Throughout my career, I’ve kept this quote scribbled on a post-it, stuck on my office pinboard, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all” accredited to Aristotle.

In this vein, it was reassuring to read that a recurring theme across the 7000 teachers surveyed in Pearson’s recent review was that life skills should be given as much time and emphasis as core subjects, with two-thirds of teachers believing that this would better support pupils (Pearson, 2022). The teachers surveyed ranked resilience, kindness and self-esteem as the first, second and third most important characteristics they would most like to see built into a future national curriculum. The vital need for such a focus on these skills in schools is something I too felt keenly in my ten years in schools across both sectors and age phases.

The school holidays provide the vitally important breathing space to zoom out and think about the bigger picture again. A time for creativity, rejuvenation and re-focusing on everything put on pause in the depths of term time, with its maelstrom of reporting deadlines, parent emails and the bread and butter of delivering impactful learning for the pupils in our care. This half term, I’ve reflected on our work to support character education in line with what the students we support are telling us they need:

1. We explicitly teach resilience in all of our mentoring programmes and lead workshops to foster this vital quality in young people. We support teachers and peer mentors with harnessing the opportunities to grow resilience within school life.

2. The confidence to communicate is a crucial skill for young people so that they can flourish both within school and in their wider lives. Promoting oracy is at the heart of our mentoring approach to supporting young people and we carefully measure pupils’ confidence in their oracy throughout our partnerships.

3. We believe you can teach empathy in young people and our programmes allow children to develop their empathy with the support of our mentors who facilitate as 'more knowledgeable others'. We evaluate our impact throughout to help school leaders understand how students’ empathy is progressing and what else can be done on the ground.

The pause from the frenetic pace of a teaching timetable creates the space for us all to evaluate what is missing. For me, the space created by school holidays always provoked questions around character: to what extent did our curriculum and school day foster pupils’ overall development as individuals? What more could we do to equip pupils with the vital skills they need to flourish not just in their learning but in their lives?

So if not now, when?

Pearson (2022) Schools Today, Schools Tomorrow Views on education in England – 2022 and beyond