Teaching British Values in Our Schools: But Why not Human Rights Values?

Determining exactly what British values' are is a problem with which successive governments have grappled. This article considers in detail the most recent attempt to explicate the meaning of the term through the 2014 fundamental British values (FBV) curriculum guidance for English schools. It suggests that the articulation of FBV included in the guidance conflicts with the United Kingdom's existing international obligations concerning the teaching of human rights values in schools, arguing that the guidance is a threat to such teaching on two levels: (i) it counters the ethical aims of educating about human rights by facilitating potentially subversive or discriminatory interpretation of the values it promotes and (ii) it is likely to perpetuate anti-human rights sentiment by entrenching, or at least doing nothing to challenge, existing misconceptions and misunderstandings of human rights. Human rights values, by contrast, are rooted in universality and the idea of a common humanity. Couching British values in the broader framework of human rights would therefore not only address much of the current anti-human rights sentiment, but would also be likely to contribute to societal cohesion and harmony to a far greater extent than the vague and potentially discriminatory FBV guidance.