Educational Purposes, Principles and Values

Introduction

The Victorian Essential Learning Standards identify essential knowledge, skills and behaviours that will assist students to live fulfilling, productive and responsible lives. These goals are intended to support students to build a future based on:

• Sustainability – developing an understanding of the interaction between social, economic and environmental systems and how to manage them.
• Innovation – developing the skills to solve new problems using a range of different approaches to create unique solutions.
• Building strong communities – by building common purposes and promoting mutual responsibility and trust in a diverse socio-cultural community.

The teaching of these goals are strengthened when it draws on learnings from a range of domains. For example, opportunities for community building can be drawn from domains such as Civics and Citizenship, Interpersonal Development and The Humanities – History.

Principles

A clear set of educational principles which reflects the community's expectations for schooling in Victoria underpins the Victorian Essential Learning Standards.

Specifically, these principles are:

• Learning for all – proceeding on the basis that all students can learn given sufficient time and support, and that good schools and good teaching make a positive difference to student outcomes
• Pursuit of excellence – seeking to accomplish something noteworthy and admirable individually and collectively, and performing at one's best
• Engagement and effort – acknowledging that student ability is only one factor in achievement and that if students work hard and make an effort, their chances of success improves
• Respect for evidence – seeking understanding and truth through structured inquiry and the application of evidence to test and question beliefs
• Openness of mind – being willing to consider a range of different views and consider different ways in which evidence is perceived and solutions can be reached.

Educational principles need to be discussed at the school level with the involvement of the whole school community. These discussions will then determine how best to use the VELS to meet the local community’s expectations and meet the full range of student needs. To have fully implemented the VELS, these principles would be visible in both classroom teaching and whole school processes.

Values

The development of the VELS was based on a set of shared community expectations and values. These values are:

• tolerance and understanding
• respect
• responsibility
• social justice
• excellence
• care
• inclusion and trust
• honesty
• freedom
• being ethical.

These values should underpin the development of curricula in schools and be in-built into teaching programs rather than be the subject of specific, stand-alone teaching or the focus of assessment of individual students.

The structure and content of the VELS also incorporates the shared personal and social values that have been outlined in nationally agreed documents such as the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australian (2008) and the National Framework for Values Education in Australian School (2003).

Related pages:
Values Education and the VELS

School philosophy

Schools are expected to develop an overarching philosophy to guide all aspects of school operation from whole-school policies and programs to day-to-day classroom practices, relationships within the school and relationships with the community and parents. In doing this the school will need to consider the educational purposes and principles and the underlying social values on which their school is based together with the values and purposes of the VELS.

Whole school curriculum planning plays an essential role in enacting this philosophy across the school. This helps to ensure that the knowledge and skills from each domain is adequately covered within the teaching program and integrates learning from all three strands.

For further advice on implementing the VELS and its underlying philosophy please see School Implementation.