Simon Uttley

Half a century ago, the Catholic Church’s publication of The Catholic School (1977) defined the theological and educational identity of Catholic schools in the post-Vatican II era. Its emphasis was on integrating faith with culture, fostering a Christ-centred community and viewing education not as mere knowledge transfer, but as a significant part of total human formation. 50 years on, with a lingering emphasis on privileging neo-liberal performativity and politicised ‘outcomes’, and a fragmented and diverse educational estate, this focus on education as formation seems as relevant today as it was then. In choosing one particular aspect of integration – character education – this paper seeks to place this seminal 1977 document in its historical context, developing from the earlier Gravissimum Educationis (1965). It goes on to explain in practical terms how character education, particularly that espoused by the Jubilee Centre and the Association for Character Education, not only supports Catholic schools in their mission to ensure their ethos is no mere gloss, but also acts as a deeply inclusive approach to human flourishing which enhances education for children of all faiths and none.

Simon Uttley

Simon Uttley is a serving Headteacher in the UK State-maintained Catholic sector, as well as Adjunct Professor of Catholic Education at the University of Notre Dame (USA), London and Honorary Professor at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. Simon is also founder and CEO of www.koin-ed.org, a values-driven research and consultancy community.

Cite as Uttley, S.R. (2026) Fifty Years On – Reflections on the Catholic Church’s ‘The Catholic School’, 1977, and the contemporary interest in character education. London : Koinonia Educational Ltd

Abstract

The author’s positionality as both a Headteacher of a Catholic secondary school in England and as a school committed to character education has led to this paper’s investigation into the deep synchronicity of Church teaching on education and the importance of how this education cashes out not only in terms of religious education and Catholic ethos, but in core pedagogy and curriculum choices.  Therefore, this paper examines the 1977 document The Catholic School, issued by the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education, and argues that it furnishes a coherent magisterial warrant for treating character education as intrinsic to, rather than an optional supplement to, the work of an authentic Catholic school. The paper synopsises the 1977 text and traces its development from the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Christian Education, Gravissimum educationis (1965). It then describes contemporary character education as articulated by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues and operationalised by the Association for Character Education. Reading the 1977 document against that framework, the paper identifies substantial convergence, and argues further that character education is an authentic expression of Catholic education, that it gives practical shape to Catholic social teaching, and that it must be designed into a school’s purposes from the outset rather than mapped retrospectively onto existing practice. Two applied sections follow: one on the implications for ongoing teacher formation, arguing that teachers in Catholic schools must be helped to understand their formative power as exemplars rather than as transmitters of knowledge; and one drawing on documented practice in the United Kingdom and beyond to illustrate what authentic character education looks like in Catholic and other schools.

Keywords: Catholic education; character education; virtue ethics; Catholic social teaching; teacher formation; Gravissimum educationis; Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues; human flourishing

 

 

 

1.     Introduction

Character education has become one of the most visible, and most contested, movements in English schooling over the past decade, attracting government endorsement, a sophisticated research infrastructure, a professional membership body and vigorous criticism. Catholic schools occupy an unusual position within this landscape. On one reading they are latecomers adopting a secular initiative; on another they are custodians of a formative tradition that long predates the movement and has its own theological grammar for what the movement calls virtue. For this author, working in the intersection of research as well as leadership of a State-maintained Catholic secondary school, character education represents an important aspect of the cashing out of what is seen as ‘Catholic ethos’ within the very weeds of the school infrastructure – pedagogy and curriculum – for the common good.

This paper defends a version of the second reading through close attention to a single text. The Catholic School, published by the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education on 19 March 1977, is the first substantial post-conciliar treatment of Catholic schooling as such, and it remains the reference point for the documents that followed it (Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education [SCCE], 1977). The argument advanced here is that the 1977 document does not merely tolerate character education but requires something functionally equivalent to it, and that where a Catholic school neglects the deliberate formation of character – sometimes termed virtue – it fails by the criteria the document itself sets out.

The paper proceeds in six movements: first, a synopsis of the 1977 document and its development from Gravissimum educationis (Second Vatican Council, 1965); second, a description of character education as currently understood in Britain; third, an argument that it is an authentic expression of Catholic education rather than an import; fourth an account of how it gives practical shape to Catholic social teaching and why it must be intrinsic from the outset; finally, the implications for teacher formation; and a survey of documented practice.

