Values education: bridging the religious and secular divide

Recent research into factors impacting on student attainment has exposed the potential of 'quality teaching' to exercise a positive influence on their achievement. Extending the notion of teacher beyond surface and factual learning, quality teaching, as defined in the literature, has posited conceptions of "intellectual depth", "communicative competence" and "self-reflection" as being central to effective learning. Implicit in these conceptions are values dimensions reflected in notions of positive relationships, the centrality of student welfare, school coherence, ambience and organization. The influences of these on student learning, welfare and progress have been observed widely across all sectors, confirming earlier studies of similar phenomena in religious schools. At the same time, new research insights are challenging some of the assumptions held by religious schools in earlier times that part of the religious school's distinctiveness was to be found around the values agenda. Evidence from the Australian Government's Values Education Good Schools Project (VEGPSP) (AGDEST, 2006) indicates the benefit to schools, religious or otherwise, of reflecting on, reevaluating and rethinking the implications of 'values education', as defined, for curricula, classroom management and school ethos in the interests of student well-being and progress. Hence, it is proposed, values education is being seen increasingly as having outgrown any earlier conceptions of dependence on religious education and, in turn, yet another of the cosmetically defined differences between religious and public schooling is being stripped away.