Developing your vision

Chapter 3 has been designed to help you to clarify the principles which follow from your values. Through this chapter we explore choices and potential consequences of your choices.

The intention of these chapters is to challenge you to be explicit about the values and priorities which underpin your choices. National leadership is a challenging task – there are competing priorities, diverse viewpoints to be reconciled, resource allocation decisions to be made. It can be easy within the day-to-day pressures of the political environment to lose sight of the fact that decisions taken at the national leadership level embody the values that will educate the citizens responsible for the society of tomorrow. Consider Kerslake’s analysis here:

In his introduction to the UK2070 Commission Report (2019), Lord Kerslake asserts that deep-rooted regional inequalities across the UK demand “long term thinking and a special economic plan to tackle them”. The report concludes that inequalities are exacerbated by “underpowered ‘pea-shooter’ and ‘sticking-plaster’ policies”. A case is made for future policy to be “structural, generational, interlocking and at scale”. Within advanced economies poverty and inequality have emerged as political flash points (G-7 summit, Biarritz, 2019).

We start this chapter with three premises with which may or may not fit with your values: • that a nation’s education service provides the foundation for development of a society: that a government creates, shapes or denies, opportunities for society’s development, economic prosperity and citizens’ wellbeing through its leader ship of the national education service • that civil unrest is a threat to democracies as governments rule by popular mandate and that the chance of civil unrest can be minimised through an education service overtly supporting values of community and social cohesion, tolerance of difference and advancement on merit • that high quality motivated teachers are the single most important factor in improving educational outcomes and that system stability with managed change, innovative CPD using 21st century technologies together with stake holder consensus is most likely to achieve this.

For the UK, the BREXIT issues divided society. A new focus on education, based on explicit shared values focused on shaping the society of tomorrow, may bring the opportunity to energise communities and bring them together. Other fractured societies may consider how consultation on the values and principles for a national education system and service could help overcome similar challenges.