2.     Approach

The method is documentary and conceptual rather than empirical. Magisterial texts are read closely in the English editions published by the Holy See and cited by paragraph number, alongside the framework literature of the character education movement and the scholarship that supports and criticises it. The aim is not to demonstrate historical influence but structural correspondence: two independently developed accounts of what a school is for converge because both are, in different registers, teleological accounts of the person.

3.     The Catholic School (1977): A synopsis

Structure and argument

The document runs to ninety-three numbered paragraphs across seven sections. Its opening move is self-limiting and important: it presents itself as a development of Gravissimum educationis, narrowing the conciliar Declaration’s broad canvas to a deeper reflection on the school (SCCE, 1977, para. 1) and states its purpose as attending to the nature and distinguishing features of a school that would present itself as Catholic (para. 2).

Section I situates the school within the Church’s saving mission, describing it as a privileged means of promoting the formation of the whole person because it is a place where a particular understanding of the world, the human person and history is developed and transmitted (paras. 7–9). Rather than treating cultural plurality as a threat, the document argues that it makes the Church’s educational mission more urgent, since Christian thought supplies a criterion of judgement amid competing accounts of the good (paras. 10–11). The pivotal sentence occurs at paragraph 12, where pluralism is said to lead the Church to reaffirm an educational mission directed to strong character formation. As a Catholic school headteacher with twenty years’ experience in the role, this paragraph remains very pertinent: our schools are a contribution to the common good and reflect one of the most potent ways in which the message of the Gospel is experienced in the modern world.

Section II is unusually candid, rehearsing objections made against Catholic schools: that institutional witness is illegitimate; that faith schools risk proselytism; that the state has rendered them redundant; that in some contexts they serve the affluent; and that they fail to form articulate Christians (paras. 18–22). Complete education, the document responds, necessarily includes a religious dimension, and religion contributes to personal development in proportion as it is integrated into general education rather than bolted on (para. 19).

Section III supplies the philosophical core. Before asking what makes a school Catholic, the document insists that what does not reproduce the characteristic features of a school cannot be a Catholic school (para. 25). A school is a place of integral formation through the systematic and critical assimilation of culture (para. 26), and instruction exists for the sake of education, understood as development of the person from within (para. 29). Paragraph 30 is decisive: drawing out the ethical dimension is named a formal task of the school as an institution for education, undertaken so as to awaken inner spiritual dynamism and help the pupil attain moral freedom. The school must form persons who are inner-directed and capable of choosing freely in accordance with conscience (para. 31) and is a place where values are actively lived (para. 32).

Section IV addresses the specifically Catholic character of the school. Christ is the foundation of the whole educational enterprise, and the community’s shared Christian vision is what makes the school Catholic (paras. 33–34). Paragraph 37 states the double synthesis that has become the document’s most quoted formula: a synthesis of culture and faith through the integration of knowledge in the light of the Gospel, and a synthesis of faith and life through growth in the virtues characteristic of the Christian. Achieving this depends less on subject matter than on the people who work in the school, since the integration of culture and faith is mediated by the integration of faith and life in the person of the teacher (para. 43). The school creates a climate in which faith matures, giving priority to the formation of conscience in fundamental and permanent virtues, above all the theological virtues and charity (para. 47). It is the centre of an educative Christian community whose work is the transmission of values for living, because faith is chiefly assimilated through contact with people whose lives bear witness to it (paras. 53–54), and justice is to be practised in the school’s own arrangements rather than merely taught (para. 58). As a school leader this remains hugely powerful. The authentic Catholic school for this author is reflective of Jesus’ encounter with the travellers on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). It is a place of encounter, accompaniment and Aletheia. Encounter with oneself, with the other and with God; accompaniment rather than isolationism, and Aletheia understood as the slow un-concealing of truth through the journey of education.

Sections V and VI turn to difficulties and practical directions: identity confusion among Catholic staff, the need for constant self-criticism, co-responsibility and subsidiarity, and the continuing formation of teachers (paras. 64–82). Section VII insists that the validity of a Catholic school’s results cannot be measured by immediate efficiency, because freedom and grace bear fruit in an order that resists temporal assessment (para. 84), and offers the school’s service to all, including non-Christians (para. 85). This brings together two equally important elements in this author’s long experience of Catholic school leadership. First, the need to temper the (particularly English) privileging of neo-liberal notions of performativity which lean towards a means-justify-the-ends approach to delivering terminal results. (Exley & Ball, 2014). Second, the schools service to non-Christians should be seen not as a failure in recruiting Catholic but as an opportunity – with full respect to all traditions – to share the ‘good news’, through a distinctive worldview, a rich and humane set of criteria for success and a belied that a Catholic school should be first and last a eucharistic space – a place of celebration, of recognition, of possibility and of grace.

