Culture

This blog is based on a provocation I gave to the Practical Wisdom Network to the question of “Whose values are they anyway?” I approach the provocation through the character lens of practical wisdom. 

Walk into any school or scroll through a Multi-Academy Trust’s website, and you’ll see them: Respect, Aspiration, Ambition, Integrity, Courage. Neatly framed, laminated and polished like a branding exercise.

But a question should haunt us: Whose values are they anyway? Who decided that these specific words should shape the daily culture, decisions and futures of an entire community? To answer this, we need to understand the difference between values and virtues and, most importantly, the practice of practical wisdom.

Practical wisdom isn’t just book smarts; it’s life smarts. It’s the ability to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, balancing rules with humanity. It’s the skill of making good decisions in messy, real-life situations – choosing what’s good, right, and true, not just what the rulebook says.

Values are the principles we declare we hold, like claiming to value our health. But virtues are the habits that make those values real. If health is the value, then virtues like self-discipline, perseverance, and temperance are what turn it into a daily practice. Self-discipline is choosing a walk over crashing out on the sofa; perseverance is showing up to the gym on the days you just don’t feel like it; temperance is enjoying food without swinging into excess. Put simply: values are what we say, but virtues are how we live, especially when it’s difficult.

Who Decides?

In practice, values are almost always handed down. A trust board. A group of senior leaders. Sometimes, one headteacher with a vision. But how often do we invite students, families, or associate staff into the process? How often do we open the doors to the community whose children will live with the weight of these words? Too rarely. Values are often written in a room by people who will not face their consequences. If that doesn’t unsettle us, it should.

Take, for example, “British Values.” They didn’t emerge from a national conversation; they were written into statutory guidance in 2014 following the “Trojan Horse” affair in Birmingham schools; a moment laced with political anxiety about extremism, identity and belonging. They were less the fruit of civic reflection and more a defensive assertion of national identity.

When one-size-fits-all national values are imposed on a plural, multicultural nation, the risk is that they flatten nuance and erase lived realities.

• What does “democracy” mean to a young person who has never seen their community represented in positions of power?
• What does “rule of law” mean to families who feel over-policed yet under-protected?
• What does “individual liberty” mean when opportunity is unevenly distributed and discrimination silently closes doors?
• What does “mutual respect and tolerance” mean when some identities are merely “put up with” (not representing the true meaning of tolerance), not celebrated or centred?

From a DEIB perspective, this is not neutral ground. British values often land less like a common commitment and more like a top-down script. Practical wisdom reminds us that to live well in community is not about repeating someone else’s script but cultivating the virtues to navigate complexity, difference and difficulty with integrity.

Values vs. Virtue

Aristotle taught that true flourishing wasn’t about abstract ideals but about virtues embodied in practice. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre notes, a value on the wall is just a word. A virtue lived out is a habit formed through struggle and character.

Integrity isn’t a poster; it’s the painful choice to tell the truth when it would be easier to conceal it. Empathy isn’t a slogan; it’s the practiced attention to the quiet child in the back row who carries the weight of the world. Without virtuous practice, values are just advertising, not meaning.

What’s Good, Right, and True?

Schools often claim they are places where children learn what is good, right, and true. But these words are slippery. What counts as good for one community may not for another. What is right in an affluent suburb may not be in a town hollowed out by unemployment. And truth, let’s be honest, is never neutral. Curricula are choices. Discipline policies are choices. Definitions of success are choices. Those choices reflect particular cultural and political traditions, not universal truths.

This is why DEIB cannot be an “add-on.” If our values exclude or silence the lived experiences of children from different racial, cultural, religious, or socioeconomic backgrounds, they are not values. They are exclusions dressed up in nice fonts. Belonging is not assimilation into someone else’s values; it is co-creating values that are genuinely shared.

Flourishing. Defined by Whom?

Too often, the system narrows flourishing to one measure: exam results. Grades are the currency of human worth, but here’s the paradox: the system itself is designed to prevent everyone from “succeeding.” Significant numbers of children will always be labelled “below standard” because that’s how exams are normed. The Department for Education’s media guidance is instructive:

• If results go up, its proof policy has raised standards.
• If results go down, its proof policy has raised standards.
  

A neat trick. But let’s be clear: nobody becomes better at maths simply by sitting a harder paper, especially if they ‘fail’ it. Yet this is the frame in which “flourishing” gets defined: harder benchmarks, narrower outcomes, national straplines.

So if flourishing is defined only by grades, or boxed into compliance with a centrally imposed set of British values, then flourishing is not about children at all. It is about alignment and fitting in. It is about living up to someone else’s story of what counts as good, right, and true.

That is not flourishing. That is conformity.

Pathways for Co-Creation

So, what is the alternative? Practical wisdom points us toward a different path:

• Co-creation with communities: Values forged through dialogue with students, parents, staff, and local voices; not handed down as final.
• Virtue in practice: Schools embedding habits of integrity, courage, empathy, and service in daily routines and structures; not as posters but as pedagogies.
• Flourishing as dignity and contribution: Schools are judged not only on exam results but on how their students leave with the capacity to live lives of meaning, purpose, and contribution to the common good.
• Local nuance, national honesty: Acknowledging that “British values” are not universal values, but one political frame; opening space for communities to shape how values are lived in their context.

The Dare

So here’s the provocation: Whose values are you really living by?

• Are they values chosen in Whitehall and laminated in your corridors?
• Are they values written in a boardroom and handed down like policy?
• Or are they values forged, tested, and lived in the daily practices of your community?

The dare is this: stop treating values as safe branding. Start treating them as dangerous commitments. Dangerous because they demand something of us. Dangerous because they unsettle power. Dangerous because they might actually make our schools places where all young people, not just the ones who fit the script, can truly flourish.

I’ll leave you with the question, not as comfort, but as a challenge: 

Whose values are they anyway? Are you ready to change the answer?