It is morning at West Kidlington Primary School in Oxfordshire. West Kidlington is an ordinary unassuming suburban village north of Oxford and the pretty, newly-built school is not a mile from Richard Branson’s country house and the airport. The time is 9am. Uniformed children file silently into the assembly hall and are seated in lines.

Headteacher Neil Hawkes starts the assembly, which, like all the others, goes according to official guidelines. There is a song, a talk, and children speak on the weekly theme, which is family. They show photographs and talk about family celebrations. The assembly follows normal practice until they arrive at the element known as “reflection”.

The practice of reflection, rooted in RE, is designed to run through everything the children do, affecting not only their behaviour at school and at home but also the way they approach their school work. RE teacher and personal and social education co-ordinator Linda Heppenstall says that during reflection the children are asked to “think”, with their hands together, not “pray”.

This discipline is a distinctive element which provides a departure from the conventional perception of school assembly as simply an obligation to be got through. It is intended to affect the children’s methods of thinking. The other unusual facet of Kidlington’s assembly is that the week’s theme, like the practice of reflection, is expected to run informally throughout all activities.

Thus during a week with the theme “respect”, children might be invited to hold a door open for someone carrying something, or ask politely for something that might usually be simply taken. Afterwards they would always be thanked for their respectful behaviour.

A recent theme was famous people, with one example Martin Luther King. The talk considered in general terms people who have done things for others, then moved to the exercise of children thinking about people they knew who had done something for someone else. The subject was the focus of the silent, contemplative time. “We introduce the idea of stillness”, says Miss Heppenstall, “and the idea that it is not inertia.” Neil Hawkes says even nursery-age children be asked to “go and think about that for a moment” when in class. “They may come back with an answer,” he says, “or they may quietly resolve something for themselves. It’s an invaluable practice.”

Having thought upon the theme of doing things for other people, a child came to Miss Heppenstall and said, “I was thinking about the children who wrote to my mum in hospital.” That child then wrote to thank them. PTA member Mrs Jordan says that, during the same week, her son came home each night and asked what he could do to help. “It only lasted a week,” she admits, but she believes “it will have stayed in his consciousness somewhere.” The intention is that the ideas contained within RE should operate throughout the time-table. Episodes like this show it to have practical results.

For Neil Hawkes this is critically important. “Spiritual awakening is coming about in everybody,” he says. He speaks very positively about the idea of reflection. “We’re trying to get them to look at themselves,” he says, “society does not enable you to do that: it’s all to do with gratification. We’re looking for balance.”

Mr Hawkes, a former RE adviser for Buckinghamshire and principal education officer on the Isle of Wight, chose to go back into a school post in order to regain contact with children. He studies aspects of spirituality with a group called Brahma Kumaris outside Oxford, and believes that the practice of reflection is valuable to the whole curriculum as well as to the whole child. A Brahma Kumaris book, Visions of a Better World, published in co-operation with the United Nations, is on display in the school’s front hallway, and the Brahma Kumaris Co-operation in the Classroom schools resource pack is used by several of the teachers. It offers positive messages concerned with world peace and the validity of all peoples and all individuals, and practical examples of values education. “We can encourage the idea in children that they can do something about the world”, says Neil Hawkes.

Mrs Arakelian, parent and voluntary helper, believes some of the consequences of these efforts to be that “the children stop and think a bit more”, and “do things right because they want to do things right”. Extraordinarily, she says, their behaviour is not determined in the conventional way as “a question of how much they can get away with”. Many informal conversations between children are concerned with what you can do and not get caught, but she says this isn’t the case at West Kidlington School. Certainly, a difference commented on by all parents is “how well the children support each other”.

The habit of pausing for reflection can help concentration in all subject areas. Deliberate consideration of a problem before rushing to act upon it has widely-acknowledged benefits - perhaps especially in science and technology. Its primary function, however, is within RE.

Linda Heppenstall speaks of a complicated moral notion discussed by a Year 4 class. “The class presented an assembly on the subject of friendship,” she says. “Then at circle time (class discussion) we talked about it in depth. We asked, who’s your friend? What do you give to your friend? Then we moved on to what a friend would do for you. What if they offered you a cigarette? Would that be a real friend? What if you had to take it to stay friends? Year 4 were able to get into these tricky questions. I’m sure it’s because of the atmosphere of reflection created here.”

For further details of the Brahma Kumaris pack, tel: 01865 343551