Values-based interviewing (VBI) is a short, structured interview that tests whether a candidate’s values, behaviours and attitudes fit your school’s. Two trained interviewers ask two or three questions built around your values. Each question asks for a real example, and the interviewers probe that one example in depth. It sits alongside your skills interview, references and checks. It doesn’t replace any of them.
What you’re after is how someone actually behaves, which isn’t always how they say they’d behave. Anyone can learn a good answer to “What does safeguarding mean to you?” It’s much harder to fake your way through honest questions about something you did.
What is a values-based interview?
The approach was developed at the NSPCC. Inquiries into abuse in children’s homes had found that recruitment focused on skills and experience, and the NSPCC went looking for a way to recruit for values instead. In some places it’s called a VBA interview, for values, behaviours and attitudes.
A few things define it. Candidates describe what they did in the past, because past behaviour is a better guide to the future than a hypothetical. The interviewer stays with one example rather than racing through a list. The questions come from your school’s values and fit the role. And two people who’ve been trained to do it carry it out.
Why do schools use values-based interviews?
Partly for safeguarding. The course points to cases of people who went on to abuse children in schools and nurseries and had no previous convictions, so checks alone wouldn’t have stopped them. A DBS check tells you what’s on record. It can’t tell you how someone treats people under pressure, or how they talk about children.
A values interview won’t predict who will abuse a child, and nobody running one claims it will. It can surface attitudes and behaviours that would make someone unsuitable, which a standard interview often misses. It also tells candidates something. A school that puts values and safeguarding at the start of its recruitment is a less comfortable place for anyone hoping to get away with something.
The other reason is fit. On paper, plenty of teachers and leaders look equally qualified. Two primary schools down the road from each other can do the same job for the same age group and still have completely different cultures. If you recruit people who share yours, fewer appointments go wrong. A study at Oxford University Hospitals, described in the course, found staff recruited this way were more engaged with the organisation.
How does a values-based interview work?
Wellington College has used values-based interviewing for over a decade. This is how they run it:
- Shortlisted candidates are sent information about the values interview in advance, because many have never had one.
- The recruiting line manager picks two or three questions from a question bank. Wellington keeps separate banks for teaching, support and management roles.
- Two interviewers run it. One asks and listens, the other takes notes. Good notes matter, because candidates can ask for feedback.
- Afterwards the pair write it up and agree a shared judgement against set criteria.
- That result goes to the decision-making panel alongside the skills and competency interviews.
It applies to every role, from the cleaning team to the head.
What are good values-based interview questions?
A good VBI question asks for a specific time the candidate did something, linked to one of your values. Two examples from the course:
- Tell us about a time when you had to deliver a difficult message or some difficult feedback to a parent or pupil.
- Tell us about a time when you became concerned about the safety or wellbeing of a pupil.
Here are a few more of our own, written as examples. Adapt them to your values and the role:
- Tell us about a time you disagreed with a colleague about how a pupil was being treated. What did you do?
- Tell us about a time you made a mistake at work that affected someone else.
- Tell us about a time you noticed a colleague’s behaviour that didn’t sit right with you.
Now compare those with “What do you understand by safeguarding?” or “How would I know safeguarding mattered in your classroom?” Those test knowledge. A candidate who has read the guidance will give you a cracking answer, and it tells you nothing about what they’d do. If you want to know how people will act, ask for an example of when they did.
How do you probe an answer? The SAFARI model
The question is the easy bit. Most of a values interview happens in the follow-up, and our values-based interviewing course teaches a probing model called SAFARI:
- Situation: tell me about a time when…
- Action: what did you do?
- Feelings: how did you feel at the time?
- Analyse: why did that matter to you? Why did you act as you did?
- Results: what happened, for you and for the others involved?
- Impact: what did you learn, and how have you used it since?
A competency interview usually stops after the first two, and anyone can rehearse those. The last four are where an invented or borrowed example falls apart, because you can’t describe how you felt about something that never happened to you.
Wellington had a candidate for a senior post who gave polished, formulaic answers. Once the interviewers probed, he couldn’t expand on any of his examples. He got irritated and asked what the questions had to do with the job. The rest of the panel had rated him the strongest candidate. A second interview, aimed at the areas the values interview had flagged, led everyone to agree he wasn’t right for the school.
What if the values interview and the panel disagree?
Decide this before it happens, because it will. At Wellington, when someone scores well in the skills interviews but poorly in the values interview, the DSL and the HR director are brought in to look at why. Sometimes the answer is nerves. One young candidate found the process intimidating and was offered a second values interview with different interviewers, which seems fair.
Sometimes the values interview is simply right. In the webinar, Deleth Lynch describes a summer appointment that was rushed, with only two applicants, where the panel overruled a poor values interview that had raised concerns about how the candidate handled conflict. Within the term there were parental complaints and a falling-out with the head of department, and the contract ended at Christmas. It’s always harder to manage someone out than to live with an empty post for a while longer.
How to introduce values-based interviewing in your school
Start with your values, not the questions. If they’re a set of words on the wall in reception that nobody can remember, a values interview has nothing to measure against. Define each value as behaviour: what you want to see when someone lives it, and what you don’t want to see. Build that with your staff. Values written by the senior team on an away day and handed down don’t stick.
Then plan for the practical side, which is where most schools struggle:
- Time to write question banks and scoring criteria, so every panel judges the same way.
- Interviewers with the right skills, proper training, and enough interviews each year to stay sharp.
- A clear owner. At Wellington, HR runs the logistics and the safeguarding team owns the policy.
- A regular review of how it’s going.
Your values also need to carry on after the appointment, into induction, appraisal and everyday conversations. Recruit someone on values and then never mention them again, and you’ve wasted the effort.
None of this replaces the safer recruitment steps in Keeping Children Safe in Education. It’s one more layer, and a good one. You’ll find more on recruiting and leading well on our leadership topic page.
Why and How to Implement Values-Based Interviewing is a recorded webinar for heads, senior leaders, DSLs, HR leads and governors. Kerry, who developed values-based interviewing at the NSPCC, explains where it came from and how to probe with SAFARI. Deleth Lynch, DSL at Wellington College, talks through ten years of running it, including what went wrong and what they changed. See the course.