Philosophy for Children’ (P4C) programme was developed in the USA in the late 1960’s by Matthew Lipman. While he was teaching Philosophy in Columbia University, he realised that his students lacked basic reasoning skills. It was already too late to develop these skills at the university level and he concluded that formal logic can and should be taught in an earlier stage (Lipman, 1976; 1982). Given the natural curiosity of the students, Lipman designed a school-intervention to support pupils’ thinking. For Lipman (2003) successful thinking involves critical, creative and caring aspects combined with reflection on its own procedures and he believed that P4C encourages and develops these types of thinking. 

Evaluating the impact of this school programme was judged particularly important. Philosophy for Children programme is currently implemented in schools of approximately 60 different countries. According to an Evidence Based Approach in education, the programmes implemented in schools should be trialed for their effectiveness (Coe, 1999). Thus, it is valuable to examine whether the time, the effort and the money spent on the programme can actually have some impact on thinking. Hence, this study is significant because it can contribute towards informed decisions about P4C implementation. 

Recently, a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) investigated the impact of the programme (Gorard, Siddiqui & See, 2015) Students of 48 schools in England participated in the study. The study also examined the impact on disadvantaged students' attainment. This RCT showed positive findings about the impact of the programme on pupils' attainment. 

The study presented in this paper offers an overall evaluation of the programme and it investigates whether this programme is effective and worth implementing in the school classrooms in England. However, the findings of this study can give indicators about the programme effectiveness and they can be useful for schools internationally. 

Having presented the purpose of the study, it is important to present the research questions. The four research questions set are:

a) According to the current published evidence, is P4C effective in improving pupils' skills?

b) Does P4C programme have an impact on the critical thinking of Year 5 students in primary schools in England?

c) Does P4C programme have an impact on the creativity of Year 5 students in primary schools in England?

d) Does P4C have an impact on students’ attainment (reading, writing, Maths) when implented for all the years of primary school (4 years in Key Stage 2)?

Before discussing the methodology, it is important to define critical thinking and creativity, because they are the two main constructs measured in this study (2nd and 3rd research question). Both constructs are defined as subject-independent. Critical thinking definition is based on Ennis (2015) and on a Delphi report and it involves only skills and not dispositions. Critical thinking is operationalised as reasoning (deduction), evaluation of credibility of sources, assumption identification, problem-solving and inference. Creativity definition and  measurement are based on the ideas of Guilford (1967) and Torrance, Ball and Safter (2008). Creativity is defined as fluency, flexibility, innovation, abstractness of title and resistance to premature closure. 

To address the first research question, a systematic literature review was conducted. The main inclusion criteria for the studies in this systematic literature review were the research design and the purpose of the study. For a study to be included in the literature review it should: a) have had an experimental design, quasi-experimental design or at least a research design with a comparison group b) have included the conduct of both pre-test and post-test c) have examined the impact of P4C on one or more skills. After the inclusion of the studies, they were also evaluated based on their trustworthiness. For the second and third research question, a comparative evaluation study was conducted. This quasi-experimental study had a sample of 817 Year 5 students (N=270 for control group and N=547 for intervention group). The intervention was implemented for one school year and the students completed critical thinking assessments at the beginning (pre-test) and at the end (post-test). The study had 10% attrition rate and there was no randomisation within the groups. The performance of of the two groups in the critical thinking skills and creativity were compared and effect sizes were calculated. To address the fourth research question, a secondary data analysis of the National Pupil Database (NPD) was conducted. For this question, national data was used (N= 566,367 students of 14,825 primary schools across England). Specifically, Key Stage 1 data was used as a baseline assessment and Key Stage 2 as a post-test. The skills of Reading, Writing and Maths were examined. Therefore, the scores of students who received P4C all the years of primary school were compared with those that did not receive. An additional variable of 'receiving Free School Meals' (FSM6) was used as indicator of disadvantage.

According to the review results, all evidence showed that P4C has a positive impact on reasoning skills. Some of them were robust evidence and had a follow-up included in their research design. In most studies, P4C was also found to have a positive impact on pupils' literacy. However, the comparative evaluation study found no evidence that P4C has a positive impact on Year 5 students’ critical thinking and creativity. The secondary data analysis showed that students eligible for Free School Meals (disadvantaged students) develop their reading and writing after long-term P4C implementation during Key Stage 2. By combining all the available published evidence, the findings of the comparative evaluation study and the findings of the secondary data analysis, this paper suggests that the implementation of P4C in primary schools is worthwhile, both in its own terms and for its added benefits in terms of developing students' skills. If a school implements P4C it is very likely that this will lead to the improvement of pupils’ reasoning skills, since this is strongly suggested by all international evidence. P4C can improve the literacy of disadvantaged students in the classrooms relative to their peers, and contribute towards closing the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

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