Development from Gravissimum Educationis

The relationship between the two documents is one of explicit continuity and genuine advance. Gravissimum Educationis itself anticipated further work, declaring principles that would need to be developed at greater length by a post-conciliar commission and applied by episcopal conferences to local situations (Second Vatican Council, 1965, Introduction). The Catholic School is a substantial instalment of that development and closes by repeating the Declaration’s final exhortation to teachers (SCCE, 1977, para. 90).

Four lines of development are worth distinguishing. First, scope: the Declaration treats education broadly, from the universal right to education to universities (Second Vatican Council, 1965, paras. 1–12), whereas the 1977 document narrows deliberately to the school and so offers what the Declaration never attempts, a definition of schooling as such and an argument that Catholic identity presupposes rather than replaces the generic excellences of a school (SCCE, 1977, paras. 25–26). For this author, this challenges the temptation for dualist thinking in Catholic education, represented by the notion that one runs a school with a Catholic ethos. There is no double ontology – the authentic Catholic school, in its infrastructure, management, operational choices and policy-making is at one and the same time an ecclesial space and a place for formation. Neither ‘category’ is, or should be, prior to the other.

Second, anthropology and moral formation. The Declaration already contains the seed, asserting a right to an education that develops physical, moral and intellectual endowments harmoniously, and a right to be motivated to appraise moral values with a right conscience (Second Vatican Council, 1965, para. 1). It describes the school as forming the ability to judge rightly and fostering a sense of values (para. 5), and names the family as the first school of the social virtues (para. 3). The 1977 document gives these dispersed claims institutional teeth: moral formation becomes a formal task of the school, tied to a named account of freedom, conscience and inner direction (SCCE, 1977, paras. 29–31). At no point does the call to moral education appear as an add-on, or as a nice-to-have. It is either intrinsic to all aspects of the school experience, or it lacks authenticity.

Third, ethos. Gravissimum Educationis had described the Catholic school’s proper function as creating a school-community atmosphere animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity (Second Vatican Council, 1965, para. 8), a phrase the later document quotes directly (SCCE, 1977, para. 55). But where the Declaration states the aim, the 1977 text theorises the mechanism: faith is assimilated through contact with people whose lives bear witness to it, and the climate of the school is the medium in which conscience is formed in permanent virtues (paras. 32, 47, 53). Again, drawing on the Emmaus account, te centrality of encounter and accompaniment not merely as pastorally or psychologically ‘healthy’, but as intrinsic to the un-concealing (Aletheia) of truth, where truth extends beyond knowledge transfer to offer the possibility of deep wisdom.

Fourth, context: the Declaration was written in an expansive moment preoccupied with access and rights, whereas the 1977 document addresses contested legitimacy, declining religious personnel and an explicitly consumerist culture, offering formation as a response to materialism, pragmatism and technocracy (para. 12). For this author, the successor to consumerism as the Bête Noir of late (or Post-) modernity – certainly insofar as we are considering the young – is the crisis in identity and the dislocation of life-giving and authentic relationships, aided by social media. Yet the effect is similar – a tilt towards the false gods, not necessarily of meaningless consumption, but of a quest for self-identity and belonging in a world of algorithms, binary positions and oft-weaponised tribalism which, stripped of accountability in a digital realm, runs the clear and present risk of becoming as toxic as it is addictive.

4.     Describing character education

The Jubilee Centre framework

The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, founded at the University of Birmingham in 2012, is the principal academic reference point for character education in the United Kingdom, though it is not unique in this mission. Its Framework for Character Education in Schools, first published in 2013 and revised in 2017 and 2022, sets out a neo-Aristotelian position applied across the Centre’s research programme (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues [JCCV], 2022).

The Framework defines character as a set of personal traits or dispositions that generate moral emotions, inform motivation and guide conduct, and character education as the whole range of explicit and implicit educational activities by which young people develop the positive personal strengths called virtues (JCCV, 2022). Two features matter. The definition includes the implicit, refusing the notion that character education is a discrete curriculum slot; and it treats character education as unavoidable, arguing that some form of it always occurs in a school, so that the useful question is not whether it happens but whether it is intentional, planned and reflective, or unconscious, reactive and random.

Substantively, the Framework organises virtues into four building blocks of Character: intellectual virtues such as curiosity and critical thinking; moral virtues such as courage, justice, honesty and compassion; civic virtues such as citizenship, service and volunteering; and performance virtues such as resilience and teamwork. Performance virtues derive their value from serving morally acceptable ends, and all four are integrated by practical wisdom, or phronesis, the meta-virtue by which a person discerns what is desirable when the demands of two or more virtues collide (Kristjánsson et al., 2021; Darnell et al., 2019).

