Andrew Wood Teaching and Learning Leading for Characterful Schools

All good teachers know that developing students’ character is essential in ensuring their overall success in both their personal and professional lives. Yet we also know that character development can be difficult to embed within a school ethos when we are primarily judged by academic progress. This course shows how a strategic whole school approach to character learning can be embedded within a school ethos to benefit students character, wellbeing and academic progress.

This kind of approach to character, social and emotional learning is advocated within government policy (NICE, 2015; Public Health England, 2015) and backed up by research which shows that it leads to improvements in school culture, staff wellbeing, pupil behaviour, school attendance and academic attainment (Weare, 2015; Banerjee et al., 2014). Furthermore, recent research by the Education Endowment Foundation has shown that these kinds of approach have disproportionate benefit to disadvantaged or low attaining students helping to close the attainment and pupil-premium gaps.

Our course "Leading for Characterful Schools'' explores our subscription to The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues key conviction that virtues that make up good character can be learnt and taught. It builds on the work of successful schools, such at the KIPP schools, which have brought about measurable improvements to the fortunes of young people using a character education approach. It shows how the work of these and other institutions can be adapted and personalised into any schools context in order to bring about school improvement.

Learning over the course considers how different approaches to character education (E.g. Claxton, Seligman et al) may be suitable for different contexts and school development needs. How we may go about measuring the impact of change (Kendall and Wilcox, Pintrich et al) and the way in which it can be embedded into a long term school development plan.

Delegates will be able to use their learning to develop a strong school ethos for character development, implement practical steps to help children develop their character, train teachers to help young people with character development and monitor the impact of their developments in bringing about school improvement.