Values education not as an additional layer in schooling, but something much more fundamental. Values shape the emotional and relational climate in which learning takes place. They influence how children speak to one another, how they respond when things go wrong, how they manage difference and disappointment, and how they begin to understand themselves as contributors to a wider community.

By Julie Penrose, Preparatory Head, Reddam House Helderfontein

In education, we speak often about achievement and, understandably, much of that conversation centres on academic progress, attainment and results. These things matter enormously. Yet the longer I work with children, the more convinced I become that achievement does not happen in isolation from the environment in which a child is asked to learn.

Before children can flourish academically, certain conditions need to exist around them: a sense of safety, a sense of belonging, a sense that they are known and, perhaps most importantly, a sense that the community to which they belong stands for something meaningful.

This is why I have come to see values education not as an additional layer in schooling, but as something much more fundamental. Values shape the emotional and relational climate in which learning takes place. They influence how children speak to one another, how they respond when things go wrong, how they manage difference and disappointment, and how they begin to understand themselves as contributors to a wider community.

Children in the preparatory years are developing rapidly, socially and emotionally as well as cognitively. They are learning what friendship means, what fairness looks like, how to navigate conflict and how to find their place within a group. As adults, it can be tempting to assume that because we use words such as respect, integrity, responsibility, courage or kindness, children understand those concepts as we do. In reality, they are complex ideas and need to be explored repeatedly if they are to become meaningful.

Kindness can grow from simply being nice to somebody into making space for a person who feels left out. Responsibility can grow into an understanding that our choices have consequences and that being part of a community means being willing to own them. Integrity asks children to recognise the difference between doing what is easy and doing what is right, and to be honest when honesty may be uncomfortable.

These are not lessons that can be delivered once in an assembly and considered complete. They develop through experience, conversation and reflection and, very often, through mistakes.

VALUES EDUCATION: MORE THAN PREVENTING CHILDREN FROM MAKING POOR CHOICES

This is one of the areas in which my own thinking has shifted most strongly. I no longer believe that values education is primarily about preventing children from making poor choices. Children will make poor choices; that is part of growing up. The more important question is what we do with those moments. Do we treat them only as disciplinary problems, or do we recognise them as opportunities to deepen a child’s understanding of themselves, of others and of the community around them?

A disagreement between friends, an unkind comment, dishonesty, exclusion or a lapse in judgement can all become important moments of learning if the response is thoughtful. Accountability remains essential. Children need boundaries and they need to understand that choices have consequences, but accountability does not have to be divorced from dignity. A child can be held firmly responsible while still being given a route back into the community through honesty, reflection, apology and repair.

WHERE KINDNESS AND INTEGRITY MEET

Kindness is sometimes misunderstood in education as softness, as though being a caring adult requires us to reduce expectations or protect children from the discomfort of accountability. I have never experienced it that way. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for a child is to tell them clearly that a choice was not acceptable, while making it equally clear that the mistake does not define them. Integrity asks us to be truthful about behaviour; kindness asks us to respond in a way that still leaves room for growth.

When children experience that consistency, expectations become more predictable, the language used by adults begins to be echoed by children, and conversations can gradually move away from “Am I going to get into trouble?” towards “What impact did my choice have?” or “What could I have done differently?”

That shift matters because there is an important distinction between values education and simple compliance. The aim cannot simply be to produce children who behave well because an adult is watching. That may create order, but it does not necessarily develop character. The deeper purpose is to help children build an internal understanding of why certain choices matter, how their behaviour affects others and what responsibilities come with belonging to a community.

At Reddam House Helderfontein, we have become increasingly deliberate about this in our Junior and Senior Preparatory years, moving beyond naming values towards helping children recognise what they look like in everyday school life. Assemblies, classroom conversations, student leadership and pastoral discussions all provide opportunities to explore what values mean in practice.

There is something very rewarding in watching a child begin to understand that confidence is not the same as being the loudest person in the room, or that courage may sometimes mean admitting that they were wrong. The child who quietly demonstrates integrity, or who chooses kindness in a moment where exclusion would have been easier, may seem to be part of the ordinary busyness of a school day, but these are often the moments in which culture is formed.

The connection between this work and learning has also become increasingly clear to me. Children learn best when they are not constantly negotiating uncertainty about where they stand in a community. When expectations are clear, relationships are secure and children feel that they belong, there is greater emotional space for curiosity, persistence and the willingness to try something difficult.

A child who is afraid of being embarrassed is less likely to ask a question. A child who feels socially unsafe may spend more energy protecting themselves than engaging with the lesson in front of them. A child who believes that they are genuinely known and supported, however, is more likely to attempt something difficult, recover from failure and remain open to feedback.

IMPORTANCE OF BELONGING

This is why belonging has become such an important part of my own educational philosophy. Children do not flourish merely because they are present in a school; they flourish when they experience themselves as part of it. When they understand that their behaviour contributes to the kind of school they attend, their sense of agency grows and they begin to see themselves as participants in shaping that community.

Of course, values education cannot be something we ask only of children. If we want young people to grow into individuals who act with integrity, kindness, respect and responsibility, those qualities have to be visible in the adults around them. Children are extraordinarily perceptive when there is a difference between what adults say and what adults do.

A school may speak about respect, but children also learn from the way adults speak to one another when there is disagreement, and they watch how adults respond when something goes wrong. In that sense, every adult in a school community becomes part of the values curriculum, whether they intend to be or not.

That does not require perfection. In fact, perfection would be a rather unhelpful model for children. What matters more is coherence. Adults who can acknowledge mistakes, repair relationships and remain open to reflection teach children something enormously important about integrity.

Communities become stronger not because conflict never occurs, but because they develop healthy ways of responding when it does.

Education will always involve curriculum, assessment, knowledge and skill, and rightly so. We have a responsibility to ensure that children leave school academically equipped for what comes next. Yet we are also educating human beings who will become colleagues, partners, parents, neighbours, leaders and members of communities far beyond our own, and the conditions in which they become those people matter.

If we can create schools in which children are known, where belonging is cultivated, where integrity is expected and where kindness is practised with courage, then we create more than a positive school culture. We create the conditions in which children are able to flourish.

One could argue that, in the end, this is one of the most important measures of an education: not only what a child has learned by the time they leave us, but who they have begun to understand themselves to be, and what they believe they can contribute to the communities they will one day help to shape.