Although
attending to the “Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural” development of the
pupils and students in their care has been a statutory responsibility for
primary and secondary schools since 1944, what counts as ‘SMSC’ has had, as
the Citizenship Education expert Ted Huddleston has noted, various iterations
over the years. At different points the
initials and emphases have changed and in different periods the nuances and
meanings ascribed to terms such as “social”, “moral”, “spiritual” and
“cultural” have meant different things. In addition, particular themes have
periodically emerged that might either be seen as a legitimate part of the
wider terrain that SMSC occupies, or which have significant implications for
those working on this terrain. For example, in recent years initiatives focused
on Citizenship Education, Employability, Values Education, Resilience and
Character Education have all come to the fore, and all have a contribution to
make to the broader and evolving SMSC agenda. Whatever its precise
articulation, though, SMSC has been viewed as a good thing. The challenge for policymakers, school leaders and
practitioners – and all who work with them – has not been its ‘worthiness’; it
has been the fact that it’s meaning has rarely been scrutinized or ‘nailed down’,
either by schools or those charged with supporting or inspecting them.
This
has been the concern of the authors of a new RSA report on this issue published
this week, a team led by the RSA’s Director of Education Joe Hallgarten and which
I have been proud to support as part of a broader advisory group, one that has
included heads, middle leaders, classroom practitioners and others who have an
engagement in the broader SMSC enterprise, including a range of national figures in the field.
Nobody
would suggest running a school that does not attend to the social, moral,
spiritual and cultural well-being of young people but giving SMSC its proper
place in a culture dominated by ‘tests, targets and tables’ has proved
especially difficult for school leaders and all who work with them. Schools
with Soul reminds us of the costs of failing to do so, as have the efforts
of those concerned with what might be broadly termed the wider social
curriculum over many years. Schools with Soul calls into question
not just the unintended consequences of the justified aspiration that every
young person should achieve their full academic potential but the very way in
which we organize schooling, and secondary schooling in particular. You can read about Schools with Soul and download the full report and associated papers here: Schools with Soul
The
dominance of the subject curriculum and of a very particular view of what
constitutes a school ‘subject’ has continually marginalized (and sometimes
ridiculed) so-called ‘newer’ subjects (think sociology, media studies,
citizenship) while confining anything that cannot be packaged so neatly (think
PSHE in its many iterations) to the often-lost world of cross-curricular themes
or the margins of tutor time, in there with the register and the homework
diaries - ‘everywhere but nowhere’ as I have been heard to claim on more than
one occasion. So it has been for SMSC, and with the old hierarchy of knowledge
firmly re-established in the new English Baccalaureate and a firm commitment to
developing teachers’ subject knowledge (that’s certain teachers and particular
subjects), the prospects might not look good for something as broad and
apparently undefined as SMSC often has been.
That’s
why this new report does three really important things: first, it makes us pause
for thought about the purpose of education – grades are vital (I know, I went
to a secondary school in the 1970s where four
of us in my year group got five or
more A-C grades) but so are the qualities and skills of confidence, character
and resilience and dispositions that are pro-social, culturally-diverse and values-rich.
Forget that and we end up with the ‘greed is good’ culture that has given us
the banking crisis, the debacle of the MPs’ expenses scandal and the ‘have it
all’ attitudes of celebrity culture, whatever the grades achieved by the
protagonists.
Second,
it proposes that we put the educational reform bandwagon on hold while we
reflect on what the purpose of our
educational endeavours might be. As Professor Richard Pring asked a few years
ago in the report of the Nuffield Foundation’s Review of 14-19 Education, “what
does it mean to be an educated 19 year old at the beginning of the 21st
century?” Seventeen years ago I published a short chapter (in a book
anticipating Labour’s 1997 landslide entitled Take Care, Mr Blunkett), that reflected on James Callaghan’s Ruskin
Speech and carried the heading “25 years on: the great debate that never was”. Schools with Soul makes it clear that
that debate remains to be had, and that it remains as important as ever; we
should take the report as our starting point.
Third,
it offers strategies that teachers and school leaders might use to bring the
distinctly un-soft skills at the heart of the SMSC agenda to reality in our
classrooms and our school communities. Everywhere but nowhere is not good
enough; thankfully, the report offers some pointers that might be of benefit
not just in addressing the ‘non-subject’ components of SMSC (and, yes, the
subject curriculum can play its part here) but in supporting other areas
afflicted by the curse of cross-curricularity: work-related learning, students’
physical and mental health, careers education and guidance, employability and
so on.
The
report’s deeper message is simple though: attending to the social development
and personal wellbeing of students, which is what good SMSC does, should never be an after-thought or add-on from
the ‘fluffy corner’, to be dealt with when we’ve met our targets numeracy and
literacy, or whatever. It must sit at the heart of school improvement and
transformation strategies designed to close the cap, raise attainment and build
inclusion, especially in our most-challenged schools and our most deprived
communities.
SMSC
is not a distraction from the ‘standards’ agenda; it is the new standards agenda, the new standard
by which we should judge the success of our educational efforts – attainment
and achievement flow from inclusion and wellbeing; they do not precede it. Requires improvement is the report’s clarion call:
without attending to their social, moral, spiritual and cultural development –
and their physical and mental wellbeing – our attempts to ensure that all of the young people that we work
with fulfill their potential are surely destined to failure.
