P4C (Philosophy for Children)

In an ever-changing world, children’s thinking and communication skills will play a vital part in their future. At Mayflower, we teach P4C, an approach designed to enhance these skills, as well as boost children’s self-esteem and support their academic development. As well as the well-researched impact of P4C on reading, writing and maths attainment, it enables children to think more deeply, develop confidence and patience, enhance their self esteem and become more skilled thinkers and communicators. We want every child at Mayflower to go out into the world as a critical thinker, who can challenge and question ideas insightfully and respectfully.

In a typical P4C session the teacher will share with the class ‘a stimulus’ such as a story, short film, image or object (these link to curriculum topics where appropriate). From this stimulus, the children are supported (with increasing independence) to pose big philosophical questions. Philosophical questions are ones which can have more than one valid point of view, are important in the children’s lives and are open to further questioning and discussing. The children then choose the question they want to discuss and conduct a ‘class enquiry’, where they share their ideas around the question and discuss it. During this enquiry, the teacher supports them to think more deeply about their own opinions and develop their communication and critical skills. Each class from Reception to Year 6 engages in a philosophical enquiry like this bi-weekly, with a focus on developing cycles of enquiries where the children are able to explore more deeply the concepts and topics discussed.

We invite a P4C consultant to the school each year who holds enquiries with different classes to further develop their enquiry skills. We also hold an annual school-wide P4C week, where every child in every class uses the same stimulus to spark their P4C learning. We have begun to incorporate our P4C practise into bi-weekly oracy assemblies for KS2 to further develop pupils’ speaking and listening skills. We also offer half termly P4C parent workshops where parents and carers can see how P4C is taught at Mayflower and have a chance to experience an enquiry for themselves. As of July 2024, Mayflower achieved the SAPERE Gold Award, celebrating our high quality of P4C practice as a school.

Progression Map