The current state of education in our schools can be blamed on many factors – some going as far back as the Apartheid system and others that are more recent. However, at least some of the blame for the current state of education in our schools can be apportioned to a lack of ethical standards in schools.

The role that ethical values play in school performance is demonstrated in the stories that we hear of under-performing schools being turned around to well-performing schools. A common denominator in these stories is often the element of the leadership of such schools starting to instill a new value system in the school – a value system that does not only prioritise values such as discipline and excellence but also specifically ethical values such as respect, dignity, and care.

The conviction that part of the problem of underperforming schools is a lack of ethical values, paired with the conviction that a sound value system is part of the formula for well-performing schools, provided the impetus for the Schools as Moral Communities project.

In this series, we will be discussing ethics in schools as well as explore the concept of Schools as Moral Communities. This concept is informed by two perspectives. The first is Lawrence Kohlberg’s perspectives on the nature of moral development. The second is the governance of ethics framework developed by The Ethics Institute (TEI).