In the European educational landscape, human values have been identified as key constructs, and accordingly promoting children’s understanding of human values has become a main objective of education. Thus, the formation of children’s values is part of the conceptual educational framework of the OECD (2019), of the model of competences for democratic culture proposed by the Council of Europe (2016) and it is also at the core of several European school curricula. To analyse value-related competencies and value-based educational goals, we apply the theory of human values, as developed by Schwartz (1994), which is the most widely researched values framework and has been confirmed in hundreds of studies around the globe. This study is part of the ongoing project “The Formation of Children's Values in School: A Study on Value Development Among Primary School Children in Switzerland and the United Kingdom”, which illuminates how primary schools influence children’s personal value development through variables of the micro- (e.g., Döring et al., 2017), meso- (e.g., Berson & Oreg, 2016), and macro-system they live in (Döring et al., 2016). A qualitative content analysis of the two national education curricula of Switzerland (Lehrplan 21) and the UK (Department of Education, 2014) was conducted to analyse how competencies and value-based educational goals in both curricula reflect theory of human values as proposed by Schwartz. Therefore, we focused on the following two questions: How do the school curricula tie in with empirical evidence of how children’s values develop (grounded in Schwartz’s theory) throughout the primary school years? What commonalities and discrepancies can be found in the national curricula of Switzerland and the UK referred to this theoretical model? The results from the qualitative content analysis of the two curricula and how much they link to Schwartz’ theory (1994) will be presented. While the analysis is ongoing at the point of submission of this abstract, we can report some interesting findings already: Analysing hundreds of value-related sections from the curricula, we found that both highlight values of benevolence, universalism, and self-direction, while there is no reference to hedonism values. Traditional Christian values are much more relevant in the Swiss than in the British curriculum. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first analysis of the value-related con-tent of European school curricula. We discuss this approach’s potential for research with teachers.

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