School Cultures, Values Education and Personal Education

This chapter provides a critical overview of research that illustrates the importance of school culture to students’ educational performance and experience of school. However, consideration will also be given to the difficulties of empirically evaluating the impact of school culture and ethos on student learning (Bragg & Manchester, 2011; Gorard, 2010; Donnelly, 2000). We will also consider how values are related to concepts of personal education. This includes discussion of the difficulty of measuring the impact of these within an educational context dominated by outcomes related to examination performance (Deakin Crick et al., 2007; Berkowitz, 2011; Lovat et al., 2011). The overview will draw attention to the problems of assuming ethos is something stable and controllable, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, not underestimating the significance of local school cultures to the fostering of personal values and the importance of these to learning behaviours. The chapter will conclude with a short explanation of the research methodology applied to overcoming these challenges.