Emotional Development and the School Curriculum
Jan 1997

Antidote’s first conference - on Emotional Development and the School Curriculum - was attended by over 140 delegates. They came to discuss how schools can prepare our children and young people for a time of rapid change, and can equip them with the emotional and social skills that they need if they are to meet the challenges that they will face.

Tony Blair has promised that his priority while in office will be Education, Education, Education. To that one can only say Three Cheers. But what sort of education will the new government encourage teachers to offer our children and young people?

Is it to be an education that recognises and seeks to enhance the wide range of different skills needed by a complex modern society, or one that focuses only on a narrow range of measurable competencies? Is it to be an education that enables young people to become increasingly adaptable and resourceful in responding to the social and technological changes that are happening all around them, or one that leaves them unable to make the necessary shifts?

Delegates to the Antidote Conference testified to a growing awareness of how recent developments in education had geared schools up to achieve better exam results, but without necessarily enhancing their ability to deliver to children the capacities they need if they are to thrive in the contemporary world, and make an active contribution to society.

Schools, it was argued, need to develop policies for enhancing the emotional and social skills of young people, so as to foster their motivation to learn, to think flexibly and creatively about problems, and to acquire the capacity for continuous self-development that is likely to be required of them. Emotional Literacy is also the basis for developing a set of values that will work both for themselves and for the rest of society.

Delegates recognised that strategies to develop Emotional Literacy called for attention to be given not only to what is taught and how it is taught, but also to what sort of organisations our schools are - to what extent they encourage the participation of children in the development of the curriculum and the running of the school, and how far they foster links with the wider community in which they are set.

Antidote’s forthcoming Report on Developing Emotional Literacy: A Positive Vision for Education will elaborate upon how we can:

• Create space within schools for activities that will encourage the development of Emotional Literacy;
• Assist teachers to develop the capacity for understanding why children and young people behave as they do, and how they can respond appropriately;
• Give teachers the sort of support that will increase their capacity to do this;
• Provide pupils with opportunities to reflect upon their experiences of school life;
• Consult pupils about what they learn, how they learn, and how their schools are being run;
• Involve parents and others in the running of schools, so that they are not isolated islands in the midst of our communities;
• Recognise that children and young people have a diverse range of talents that need to be nurtured and developed.

"Progressive, child-centered education is fighting back under a new banner. After a decade in which it has become de rigueur for people to admit ruefully that educating the ‘whole child’ was a sweet, though now impractical Sixties idea, a new wave of interest in ‘emotional literacy’ is gaining momentum."
Josephine Gardiner, Times Educational Supplement


Conference reports