In UK policy, practice and academic discourse, there has been a resurgent interest in character education – a development which can be situated within a wider discourse on the importance of ‘non-cognitive skills’ for individual and societal economic success in the context of the 4^th industrial revolution (Pattaro, 2016; Williamson, 2017). International organisations, including the European Commission, the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank promote and increasingly measure children and young people’s ‘social and emotional skills’, as seen in PISA 2018 (OECD, 2019; see also Zhou, 2016; Chernyshenko, Kankaraš, & Drasgow, 2018). It has been argued that the debate both in the UK as elsewhere is heavily influenced by knowledge from the scientific fields of behavioural economics, cognitive psychology and positive psychology, which are intertwined with political and intellectual agendas promoting a focus on free-market economics and economic growth (see, Allen and Bull, 2018; Burman, 2018).

Simlarly, the rise of ‘personality’ and ‘character’ has been seen as part of a wider biopolitical imperative according to which economic success is dependent on the individual’s ability to improve their psycho-biological make-up in order to maximise their (productive) ‘potential’ (Spohrer and Bailey, 2020). Analysing character education from a morphogenetic perspective, Maccarini (2016) distinguishes between ‘ethical culturalist’ and ‘psycho-economic semantics’, but argues that both increasingly converge in complex societies with their imperative for individual reflexivity.

This paper argues that it is important to examine not only the ‘big picture’ but also enactments of character education in regional and local context. Drawing on empirical research in English secondary schools, as well as national and international policy documents, this paper aims to trace how knowledges surrounding character education mutate and are mobilised as they travel between the international, national and local level.

The analysis presented in this paper is based on an analysis of documents as well as empirical data gathered in English schools. The empirical research was conducted in 2017 in secondary schools in England, both faith-based and non-denominational. Qualitative data from three schools are analysed in this paper, including material from individual interviews with school leaders and teachers and field notes from observations in the participating schools. The data were analysed thematically, before applying a layer of discourse analysis, drawing on Bacchi’ and Goodwin’s (2016) post-structuralist approach to interview analysis with an aim of identifying the rationalities underpinning character education and the techniques and methods used in schools to develop ‘character’. Subsequently, ideas identified in the school contexts were compared with the themes identified in wider public discourses on character and social and emotional skills with a view to mapping the flow of knowledge in discourses of character education.

The notion of instilling discipline and resilience in young people was most prominent in the participants’ accounts, with a less audible aim of shaping good citizens. A strong influence from cognitive and positive psychology on the was identified, however, this type of knowledge amalgamated with religious, moral and military repertoires. Reading the findings against Maccarini’s (2016) two semantics of character education, it was found that while the ‘psycho-economic’ register dominated, ‘moral-culturalist’ semantics were also drawn upon, in particular by teachers and other staff who worked with pupils on a day-to-day basis. Both semantics were also employed concurrently, suggesting that when studying character education on the ground, a more complex picture than previous categorisations of character education approaches emerges. The paper concludes with reflections on silences as well as more of less audible threads in current iterations of character education.

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