Awareness of the potential of quality teaching (or teacher excellence in content, knowledge and pedagogy) to impact upon student achievement is an outcome of recent school‐effectiveness research. This research has extended the understanding of the conception of ‘teacher’ beyond surface factual learning to that of induction into learning of intellectual depth, which engages the more sophisticated skills of ‘communicative capacity’ and ‘self‐reflection’. Habermas provides a conceptual framework for this expanded notion through the awareness that knowing extends beyond factual knowledge to the challenge of ‘communicative knowledge’ and ‘self‐reflectivity’. Quality teaching alerts educators to the potential of the role of explicit teaching in values education and, in turn, the capacity of values education to complement and even enhance the learning goals implicit in quality teaching. By this is meant that values education has potential to remind individuals and systems that it is the affective and relational aspects of teaching that ultimately give it its power and positive effect. Data from the Australian Government's Values Education Good Practice Schools project are offered as evidential support for this hypothesis.

This article focuses on the Australian Government’s Values Education Program and, within its context, the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project (VEGPSP) Reports and the Project to Test and Measure the Impact of Values Education on Student Effects and School Ambience, funded federally from 2003 to 2010. Findings demonstrated the capacity of values education, properly implemented, to impact positively on a range of educational goals, emotional, social, moral and academic. On these grounds, it is argued that values education possesses largely unrealized potential to constitute good practice pedagogy. Furthermore, the article underpins these claims with recent insights from the neurosciences that explain in part why values education possesses such potential.

The article explores the research findings of values pedagogy, both Australian and international, and makes application to the need to re-conceive many of the assumptions and foundational theories that underpin teacher education, based on the new insights into learning, human development and student wellbeing that have resulted from these research findings.