“The average anxiety level of a western teenager today is equivalent to a level which would have denoted a clinical anxiety disorder in the 1950s,” reveals Alastair McConville in this week’s TES.
With that in mind, Mr McConville, director of teaching and learning at Bedales School in Hampshire, focuses on the duty of schools to oversee students’ moral and spiritual progression.
But, as with most pastoral issues, how much responsibility rests with schools – and how can teachers know if they are doing it effectively, or indeed correctly?

Mr McConville suggests that schools might take as a starting point for the definition of moral and spiritual well-being: “People who are reliably kind to others, tolerant of difference, comfortable in their own skin, compassionate, understanding of their responsibilities to people other than themselves, and ‘reflective about beliefs, values and more profound aspects of human experience’, to steal an Ofsted phrase.”
Among other ways of guiding students towards such well-being, Mr McConville points to the current non-statutory guidance for religious education as being a “well-established education framework” for learning about spirituality, belief and moral attitudes.
MORE