Each virtue is further decomposed into components, three of which — perception, knowledge and understanding, and reasoning — are grouped as virtue literacy. Pedagogically, the Framework works through the typology of character caught, taught and sought: caught through community, relationships, role modelling and ethos; taught through curriculum, discussion, moral dilemmas and exemplars; and sought through freely chosen experiences, reflection, service and personal commitments. Character sought is linked directly to phronesis, since virtues lack full moral value in an adult unless independently sought (JCCV, 2022). The Framework is cautious about measurement, warning against aggregating individual virtue profiles while accepting that provision can be evaluated.

The Association for Character Education

Where the Jubilee Centre supplies theory, the Association for Character Education supplies a professional community of practice, working in partnership with the Centre so that its support to schools is shaped by current research (ACE, n.d.-a, n.d.-c). Its central conviction is that there is no blueprint: provision should be shaped by the needs of the community a school serves, but to be transformative it must be planned, intentional and embedded across the whole school (ACE, n.d.-a).

ACE’s most distinctive instrument is its suite of Character Quality Marks, awarded to schools, colleges and organisations that can demonstrate character education delivered in an explicit, planned and reflective manner, so as to cultivate positive character qualities in the interests of human flourishing (ACE, n.d.-b). The process is developmental as well as evaluative, yielding a report of strengths and recommendations. The policy context is supplied by the Department for Education, whose non-statutory guidance sets out six benchmarks organised around questions a school might ask of itself, while leaving schools free to decide what constitutes good provision (Department for Education [DfE], 2019).

Criticism

Character education is not uncontested. The most sustained British critique argues that the movement individualises social problems, presenting character as the solution to difficulties whose causes are structural, and that citizenship education is the better vehicle for democratic formation (Jerome & Kisby, 2019). Kristjánsson (2021) has responded that such critiques misidentify their target and misread an Aristotelian tradition that is neither individualist nor politically quietist, having earlier answered a set of persistent misconceptions while conceding three well-founded misgivings (Kristjánsson, 2013). Of course, within the catholic educational tradition,  there is no claim for character education to become hegemonic, not least as the heart of the Catholic school is – or should be – Christ himself. In other words, the un-concealing of truth will be a function not of one approach, but of the intellectual, social, developmental, theological and spiritual.

5.     Character education as an aspect of authentic Catholic education

This author, like a significant number of leaders of Catholic schools, recognised that character education is better understood as an expression of Catholic educational identity than as an external programme adopted alongside it. Why?

Anthropology and Telos

Both accounts are teleological. The Framework treats human flourishing as the ultimate aim of character education and holds that flourishing requires intellectual, moral and civic virtues together with the enabling virtues of self-management (JCCV, 2022). The 1977 document commits the Catholic school to the development of the whole person because in Christ, the Perfect Man, all human values find their fulfilment and unity, identifying this as the specifically Catholic character of the school (SCCE, 1977, para. 35). Both hold that education is answerable to an account of what a human being is for. That shared structure makes translation between the vocabularies possible, and it is the basis on which Arthur (2021) argues that a neo-Aristotelian-Thomist framework offers a richer grounding for Christian character education than either a purely secular virtue ethics or an unarticulated appeal to values.

An explicit mandate for character formation

The most direct textual warrant is paragraph 12, where the document responds to cultural pluralism by reaffirming an educational mission aimed at strong character formation, so that the young may resist the debilitating influence of relativism (SCCE, 1977, para. 12). The language is not incidental: it stands at the hinge of the argument about pluralism and treats character formation as the Church’s considered answer to a culture marked by materialism, pragmatism and technocracy. A school that regards character formation as a fashionable addition to its core business has inverted this logic, in which such formation is the response to precisely the conditions that make Catholic schooling contested.

The ethical dimension as a formal task

Paragraph 30 states that drawing out the ethical dimension is a formal task of the school as an institution for education, aimed at arousing inner spiritual dynamism and at moral freedom grounded in absolute values. The parallel with the Framework’s claim that character education is unavoidable, so that the only real question is whether it is planned or random, is close (JCCV, 2022). Both refuse the idea that moral formation is a residue of good teaching, and paragraph 29 sharpens the point by insisting that the school’s programme is intentionally directed to the growth of the whole person. As we will see, the challenge here is to ensure that all adults in school not only feel permitted, but in fact encouraged to use their own power as role models to help in the formation of the young. This is not to detract from the parent/carer role as first educators (Catechism of the Catholic Church (2018) paras. 2221-3), but rather reflects Pope Paul VI insight that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” (Paul VI, Pope 1974).

