David Rowse
Profile
David Rowse is married, with three grown up children, three grandchildren and one great granddaughter. David has been involved in teaching young people about truth, beauty and goodness in both the statutory and voluntary sectors in the UK for over fifty years and is passionate about the need to encourage them to better understand themselves, others, and the strange experience that we call ‘life’ in order to provide some meaning to their sense and sensibility of ‘being’.
David’s own ‘life’ started a few months before the beginning of World War 2 and his early experiences were very much influenced by the deprivations of the post-war period in the UK, but also by religion, which was still a powerful force within society at that time, together with the importance of an extended family within a caring and loving home environment created by parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and neighbourhood friends.
Primary education was provided by a Church of England school, still affiliated to what had originally been a medieval abbey, and secondary education at the local grammar school, which was granted a charter in 1552 by Edward VI and still very much affiliated to the parish church next door.
Further education was provided by the local art school and then regional art college where David was educated in the visual arts and obtained both the Intermediate and National Diploma in Art. He later completed an Art Teacher’s Certificate, a Master’s degree in education, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education Research at the University of Birmingham.
After completing his National Service in Germany as part of the British Army of the Rhine, David successfully applied for a teaching post in Birmingham, UK, where he mainly worked with disadvantaged young people who were experiencing numerous difficulties in their lives. During this period, he taught art, and extended his professional interests into pastoral roles, including co-ordinating Personal, Social and Health Education in a large comprehensive school, then became Head of Year and later Head of Upper School, all in large comprehensive schools located in areas of identified city deprivation.
This was considerably aided by associations with Professor Derek Wright at the University of Leicester and Professor Larry Kohlberg working out of Harvard. David was able to visit Larry in the USA and joined his support team for a brief period at the Theodore Roosevelt High School, in the Bronx, New York, where he had been tasked with improving a failing school.
In 1990 David founded a registered charity called Values Education for Life (VEfL) and utilising his extensive experience and knowledge acquired set out to establish an education program more suited to the needs of disadvantaged adolescents. This resulted in the opening of an independent school in Birmingham, which the students later named the Safe School. The curriculum was focussed on an ethos of values, which included Valuing Education, Self, Others, Mutual Respect, The Environment, Individual and Collective Rights and Individual and Collective Responsibilities. The school was very successful, and an Office for Standards in Education inspection report stated that it was good in all required areas, except for spiritual development, where it was outstanding. Students attending the school described it as being ‘strict but very fair’.
The school attracted considerable attention, and David was awarded The Good Work Award by the Association for Moral Education (AME) for ‘his outstanding contribution to the moral development and well being of many children at risk of exclusion through many diverse initiatives’.
David has continued this work up to the present time whilst also promoting the notion of the importance of ethically based education within the curriculum and ethos of schools. He continues this through his involvement in VEfL as Founder President, his association with the AME and as a member of the steering committee of the newly founded Global Alliance for Value-based Education.
He has no intention of retiring from helping disadvantaged young people to make sense of themselves and their lives in a world which sadly has become increasingly fragmented, frightening, angry and violent.
Conversation Themes
- Early Years Learning: end of WW2, powerful experiences of hate (women’s reactions to German Prisoners of War), fear (school evacuation practice and air raids; corporal punishment), love and compassion (grandmother).
- Influence of Christianity in 1940s and 50s Britain: permeation in daily social life; experience of Christ’s agony in Abbey church, ‘desire for joy’; Sunday School teaching – moral stories and the slightly naughty.
- Grammar School, Further Education and Art College: discovered talent for art: self-expression; print in London collection and book.
- Learning from National Service: eradication of individualism; authority and orders, discipline and functioning of collective unit; absence of discussion or argument; survival; trying to get away with small things.
- Teaching Experience: no initial teacher training or induction; from art teacher to Personal, Social and Health Education and school management; reflections on role of corporal punishment and catechism – saying without understanding and fear of consequences.
- Social Change: cultural localism to globalisation in a short time; old practices of working at or near home, sense of community, sharing and family changed; lack of fairness in life; interest in needs of young people at the margins.
- Practical and Community Learning in a School Context: ‘magic moments’; being a paid helper to students to take responsibility; a community experiment within the school: a separate space for students, skills and personal development in all aspects of story collection, printing, costing, etc of a community newspaper; a creche so mothers could join lessons in school; effects on students.
- Continuing Self-Education: Local Education Authority short courses; Master’s in Education; a sabbatical year; meeting influential people: Harry Stopes-Roe and Humanists, David Ingram, Derek Wright, Larry Kohlberg; visit in 1983-4 to
- Just Community project in Theodore Roosevelt High School, New York; ‘enthused’; description of development with year group in Birmingham UK school; key moments.
- Values Education for Life and the Safe School: motivation for and explanation of the process with excluded students and parents; social contract with the student; democratic group – accountability and responsibility; values, rules and reasons; General Certificate of Secondary Education curriculum, evaluation and inspection; staffing: authenticity, person to person relationships with students, sympathy, engagement, sense of humour; listening to students and feedback; enabling young people to have a better start in adult life and to make a social contribution; accredited teaching modules at undergraduate level.
- Values Education Council of the UK: reflections on its 15-year history (1992-2007); coming into being, roles, membership, meetings, ideas, hard dialogue, frustrations, umbrella label and lack of resonance, some influence, mutual support.
- Association for Moral Education: Good Work Award – recognition of contributions and achievements; long-term regular conference supporter; ‘Mind the Gap’ (Norman Sprinthall, Journal of Moral Education 25th anniversary conference, 1996), theory and practice go hand in hand; lifelong education of self and others.