To promote, or not to promote fundamental British values? Teachers’ standards, diversity and teacher education
Abstract
In this article we seek to problematize the presence of the requirement within the teachers’ standards (DfE, 2012), that they ‘should not undermine fundamental British values’ in the context of initial teacher education in England. The inclusion of this statement within the teachers’ code of conduct has made its way from the counter‐terrorism strategy, Prevent and raises questions about Britishness, values and the relationship between the state and the profession more generally. We argue that the inclusion of the phrase within a statutory document that regulates the profession is de facto a politicization of the profession by the state thereby instilling the expectation that teachers are state instruments of surveillance. The absence of any wider debate around the inclusion of the statement is also problematic as is the lack of training for pre‐service and inservice teachers since it means this concept of fundamental British values is unchallenged and its insidious racialising implications are unrecognised by most teachers.
Number of times cited: 17
- Edda Sant and David Menendez Alvarez-Hevia, Policy and Research on Citizenship Education in the United Kingdom (1998–2018), Handbook of Research on Education for Participative Citizenship and Global Prosperity, 10.4018/978-1-5225-7110-0.ch013, (302-327)
- Imran Awan, Keith Spiller and Andrew Whiting, Surveillance and the ‘Monitoring’ of Citizens by the State, Terrorism in the Classroom, 10.1007/978-3-030-01710-1_4, (43-59), (2018).
- Edda Sant and Chris Hanley, Political assumptions underlying pedagogies of national education: The case of student teachers teaching ‘British values’ in England, British Educational Research Journal, 44, 2, (319-337), (2018).
- Sadia Habib, Conclusions and Recommendations, Learning and Teaching British Values, 10.1007/978-3-319-60381-0_8, (149-164), (2017).
- Hugh Starkey, Fundamental British Values and citizenship education: tensions between national and global perspectives, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, (1), (2018).
- Sadia Habib, Introduction, Learning and Teaching British Values, 10.1007/978-3-319-60381-0_1, (1-28), (2017).
- Sadia Habib, Trainee Teachers “Unravel, Criticise and Re-imagine” British Values, Learning and Teaching British Values, 10.1007/978-3-319-60381-0_4, (51-78), (2017).
- Sadia Habib, Learning and Teaching About Britishness, Learning and Teaching British Values, 10.1007/978-3-319-60381-0_5, (79-99), (2017).
- Christine Winter, Disrupting colonial discourses in the geography curriculum during the introduction of British Values policy in schools, Journal of Curriculum Studies, (1), (2018).
- Lynn Revell and Hazel Bryan, References, Fundamental British Values in Education, 10.1108/978-1-78714-507-820181010, (107-127), (2018).
- Leandra Parris, Jesslynn Rocha Neves and Tamika La Salle, School climate perceptions of ethnically diverse students: Does school diversity matter?, School Psychology International, 10.1177/0143034318798419, 39, 6, (625-645), (2018).
- Andrew Village, Church Schools, The Church of England in the First Decade of the 21st Century, 10.1007/978-3-030-04528-9_10, (213-232), (2018).
- Mario Novelli, Education and countering violent extremism: Western logics from south to north?, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 47, 6, (835), (2017).
- Joanna Haynes and Rowena Passy, Racism, Prevent and education: insisting on an open space, Safer Communities, 16, 4, (155), (2017).
- Yuval Dvir, Paul Morris and Miri Yemini, What kind of citizenship for whom? The ‘refugee crisis’ and the European Union’s conceptions of citizenship, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 10.1080/14767724.2018.1525284, (1-12), (2018).
- Philip Bamber, Andrea Bullivant, Alison Clark and David Lundie, Educating Global Britain: Perils and possibilities promoting ‘National’ values through critical Global Citizenship Education, British Journal of Educational Studies, 10.1080/00071005.2018.1533097, (1-21), (2018).
- Carol Vincent, Cohesion, citizenship and coherence: schools’ responses to the British values policy, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 10.1080/01425692.2018.1496011, (1-16), (2018).
