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SecondaryCitizenship

Great SMSC Provision Is Key To Converting ‘Mere Schooling’ Into ‘True Education’

Approaches to outstanding spiritual, moral, social and cultural education in secondary schools

Will Ord
by Will Ord
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‘Mere schooling’ concerns itself with teaching a curriculum, chasing grades and keeping the various bean counters and stakeholders happy. If these priorities predominate, they tend – in my experience at least – to engender an attitude of compliance from staff.

Contrastingly, true education concerns itself with teaching young people the vision of creating happy and skilful learners, and good results are then regarded as a benign side effect.

These educational aims engender real purpose and invite commitment from staff. A very different fuel for school evolution.

So, what is spiritual, moral, social and cultural education at heart, and why can it help to convert mere schooling into great education?

For me, SMSC is fundamentally about two questions:

1) Who am I? 2) How do I, and how can I, relate to the world around me?

In other words, SMSC deals with identity and relationships. What shapes the beliefs, nature, values, behaviour, traditions, morals and perspectives of me, and others? What should shape them? To what end?

What does great SMSC look like?

Here are some basic approaches that schools usually consider:

1) SMSC auditing, ideally as an ongoing process 2) Policy documentation 3) INSET time and resourcing 4) Cross-curricular provision – subject contributions 5) Extracurricular provision 6) Discrete timetable provision 7) SMSC leadership and management structuring 8) Connecting SMSC to the school vision and SIP 9) Governor involvement 10) Links to citizenship education

I created these ‘SMSC Medals’ as a quick way to get a sense of where a school might be with its SMSC provision. Which medal describes your school at present? What’s needed to upgrade?

• Lead: Haphazard provision, unaudited, no shared vision or language, tick box motivations.

• Bronze: Patchy provision, audited basics, outdated vision, some shared language, a few key enthusiasts.

• Silver: Solid and widespread provision, current audit, clear vision and language, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

• Gold: Staff and pupil provision, ‘living audit’, school and SMSC vision well integrated, inspiring and shared language, ambitious motivations.

In this article, however, I’d like to highlight another approach to SMSC in the form of pedagogy.

SMSC – Process and content

Try an experiment with your staff, perhaps. Ask them to scan through the Ofsted definitions of the four SMSC areas, and ignore the nouns or the content for a moment. Ask them to extract the verbs.

What skills and attitudes does SMSC require children to develop and apply? Let me save you the bother for now…

• Reflecting • Respecting • Enjoying • Imagining • Finding interest • Discerning • Understanding • Investigating • Responding • Reasoning • Appreciating • Socialising • Participating • Accepting • Engaging with • Knowing • Exploring • Celebrating

It’s a considerable list, but hardly surprising. If young people are to explore their identity and understand how they (can) relate to the world, then these skills are absolutely essential.

For example, how can any ‘moral education’ worthy of the name ignore learning how to reason well, and reason with others through dialogue? What social or cultural understanding could a child be said to have if he has no ability to reflect and participate responsibly? How can spiritual education occur without the ability to investigate and find interest our human nature? Indeed, how can any learning take place without these?

So how can these skills and attitudes, as well as the content, be nurtured in very different contexts, and with precious little time? One very powerful way is through Philosophy for Children (or P4C).

Philosophy for Children (P4C)

P4C is a pedagogical approach to learning in general. It’s not ‘philosophy’ as a subject area as it is in universities. Rather it’s a ‘way of thinking together’.

Pupils learn how to raise questions, deal with uncertainty and complexity, think clearly and critically and communicate skilfully in a ‘Community of Enquiry’. They develop ‘The 4Cs of Thinking’: Critical, Caring, Creative and Collaborative Thinking. All four, I’d argue, form the very roots of great SMSC, not to mention learning and good citizenship.

P4C can be the method of learning used with any subject (see Philosophy for Children Through the Secondary Curriculum edited by Lewis and Chandley). It can cover both the content areas specified by SMSC, but do so through a process that also evolves SMSC skills and dispositions. In essence, it invigorates both the process and content of SMSC provision.

Personally, I can tell you that it’s really enjoyable and it works. I’ve been practising P4C for 24 years and see it work small miracles on a regular basis. When I was a head of RE, I used P4C in about 20% of my GCSE and A-Level lessons. Pupils loved it, I loved it, and there were 80 students taking the full RS A-level: one-third of the Sixth Form. (The results were very good too, but as a benign side effect, not the core aim of P4C!)

But personal anecdotes are not enough, so do refer to the SAPERE website (the UK charity for P4C) for the latest research and evidence for the impact of P4C practice.

The importance of concepts

This is one other aspect of P4C and SMSC worth mentioning. The areas of SMSC are heavily peppered with concepts that play a central role in all of our individual and collective lives: for example, fairness, justice, identity, soul, tradition, self, moral, British values, etc. These concepts cannot be understood without the ability to explore them thoughtfully, and with others.

Consider, too, that prejudice and extremism (in all forms) can only flourish with the manure of shallow and irrational thinking. Consequently, the philosophical art of conceptual understanding is central to the process and the aims of SMSC in schools.

In conclusion, great SMSC provision is not simply a matter of ‘covering the content’, be it British values or mindfulness. The development of many skills and dispositions is essential if children are to understand their identity and their relationship to the world around them.

P4C is a wonderful way of evolving both areas: of converting mere schooling into true education.

Will Ord is Director of Thinking Education, and has provided teacher training to over 1,000 schools in the UK and in 20 other countries. He has been a secondary school teacher, deputy head of sixth form, school governor, chair of SAPERE and is an author of several textbooks.

Will specialises in helping schools to develop growth mindsets, P4C, Thinking and communication skills, great learners, and mindfulness in both primary and secondary schools. He also runs parent and governor evenings to help parents support their children’s learning at home and at school. For more information on his training sessions go to: thinkingeducation.co.uk.

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