ABSTRACT
Ethical and value issues lie at the heart of school, or would the metaphor more appropriately be ‘weave through all aspects’ of schooling? Aristotle declared: ‘The object of education is to cause us to like what we ought to.’ More recently the Education Reform Act 1988 lays down in its first section that the curriculum of a maintained school satisfies its requirements only if it: ‘promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society; and prepares such pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life’ (Section 1, para. 2). The first clause is a repeat of the 1994 legislation with the very important addition of the significant ‘cultural’. The second is a key extension, of very great importance for a school’s central aims, but a legal demand on school planning that has been inadequately debated, explored, and implemented. Both are logically prior and hierarchically superior to the National Curriculum requirements in Sections 2 and 3. Both involve values.
