Welcome

The Ethos Consortium came into existence as a result of the founders’ work in the UK education system. From three different perspectives we reached the same conclusion. That conclusion was that in the ceaseless drive for school improvement, higher standards and raised levels of attainment (all of which are positive in themselves) something important had been lost.

What had been lost is the notion that education is about character and that the development of character in young people is the paramount responsibility of schools and their teachers.

We’d seen young people achieve incredible things – to do everything they could for one another, to work until they dropped, to commit to a group or community through pain and suffering and ridicule; to believe they could achieve in the most unlikely hour, to surprise themselves with what they had and could become. Usually these events occurred outside of what would be considered the "normal" emphasis of schooling; and that worried us.

In each of these examples of the incredible character of our young people, one thing’s for sure: in every case, every one of those young people in those ideal moments was “achieving”, and learning, at a level truly stratospheric compared with much of the achievement and learning that goes on in conventional classrooms and schools. We’ve seen comradeship, spontaneous peer teaching, principled defiance of authority, rare outstanding moments of sporting and artistic commitment, great self-sacrifice, right up to watching young people haul exhausted friends up mountainsides. These are powerful exemplars; and so they need to be, for “the argument is, that character education is not simply about the acquisition of social skills: it is ultimately about what kind of person a pupil will grow up to be.” (Arthur, 2003)

We believe, in short, that young people have tremendous potential for character. We believe that if education isn’t about character it’s about nothing meaningful at all. And we believe we’ve seriously forgotten how to do it in our schools.