Virtue language, Virtue literacy and pedagogy

The 1977 document uses the vocabulary of virtue without embarrassment, speaking of forming those particular virtues that enable a new life in Christ (SCCE, 1977, para. 36), of the synthesis of faith and life as growth in the virtues characteristic of the Christian (para. 37), and of the gradual formation of conscience in fundamental and permanent virtues, above all the theological virtues and charity (para. 47). This last passage is the most theologically distinctive, identifying charity as the animating principle that transforms a person of virtue into a person of Christ. Set beside the Framework’s account of virtue literacy, the correspondence is partial but real: paragraph 48 requires the systematic formation of pupils’ critical faculties so that they attain self-control and can subject the offerings of mass communication to critical and personal analysis, a recognisable demand for what the Framework calls virtue perception and virtue reasoning.

The caught, taught and sought typology maps onto the document with surprising economy. Character caught corresponds to its attention to climate and community: values actively lived through sincere relationships (para. 32); a climate in which faith matures (para. 47); a community whose work is the transmission of values for living (paras. 53, 55). Character taught corresponds to the double synthesis of paragraph 37, to the insistence that subjects serve the acquisition of values and the discovery of truth (para. 39), and to the requirement of explicit religious education (para. 50). Character sought is the most interesting correspondence, because it is most often lost when character education collapses into a behaviour policy. The document requires a school that develops persons who are inner-directed and capable of choosing freely in conformity with conscience (para. 31); that leads the pupil to a lifelong personal integration of faith and life (paras. 44–45); and that recognises a demanding educational vision cannot be imposed but must be freely accepted, being offered as good news and as such refusable (para. 59). The insistence on freedom is not a concession; it is a condition of formation being formation at all.

Evaluation and the limits of measurement

A final convergence concerns assessment. The Framework warns that measuring character is extremely difficult and that self-report measures require caution, while affirming that provision can be evaluated (JCCV, 2022). The 1977 document reaches a similar conclusion from theological premises, conceding that formative results must often be calculated over the long term (SCCE, 1977, para. 22) and arguing that a Catholic school’s results cannot be measured by immediate efficiency, because freedom and grace come to fruition in an order that resists temporal assessment (para. 84). A Catholic school adopting character education should therefore be sceptical of any framework promising quantifiable virtue.

6.     Character education and Catholic Social Teaching

If character education is an authentic expression of Catholic education, it is also the point at which Catholic social teaching becomes practicable in a school. Social doctrine is not a set of policy positions to be memorised but, as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church puts it, an instrument of evangelisation that reveals the human person to himself and bears on family and education as much as on economic and political life (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2004, no. 67). Its permanent principles — the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity — are dispositional before they are political. They describe how a person must habitually see and respond to others if social life is to be just.

This is precisely the territory the Jubilee Centre calls civic virtue. The Framework groups citizenship, civility, service and volunteering as traits necessary for responsible citizenship and contribution to the common good and insists that the ultimate aim is not only to improve individuals but to create the conditions in which all can flourish (JCCV, 2022). The Centre has developed this into a positive conception of social justice grounded in Aristotelian and Thomistic accounts of justice rather than in rights discourse alone (Arthur et al., 2021). Arthur (2024) makes the connection explicit, arguing that Catholic social teaching shows the social order can be shaped and that Christians therefore bear responsibility for shaping it.

The 1977 document anticipates this alignment. It requires pupils to overcome individualism and discover their vocation to live responsibly in community (SCCE, 1977, para. 45); insists that the demands of justice be put into practice in the daily life of the school and not merely taught, warning of counter-witness where provision drifts towards the wealthy (para. 58); and presents the school community as evidence to a society experiencing new forms of individualism that true communities can be built through common effort for the common good (para. 62). Its statement that education is not given for gaining power, and that knowledge is a call to serve rather than a means of material prosperity (para. 56), is a compact statement of solidarity as an educational aim.

