ABSTRACT
The aspiration of developing the ‘whole child’ – emotionally, socially, intellectually and spiritually – has a long history. In England it grew bolder with the publication 50 years ago of the Plowden Report and subsequently peaked in the 1970s alongside the drive towards comprehensive secondary education. The commitment to this rounded development is maintained at policy level and is still structurally visible in the curriculum of maintained schools in the form of spiritual, moral, social and cultural education (SMSC), personal, social and health education (PSHE) and citizenship. However, an increasing focus on academic competition within and between schools since the 1980s, especially in subjects compared through international testing since 2000, has led to a narrowing of the curriculum – despite the commitment to it being ‘balanced and broadly based’ (Department for Education, 2013, p. 5) – and a reorientation of schools’ mission around measurable performance. This is a likely contributing factor to a rising tide of stress and mental illness among young people (Longfield, 2017). Bates has argued that the recent policy focus on developing students’ character – in particular, ‘resilience’ (Department for Education, 2013) and ‘grit’ (Morgan, 2017) – represents another reframing of whole child development: the ‘management of “emotional labour” of children’ within a ‘corporate re-imagining of schools’ where emotional qualities are a valuable commodity in the future workplace (Bates, 2017, p. 66). More prosaically, promotion of these qualities can be understood as an attempt to make a virtue of the increasingly pressured environment in which children find themselves.
