect of education within the confines of their curriculum and resources. But most schools will also concede that in recent years, PSHEE has become a catch-all for the new foci in education as well as the development of character and citizenship, health and well-being and all things pastoral. A few schools do work hard to embed or teach key aspects of PSHEE within their core curriculum, but they are in the minority. Instead, most are busy juggling their timetables for space to accommodate it while wrestling with such questions as who should teach it and how it should be measured. After all, like the PREVENT programme, intended to out root out radicalisation in our schools, and what passes as character education, the process of teaching philosophical and moral issues is not something anyone is equipped to do. Teaching pupils, for instance,?‘to distinguish right from wrong,’??requires a clear vision to avoid it either being laced with bias or being a mere fudge: where for instance, where does membership of extinction rebellion sit? Or tax avoidance? Even driving a diesel car???Who knows???In the same way, teachers are expected to ‘encourage’ pupils to show initiative and ‘understanding’?of how they can contribute positively to their local communities and society when so much of their education is about self, personal attainment and getting the best grades and ultimately, by?what they do, their jobs and achievements, their possessions and status, rather than by?who they are, the families they belong to, their personal values and the role the play in their communities.?

In this, schools and universities are not that dissimilar. And even where core values are spoken about in assemblies, championed in reward systems and aired in other classes than PSHEE, it is never enough because it sits outside the high-accountability system we have.??Something more fundamental is needed than a clip-on lesson or two taught in isolation to change the path of travel.??

That is the challenge: How do we change the messaging that should underpin our learning, and not just leave it sitting slightly apart in the PSHEE and??HSE curriculum???For as we talk up mission statements, and haggle over the values and ethics that sit at the heart of our institutions, the reality is, both in schools or in public life (as enshrined in the Nolan Principles), the words, however well-meaning, are often little more than mere compliance, a tick in a box.

We need to re-set our curriculum. That means starting at age four and going down that other fork in the road with the promise of a different destination. This can mean one of two things in the short term. Either we reshape every subject to reflect the values and attitudes we already profess to champion in education in order to ensure everything we teach is properly grounded in our values; or we abandon our attachment to traditional subjects and move towards a new way of teaching and learning, one based more on skills, on inter-related knowledge, collaboration teams and the relevance and applicability of what we teach.

In practical terms, this may start by something as simple as introducing social studies with its ability to draw together strands of history, geography, anthropology, economics, philosophy??– into our junior schools. The flexibility it would give teachers to approach subjects from a multi-disciplinary approach would be considerable, as would be breadth of information provided to children. In secondary schools, a move away from GCSEs, much talked about, would allow more opportunity for subjects to be able to dig deeper to reflect the pertinent values, behaviours and attitudes taught in PSHEE. Geography, for instance, might require looking at the subject through the prism of the economic doughnut, the socio-economic impact of climate change or the scarcity of resources such as water and, specifically, at our responsibilities in each instance. In the Sciences, an understanding of ethics and social responsibility, as well as an awareness of sustainability, may form the bedrock for what follows.?

At A Levels, we are already hampered by the reduction of the curriculum to, usually, just??three core subjects, often knowledge rich to the point of gagging, insular and jealously guarded and with little potential for overlap. The International Baccalaureate is preferable in respect of the breadth it offers, but still tied to subject boundaries that we have stayed hemmed within for decades. We need to do better.

Perhaps it’s time to revisit??the spirit of the Rede Lecture of 1959, on ‘The Two Cultures’,??where CP Snow talked of the need to narrow the gulf between the sciences and the humanities to create a broader-based curriculum -??one founded on an altogether premise We can identify those subjects which may need to remain essentially as they are (which would most probably include Mathematics, English, foreign languages), but look at different ways of teaching others so that they are dynamic, more relevant, more aligned to what universities and employers want, with evidence of greater creativity and critical thinking and based on values that are grounded in the community, in environmental and societal considerations rather than in wealth aggregation and material definitions of what success looks like. To do this, we need to look at what we teach in PSHEE and character education, the values and mission statements we give voice to, and make them our bedrock. For too long schools have been marking children by the wrong scorecard, one determined by the shape and priorities of the curriculum. St Andrew's response might seem a little draconian, but they are right to call out their students on the need to be educated in the round and to assert that values and attitudes matter. Perhaps it is time for some reinvention in our schools.