Two practical consequences follow. First, social action ceases to be an enrichment activity and becomes a curricular obligation: if solidarity is a virtue, it requires practice, and a school that teaches the preferential option for the poor without arranging for pupils to act on it is teaching a proposition rather than forming a disposition. Second, Catholic social teaching supplies the answer to the charge that character education individualises structural problems (Jerome & Kisby, 2019). A tradition that holds schools accountable for the justice of their own admissions, resourcing and relationships cannot easily be accused of substituting personal virtue for structural analysis. Pope Francis’s call for an educational village, in which all share the task of forming a network of open human relationships and the ground is cleared of discrimination so that fraternity can flourish, extends this logic beyond the school gate (Francis, 2019).

7.     Intrinsic from the outset, not mapped on retrospectively

A recurring failure mode in character education is retrospective mapping: a school audits what it already does, relabels assemblies, house competitions, sports fixtures and charity fundraising as character provision, and declares the work complete. The exercise is attractive because it is cheap (nowadays aided by AI) and because it flatters existing practice. It is nonetheless a category error, and the 1977 document supplies the resources to say why.

The document’s claim at paragraph 30 is that the school has a formal task in the ethical dimension. A formal task is constitutive of the institution, not descriptive of its by-products. Paragraph 28 requires the school to review its entire programme of formation, both content and methods, in the light of the vision from which it draws its inspiration. That is a design instruction, not an audit instruction: it asks what the school is for before it asks what the school does and expects the answer to reshape provision rather than merely describe it. Paragraph 67 reinforces the point by requiring constant self-criticism and return to basic principles.

The Jubilee Centre reaches the same conclusion by a different route. Its distinction between character education that is intentional, planned, organised and reflective and character education that is assumed, unconscious, reactive and random is precisely a distinction between design and retrofit (JCCV, 2022). ACE likewise insists that provision must be planned, intentional and fully embedded across the whole school before it can be transformative (ACE, n.d.-a). The Centre’s Character Teaching Inventory does aim to make explicit what is often implicit in schools, but this is not the same manoeuvre: making an implicit practice explicit so that it can be examined, justified and improved is the opposite of leaving it implicit and applying a label.

The risk is not hypothetical, and it is documented within Catholic schooling. Lapsley and Kelley (2022) argue that the character-forming work of Catholic schools is too often remanded to the hidden curriculum, where it cannot be intentionally promoted, improved or targeted for explicit instruction, and where an otherwise strong communitarian ethos never becomes a visible pedagogy of moral, civic and intellectual virtue. They cite a study of Catholic character education in United Kingdom schools which found that although school ethos was the strongest supporting element, character education was largely an implicit feature of the school day, a matter of character caught rather than character taught, and that the language of Gospel values risked being received as platitudes with no detectable impact on character (Devanny, 2018, as cited in Lapsley & Kelley, 2022). Grace’s (2002) earlier observation that a visible pedagogy of religious instruction always coexists with an invisible pedagogy of formation shaped by ethos, ritual and symbol identifies the same structure, and the danger is that the invisible pedagogy is assumed to be working because it has never been examined.

The consequence for practice is a sequencing claim. A Catholic school should begin from its account of the person and the ends of education, derive from that account the virtues it will prioritise, and only then ask which existing practices serve those ends, which need redesign and which should be discontinued. Beginning at the other end — with the practices — guarantees that the virtues chosen will be those the school already happens to produce, which is a description of the status quo dressed as a formative aim. Arthur’s (2013) analysis of curricular de-Catholicising in English Catholic schools suggests how quickly distinctiveness can erode where the label persists but the underlying rationale is not revisited.

8.     Tensions and limits

Convergence is not identity, and three tensions deserve statement rather than concealment.

The first concerns ultimate ends. The Framework’s grounding concept is eudaimonia, flourishing understood as the fulfilment of human potential, and the Centre is explicit that character and virtue are not exclusively religious notions (JCCV, 2022). The 1977 document’s telos is different in kind: life in Christ, a virtue list culminating in the theological virtues, and a conviction that grace, not only habituation, is operative in formation (SCCE, 1977, paras. 47, 84). Arthur (2021, 2024) argues that a Christian account of flourishing is inseparable from God’s active relationship to human beings, so that for Catholics the good life is holiness. A school adopting the Framework wholesale without this correction risks a formation that is coherent but truncated.

The second concerns performance virtues. The Framework subordinates resilience, determination and teamwork to moral and civic ends, but acknowledges that instrumentalist performance virtues have been given disproportionate credence in policy and practice (JCCV, 2022), and the English Department for Education’s guidance, foregrounding resilience and confidence, does little to correct that emphasis (DfE, 2019). The 1977 document is a useful corrective, identifying the school’s task as forming persons against the pressures of materialism, pragmatism and technocracy (SCCE, 1977, para. 12).

