P4C is a powerful approach to develop children’s thinking skills, which has been practised in over 60 countries wordwide for 30 years. In independent studies it has been shown to have a significant impact on pupil’s attainment and emotional wellbeing.  A recent EEF study showed that pupils regularly engaging in P4C could boost maths and reading progress by 2 months and for disadvantaged children this jumped to 3 months for maths, 4 months for reading and 2 months for writing. Here is a link to the report https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/philosophy-for-children/

Essentially P4C gets children to think for themselves. It stops them playing the age old game of ‘guess what’s in the teacher’s head’. In P4C the children are given the tools and structures to develop high quality  thinking. This process is facilitated by the teacher, who after some warm-up activities will present a stimulus for thinking e.g. a story, an artefact, a picture, a video clip etc. The children then generate questions that they would like to discuss that are inspired by the stimulus and then vote on the most interesting question. The teacher then facilitates a philosophical dialogue that helps children come to a better reasoned and more deeply thought through answer to the question.  The approach helps children use critical and creative thinking to explore key concepts within the curriculum through a caring and collaborative community of enquiry. Although the techniques and tools of P4C can be infused throughout the whole curriculum within a variety of lessons.

P4C helps pupils accept and respectfully agree or disagree with other viewpoints in a constructive way. It promotes learning to learn and develops children’s emotional development.

Jonathan can lead a variety of P4C packages which include:

* Whole school taster sessions as a two hour twilight

*  Dialogue Works P4C Plus validated course, which are 2 day plus 1 or 2 twilight course.  The sessions should be 4-8 weeks apart to allow teachers to experiment and work with the techniques that are introduced. This is an ideal way to embed P4C in your school’s pedagogical practice. They can also be run as whole school or cluster training sessions.

*  Level 1 SAPERE validated courses which are two-day courses run with the days   ideally being about 4-8 weeks apart.   They can also be run as whole school or cluster   training sessions.

*  Level 1 plus twilights to further extend the skills of teachers who already practice  P4C regularly or who have completed the SAPERE Level 1 course

* Level 2A This is a 2 day SAPERE validated course for P4C leads to deepen their practice and equip them to lead P4C in their school. This course involves some pre-reading and assessed course work.

* P4C Development Days – these follow a whole school training programme and typically involve a range of the following activities: Jonathan facilitating groups of children for teachers to watch and deconstruct practice; working with the P4C lead to plan a strategic action plan for P4C in the school; joint planning sessions with year groups; learning walks to give feedback on school P4C practice; and additional twilights to deepen practice.

Generally speaking schools should view P4C as a 3 year development journey and look at a package of development and support over that time period comprising of a mix of training and development days.