Abstract

In the United Kingdom and other western countries, spiritual and moral development are being used increasingly with reference to general education‐‐albeit with diverse and conflicting interpretations of what education to promote such development means in practice. Despite the similarities, there appears to be something distinctive about what is happening in Britain at education policy level. The first part of this paper looks into this question and in particular at some of the ambiguities relating to the inspection of schools’ educational provisions for spiritual and moral development. The second part proposes a curriculum schema that might be used to give more coherence to a school's plans for promoting the spiritual and moral development of pupils. It includes reference to subjects whose content is directly concerned with the spiritual and moral; to the treatment of spiritual/moral issues in the general curriculum; and to the distinctive contribution that each learning area might be expected to contribute to students’ personal development.