The third concerns openness. The document offers the school’s service to all, including non-Christians (para. 85), and the more recent instruction on Catholic identity insists that identity and dialogue are not alternatives (Congregation for Catholic Education, 2022). A shared language of virtue, precisely because it is recognisable across traditions, can serve that dialogue — but only if the school retains the theological account that gives its own virtue language content.

9.     Implications for ongoing teacher formation

If character is largely caught, the single most consequential variable in a Catholic school is the character of its adults. This is the point at which the 1977 document is most demanding and at which current professional formation is weakest.

The document’s argument is one of mediation. The integration of culture and faith, it holds, is mediated by the integration of faith and life in the person of the teacher, who is called to reveal the Christian message not only by word but by every gesture of behaviour; this, it says, is what distinguishes a school whose education is permeated by the Christian spirit from one in which religion is an academic subject like any other (SCCE, 1977, para. 43). Teachers are described as of first importance in imparting a distinctive character to Catholic schools, and the document draws the practical consequence directly, requiring their continuing formation through suitable pastoral provision aimed at animating them as witnesses in the classroom (para. 78). Gravissimum Educationis had gone further still, declaring that the Catholic school depends upon its teachers almost entirely for the accomplishment of its goals, and that they should bear witness by their lives as much as by their instruction (Second Vatican Council, 1965, para. 8).

The Jubilee Centre’s finding is that teachers do not experience themselves this way. The Framework reports that teachers frequently suffer moral ambivalence and a lack of self-confidence in their inescapable position as role models and character educators; that repeated studies show teachers find it difficult to address ethical issues in the classroom; and that the scarcity of teacher education programmes with a coherent approach to character is most likely a consequence of an overly narrow concentration on attainment and classroom management (JCCV, 2022). The Centre’s position is that in order to be a good teacher one needs to become a certain kind of person, and that the character and integrity of the teacher is more fundamental than personality or classroom style and no less important than mastery of subject content. Lapsley and Woodbury (2016) make a parallel case for embedding moral-character development in teacher preparation rather than treating it as an optional specialism.

The implication is that Catholic schools cannot treat character as a matter for a curriculum lead while leaving the staff body to understand itself as a knowledge-transfer profession. Induction should establish that every member of staff is a character educator, a principle ACE builds into its expectations of school leaders (ACE, n.d.-b). Continuing professional development should be doctrinal and philosophical as well as technical, since teachers cannot model a Christian anthropology, they have never been taught; the Jubilee Centre’s statement on teacher education argues for exactly this integration (JCCV, 2015), and its research on the virtues of good teachers offers a vocabulary for professional self-examination (Arthur et al., 2015). Appraisal and recruitment should include character considerations.

There is also a spiritual dimension that a secular framework cannot supply. The document’s requirement of pastoral provision for teachers implies retreat, prayer and theological formation, not only pedagogical training, because the witness it asks for is not a professional competence that can be performed on demand. The growing number of teachers undertaking specialist postgraduate study in character education suggests that sustained formation changes how teachers understand their role rather than merely adding techniques.

10.  Authentic character education in practice

What does provision look like when it is designed rather than retrofitted? The following examples are drawn from documented practice in the United Kingdom and beyond, and are offered not as templates but as illustrations of the principles set out above.

Whole-school design and external scrutiny

The ACE Quality Marks have generated a body of documented whole-school practice. Aylesford School in Kent was among the first four schools nationally to receive the School of Character Quality Mark in 2019, following assessment of culture, ethos and practical examples of character development across the school (Aylesford School, 2019). Wrotham School, awarded the mark in 2022, evidenced in detail how character is caught, sought and taught and underwent a full inspection day; its account notes the value of collaboration with a partner school within its trust (Wrotham School, n.d.). The Charles Dickens School in Broadstairs frames provision around four named virtues — compassion, aspiration, resilience and enthusiasm — and its assistant headteacher was explicit that the work is not character for its own sake but is directed at pupils’ capacity to self-regulate and make good choices (The Charles Dickens School, n.d.). Each case illustrates the design principle: a defined account of the person, a named set of virtues, and provision built to serve them.

Blessed Hugh Faringdon, this author’s school,  is a co-educational Catholic secondary school of around 1,050 pupils, including a sixth form. In September 2025 it received the Association for Character Education’s “School of Character” award, and character formation sits at the centre of how the school describes its own identity, alongside its recent “Outstanding” judgement from the Catholic Schools’ Inspectorate.

