Well-being
Prepare children for a fulfilling future as well as attend to their present needs, hopes, interests and anxieties and promote their mental, emotional and physical welfare. Help them to develop a strong sense of self, a positive outlook and maximise their ability to learn through good, evidence-informed teaching.
Engagement
Secure children’s active and enthusiastic engagement in their learning.
Empowerment
Excite, promote and sustain children’s agency, empowering them through knowledge, understanding, skill and personal qualities to profit from their learning, to discover and lead rewarding lives, and to manage life and find new meaning in a changing world.
Autonomy
Enable children to establish who they are and to what they might aspire. Encourage their independence of thought and discrimination in the choices they make. Help them to see beyond fashion to what is of value.
Encouraging respect and reciprocity
Promote respect for self, for peers and adults, for other generations, for diversity and difference, for ideas and values, and for common courtesy. Respect between child and adult should be mutual, for learning and human relations are built upon reciprocity.
Interdependence and sustainability
Develop children’s understanding of humanity’s dependence for wellbeing and survival on equitable relationships between individuals, groups, communities and nations, and on a sustainable relationship with the natural world and help children to move from understanding to positive action.
Promoting Empowering local, national and global citizenship
Enable children to become active citizens by encouraging their full participation in decision-making within the classroom and school, and advancing their understanding of human rights, conflict resolution and social justice. They should develop a sense that human interdependence and the fragility of the world order require a concept of citizenship which is global as well as local and national.
Celebrating culture and community
Every school should aim to become a centre of community life, culture and thought to help counter the loss of community outside the school. ‘Education is major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it,’ as Jerome Bruner said.
Exploring, knowing, understanding and making sense
Give children the opportunity to encounter, explore and engage with the wealth of human experience and the different ways through which humans make sense of the world and act upon it.
Fostering skill
Foster skill in those domains on which learning, employment and a rewarding life depend: in oracy and literacy, in mathematics, science, IT, the creative and performing arts and financial management; but also communication, creativity, invention, problem-solving, critical practice and human relations.
Exciting imagination
Excite children’s imagination so they can advance their understanding, extend the boundaries of their lives, contemplate worlds possible as well as actual, understand cause and consequence, develop the capacity for empathy, think about and regulate their behaviour, and explore language, ideas and arguments.
Enacting dialogue
Help children grasp that understanding builds through collaboration between teacher and pupil and among pupils. Enable them to recognise that knowledge is not only transmitted but also negotiated and re-created; and that each of us in the end makes our own sense out of that knowledge. Dialogue is central to pedagogy: between self and others, between personal and collective knowledge, between present and past, between different ways of thinking.