Philosophy

The Ethos Consortium seeks to promote “the rediscovery of education with character.” This is a complex and, in some ways, rather nebulous aim. Whilst its very breadth and subtlety is an important part of the debate, it is therefore important to seek to be as clear (if necessary, in as many different ways as required) about all the things this might be said to constitute.

We feel that character education sometimes receives inadequate hearing in UK educational discourse because it fails to fit easily in four boxes that tend to enable themes or ideas to become politically central in the industry of education. These might be summarised as (in order in which they must be challenged):

1. No importance per se.
2. No data.
3. No central debate.
4. No consensus.

By contrast, ideas that succeed in capturing general attention (and hence are picked-up as political batons in education) tend to be clearly-defined in these areas: the very fact that they are limited in their aims (they are often not generalistic or broad in intention, and are set into an understood paradigm e.g. behaviour management / assessment etc) is their strength in catching attention. By contrast, "Character" is so broad and multi-faceted that many people give up trying to think about it altogether as simply too big an issue. But a hidden curriculum won't do.

The aim of The Ethos Consortium therefore becomes to overcome these weaknesses – in each case, partly by rebutting the requirement and partly by servicing it. So our aim is to stress that character education:

1. Is not merely important but critical specifically because it pervades almost everything we do.
2. Needs to both design effective measurement tools for evasive answers, and champion the primacy of soft (attitudinal / perceptual) over hard (attainment) data when it comes to character education.
3. Requires a central debate in our schools and view of education, not a peripheral place in other debates.
4. Does not and should not result in a consensus; but in an enriched and broad ground of varying philosophies each with significant interplay and reasoning underpinning them.

Everything we do aims to enrich, deepen and engage as many in education as possible in this debate.