The school has set out eight paired character traits that it wants pupils and staff to develop, each explained with a rationale, a supporting quotation, and reflective questions for staff:

• Grateful and Generous
• Attentive and Discerning
• Compassionate and Loving
• Faith-filled and Hopeful
• Eloquent and Truthful
• Learned and Wise
• Curious and Active
• Intentional and Prophetic

Each trait is given a working definition rather than left as an abstract value. “Learned”, for example, is tied explicitly to good teaching and curriculum quality, while “Eloquent” covers speech, writing, music, drama, art and sport, not just verbal fluency. Pupils explain these traits themselves in a short film hosted on the school website, which suggests the framework is used with pupils directly rather than only as a staff-facing document.

Character is developed where it is meaningful and resonates with the whole community. To this end, Blessed Hugh Faringdon School maintains a deeply dialogical relationship with its students. The school runs an annual “What Matters to Me?” survey, sampling roughly a quarter to a third of the student body each year. Results from a recent survey covered pupils’ concerns about war, poverty and mental health, their views on forgiveness, and what they most valued in life (family, friendship, courage and compassion featured highly). These results feed directly into chaplaincy planning, charitable giving, community involvement and other school initiatives, which gives the character programme a feedback loop rather than a fixed, top-down design.

Character education is presented as inseparable from the school’s Catholic mission, expressed in its motto “Nihil Nisi Deo” (Nothing without God). The framework draws on figures such as Pope Benedict XVI, John Henry Newman and C. S. Lewis, and on formal Catholic Social Teaching themes (human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good). The school also links out to the Association for Character Education and to St Mary’s University’s Centre for Catholic Education, indicating an external, research-based grounding for the approach rather than one developed in isolation.

Service and civic virtue

Where Catholic social teaching is taken seriously, service is structured rather than occasional. The Framework’s category of character sought includes school-led and community-led social action, sustained voluntary commitment, and opportunities for pupils to explore their role as active citizens locally and globally (JCCV, 2022). The distinguishing feature of good practice is continuity: a sustained relationship with a particular community partner, with structured reflection before and after, forms different dispositions from an annual fundraising week. This is the practical form of paragraph 58’s requirement that the demands of justice be enacted in the daily life of the school.

Practice Beyond the United Kingdom

Comparable work exists elsewhere in the Catholic sector. The Diocese of Sacramento has implemented the Disciple of Christ, Education in Virtue programme across its elementary schools, a Thomistic curriculum organising virtue instruction around the cardinal and theological virtues (Lapsley & Kelley, 2022). Its significance here is structural rather than curricular: adoption at diocesan level makes formation a matter of system design rather than individual school enthusiasm, which is what the 1977 document envisages when it asks episcopal conferences to translate its principles into concrete programmes (SCCE, 1977, para. 92).

Common Features and Cautions

Three features recur. Provision is explicit and named, so that pupils and staff share a vocabulary; it is embedded in curriculum and relationships rather than confined to assemblies; and it is subject to external scrutiny that functions less as measurement of pupil virtue than as an audit of provision, consistent with both the Framework’s cautions and the 1977 document’s warning against assessing formation by immediate efficiency (JCCV, 2022; SCCE, 1977, para. 84). Two cautions are equally clear. Where virtue language is adopted without theological grounding, it can drift towards the instrumental, and Catholic schools should test their chosen virtues against paragraph 47’s ordering, which places charity at the centre. And where the language of Gospel values is used without explicit teaching, it risks being received as platitude (Lapsley & Kelley, 2022).

11.  Conclusion

The Catholic School was written to state premises for further study rather than to settle the question of Catholic schooling (SCCE, 1977, para. 3). Read almost fifty years later against the literature of contemporary character education, it turns out to have stated premises the movement would independently rediscover: that education is formation of the whole person; that moral formation is a formal task of the school and not a residue; that ethos, curriculum and free personal appropriation are distinct and mutually necessary routes to virtue; that teachers form principally by what they are; that civic and moral virtue are inseparable; and that formation resists short-term measurement.

The conclusion for practice is stronger than mere compatibility. If the 1977 document supplies the criteria of authenticity for a Catholic school, deliberate and reflective formation in virtue is not an optional programme to be adopted if capacity allows; it is an expression of what the document takes a Catholic school to be, the point at which Catholic social teaching becomes practicable, and a commitment that must shape the design of provision from the outset rather than be inferred from it afterwards. It also places a demand on those who teach. What the Catholic tradition adds to the contemporary movement is not a different pedagogy but a different account of the end towards which the pedagogy runs, and it is that account, rather than any particular list of named virtues, that a Catholic school must be most careful to preserve.

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