During the second part of the 20th century, the term ‘character’ fell out of favour in UK school discourse. To rehabilitate character education, it was therefore necessary to retrieve the term ‘character’ and liberate it from any misleading negative connotations it had acquired. The Jubilee Centre informed the 2019 revision to the Ofsted Inspection Framework, and particularly the inclusion of character and character education in the expectations regarding personal development.
The inclusion of character in the Ofsted Inspection Framework has been popular with school leaders, pupils, parents and governors and recognised by inspectors. Our research highlights this growing emphasis: in 2014, only 1% of “Outstanding” schools had their approach to character explicitly mentioned in Ofsted reports. By 2022, this figure rose to 14%, and by 2024, it reached 22%.
Notably, there were no references to ‘virtue’ in the context of character education in the 439 reports searched between April and July 2024; and hence the language of ‘character strengths’ seems to have more resonance with school leaders than that of ‘virtue’. This is somewhat unfortunate as it makes it more cumbersome to distinguish instrumental performance strengths (such as resilience) from moral, civic, and intellectual virtues that all form part of good character. There is need for further linguistic retrievals in this area, therefore, in the service of nuance and conceptual clarity.
See our full response to Ofsted here.