Concordia Magazine 2025

meet our high expectations, both academically and in terms of character development. But expectation must also challenge pupils to expect more of themselves and exceed their previous best. Challenge is not a ‘one size fits all’ process. What is challenging for one child is easy for another. For challenge to be meaningful it must be tailored to the individual. That requires a deep knowledge of the pupils. This knowledge is subtly different from that required in the academic classroom. Pastoral interactions are typically more low-key, conversational, one-to-one and speculative. The final word, ‘care’, is crucial as it both underpins and validates all of the previous actions. The pupil must understand that teachers care about him as a person, irrespective of his successes and failures or his faults and talents. He must be certain that he is valued as an end rather than a means, as himself rather than as one of the crowd. To be kind to others, he must first receive an altruistic and unconditional gift of kindness from us.

Young children are not wicked: they simply haven’t arrived at the stage where they make moral choices. As they don’t fully understand the concepts of good or bad they aren’t choosing between them and cannot be categorised as one or the other. In Freudian terms, they are examples of pure id. The id is the animalistic, egocentric essence of humanity. The id seeks personal gratification and is unwilling to wait for it. Only later in life, and not always then, can the id be mediated by the super-ego. This is the moral sense, or instilled conscience, and the tension between the ‘I want’ of the id and the ‘you ought’ of the super-ego creates the self inhabited by a civilised person: our ego. I think this primordial clash within the psyche of every child is one of the reasons I think schools have a duty to engage with the moral as well as the intellectual. We send pupils out into the world half-finished if they have not learnt to overcome themselves, defer gratification and care for others. So, what does good pastoral care in a school look like? For me, it centres on four key words: expectation, challenge, knowledge and care. Our pastoral work helps a pupil

Concordia Winter 2025 5

For challenge to be meaningful it must be tailored to the individual. That requires a deep knowledge of the pupils.