By REBECCA WALSH
Education Minister Trevor Mallard will launch today a series of seminars aimed at helping incorporate values in schools.
The seminars, to be held around the country over the next five months, are being run in partnership with the Living Values programme and Unesco.
Judy Lawley, director of the Ministry of Education-funded Living Values programme, said schools, parents and the community at large were keen to see "more determined integration" of values education in schools. The 11 seminars would involve local councils, school principals, boards of trustees and parents.
Ms Lawley said the pilot programme, which has been run in 20 private and public schools, indicated schools should survey their community on what values were important. Living Values had designed a survey kit to help schools do that.
"It gets them through the basic process. To survey what they do now and what everyone thinks about values in the school ... It gets them through how to make a school value statement."
She hoped the pilot programme, which aimed to build children with good character by helping school communities identify their values and strategies for promoting them, would be implemented nationwide.
"There is a vicious negative spiral that has been created by the collapse of character development in New Zealand ... The only real solution is to reverse the spiral by a concerted effort to establish an environment whereby all children have the opportunity to develop a character strong enough to resist negative behaviour," she said.
Ms Lawley hoped to get a "mandate from the whole of society," particularly the Government, to enable schools to have the time and resources to spend on developing values in school properly.
Schools get help to set up 'values'
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