The Centre For Social Cohesion

The academic whose research discovered the beneficial effects of these lessons is Professor Susan Hallam of the Institute of Education. She is reported as having suggested the Seal programme to be ‘the perfect antidote to the intense pressure imposed on schools by the testing regime and exam league table’, and quoted as saying:

‘Most of the effort in recent years has been on academic work. Seal gives teachers and pupils permission to think about things that are not academic. It allows them to take time to consider how they think about themselves and others.’

While being all in favour of school children being well mannered and motivated to learn, I can think of an alternative way of achieving these same ends in the face of a regime of over-testing than by the introduction of confessedly non-academic lessons into school day.

If the current regime of over-testing were scrapped, then schools would not have to clutter their day with the non-academic lessons SEAL supposedly provides as a corrective to the stress constant testing creates.

Part of the Seal programme involves schools holding ‘well-being assemblies’. What’s wrong with the old-fashioned and largely abandoned but still legally mandatory collective daily act of worship, I wonder? Are we to think that some new-fangled mush is preferable to these old tried and tested methods that have been used for centuries to ‘help pupils to make sense of their life story’ and that the Seal programme is apparently designed to do?

You may be wondering what all this has to do with social cohesion. Its relevance is this. The need for special happiness lessons would be obviated were schools not to have been obliged to turn into test factories, which they made into to redress the lack of proper teaching in so many that was the result of the progressive teaching fads of the nineteen seventies. Likewise, the need for society to concern itself with social cohesion would be obviated were it to cease to subvert such cohesion through multiculturalism and through depriving children of the wherewithal to form a common social identity that a decent study of British narrative history would supply.

I appreciate that, in an ethnically and religious pluralistic society such as Britain has become today through mass immigration, the preservation there of social cohesion has been made much more difficult than it might otherwise have been. But there is no reason to think it would not be the natural outcome of a school core curriculum that was designed to foster in them all a common British identity that made them aware of what a privilege they enjoyed by virtue of their British citizenship and which did not fight shy of wanting to make them proud and glad to be such.

A curriculum designed to achieve this outcome would be a demanding one, since it would require all schoolchildren to become progressively more steeped in British culture. And it would carry an opportunity cost: those aspects of their identities that divided them would suffer attenuation, as there would be less time to devote to them.

Rigorous end of course examinations would still be needed to ensure efficacy of the schools and for certification of pupil attainment levels. But it would all be a far cry from the socially divisive and un-edifying educational bedlam that reigns in all too many of our schools today.