While values play a key role in formal education, as highlighted in policies at European level (Council of Europe (CoE), 2016) as well as worldwide (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2019; The international Group of Seven (G7), 2016; United Nations (UN), 2015) very few empirical studies have collected data from children and their teachers. This gap in research is particularly wide in preschool and early primary school years. The four presentations in this symposium are aiming to help close this gap, analysing data from five-to-eight-year-old children and their teachers across three countries. Schwartz’s (1992) theory of human values with its ten key values of universalism and benevolence (self-transcendence values), achievement and power (self-enhancement values), tradition, conformity, and security (conservation values), and hedonism, stimulation, and self-direction (openness to change values) forms the theoretical framework. This framework has been particularly strong in facilitating approaches to the assessment of children’s values, explaining dynamics of value development and value change in social and educational contexts, and understanding how values direct children’s actions (Döring et al., 2016). Thus, gaining empirical evidence on children`s value development in an early school education has a particular importance for pedagogical practice in an increasingly diverse educational settings where values has been recognized as a pathway to inclusion (Booth & Ainscow, 2002; Booth, 2011).

                  The contribution of the symposium maps the diversity of value research in early school education with particular focus on value transmission in classrooms of three different countries (Switzerland, the UK, and Israel).

Scholz-Kuhn and colleagues are presenting a multi-level study with 952 Swiss children in primary schools, showing how children’s self-reported values of self-transcendence versus self-enhancement and openness to change versus conservation are systematically related to their supportive versus performance and learning-oriented versus disciplined behavior in the classroom as observed by their teachers.

The following presentation by Jones and colleagues gives voice to ten British primary school teachers and applies deductive content analysis as well as inductive thematic analysis to interview data. The emerging themes speak to the different routes to value transmission inside and outside of the classroom and facilitators of value change (see Bardi & Goodwin, 2011), such as identification, adaptation, and priming.

The third presentation by Habermann and colleagues explores data from both countries, Switzerland and the UK and reflects the reality of today’s primary school classrooms in Europe, which is often multilingual. The findings show how children’s value priorities (the importance children give to specific values) are systematically related to language as well as cultural background.

The fourth presentation by Elizarov and colleagues adds data from a new country, Israel, and lowers the age range to kindergarten age. In the same vein as the first presentation, it demonstrates how children’s values predict their prosocial behaviour, but it adds a potential mediating mechanism via social information processing as well as children’s feelings toward school.

The discussion by Döring will review these novel insights in view of children’s developmental background during these early stages of formal education, focusing on how values predict children’s actions and vice versa.

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