We believe that the National Framework for Values in Australian Schools, in its present form, is slightly inconsistent. According to the Framework, it recognises that “in all contexts schools promote, foster and transmit values to all students and that education is as much about building character as it is about equipping students with specific skills”. This is a valid statement, but it appears to contradict the whole idea of a set of nine values. The Framework focuses on and encourages children to adopt a predefined set of values (nine in total), but at the same time wants students to “explore their own, their school’s and their communities’ values”.

While we agree that “schools are not value-free or value-neutral zones of social and educational engagement”, the Framework limits the values taught to nine values that have been defined predominately by politicians. The Values Education Study did involve surveying a range of schools and students about the values that were important to them, it is impossible, in a multicultural society such as Australia’s, to limit the values taught in schools to just nine.

A number of questions need to be asked then. Whose values are actually being represented? And whose values have been excluded? Is it dangerous for the government to limit the values in this way? Would it be wiser to take a more neutral stance and not make any particular value explicit?

The danger here, then, is that if educators adopt a position of moral or cultural relativism, they are demonstrating and justifying a neutral stance that accepts that each culture’s behaviours and norms are relative to that culture. In doing so, the educator may be supporting behaviours and actions that are not only contrary to the culture in which the teacher and students exist in, but are also illegal in the country in which they live in. In which case, the teacher is failing in their responsibility and duty of care to their students.

The Framework states that “individual schools will develop their own approaches to values education in partnership with their local school communities, including students, parents, caregivers, families and teachers”. We believe this individuality and flexibility is an important aspect of teaching values in schools, but feel that by explicitly stating and limiting the values to nine, and declaring them in permanent print on large posters, the Framework does not encourage schools to be creative, innovative and flexible in their values education curriculum.

The case studies show many different ways of implementing the Framework in schools, and those schools that have been creative and innovative have had impressive results. However, the government has been inconsistent with its expectations of the implementation of the Framework. Limiting the values to nine specific values suggests that the government wants them to be taught explicitly, whereas other parts of the Framework document suggest that schools should be creative and flexible, and should encourage students to explore their own values. It is not clear and it is not consistent.

In conclusion, we believe that values education is important in schools, but the real issue is the means by which values education is implemented. Instead of simply telling children what values they should adopt, values education should be about fostering an environment of questioning and learning, where children learn to think for themselves through obtaining evidence, analysing facts and justifying decisions. Schools should be given the freedom to explore values that are culturally, locally and personally relevant to their students. This should be done in both explicit and implicit ways, and this approach should be evident in both the overt and the hidden curriculum.