Labour’s new curriculum review has left many of us worried it will lead to dumbing down in England and Wales. Here, Stuart Waiton explains why we have much to learn from the disasters in Scotland.
SCOTTISH UNION FOR EDUCATION
As Scotland slides down the international league table of basic educational standards, and concerns mount about behaviour in schools and the social-justice activism of teachers, the Scottish Union for Education (SUE) has organised a conference ahead of next year’s Scottish Parliament election, Election 2026: Why Scottish Education Matters, on Saturday 15 November in central Glasgow to urge our politicians to put education back on the agenda.
A LEARN-LITTLE CURRICULUM
Sir Nick Gibb, a long-time minister of state for schools in Westminster, will be addressing the conference, explaining how Scotland’s national curriculum, the Curriculum for Excellence – prepared by Labour and implemented 15 years ago by the SNP – is a ‘monument to progressive ideology’, one that has left us with a curriculum where ‘content was absent’.
Journalist and author Joanna Williams, who will also be speaking at the conference, explains that:
‘Scottish education, once the envy of the world, is now failing children as schools employ progressive teaching methods and promote contested political viewpoints rather than subject knowledge. But transformation is possible. Sir Nick Gibb, in his excellent book, Reforming Lessons, shows how a focus on evidence-based approaches to teaching, a knowledge-rich curriculum and orderly classrooms can lead to higher standards.’
Behaviour ‘tsar’ Tom Bennett OBE will also address the conference and raise his concerns about the lack of structure and discipline needed for schools to operate. As Scottish schools become ever more ‘child centred’, Bennett points to the need for rules, manners, sanctions and adult authority to help get things back on track. Perhaps the lack of this disciplined approach in too many schools helps to explain why working-class kids are doing so badly and why the government has failed to close the ‘attainment gap’.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO KNOWLEDGE?
But the conference is not only about the attainment gap. We will also discuss the lack of inspiration and high standards in our schools. For example, English teachers have confirmed to SUE that the Higher (equivalent to the first year of an A-level) in English can be gained without a student reading a single novel!
For SUE, a clear problem with both standards and behaviour is the fact that adult authority in the context of a school can only come from teachers who are experts, who have a depth of knowledge, and who work within an education system that ensures that this knowledge is seen as something that is vital and that must be passed on to the next generation. Authority and authoritative teaching are not based simply on personalities or techniques, they are founded on a will, and a sense of meaning and purpose, established through a passion and understood need to teach children ‘the best that has been thought and said’.
The current knowledge-light curriculum disempowers teachers, degrades their expertise and deprives children of the beauty and brilliance once associated with Scottish education.
IDEOLOGY OVER INSPIRATION
Part of the problem with Scottish schools is the training that is on offer for aspiring teachers. Two years ago, a leading educational theorist explained to me that it would be unlikely that an individual who did not follow the social-justice doctrine of the educational establishment would be allowed to teach. At the time, I wondered to what extent that was true. Subsequently, SUE has heard from several student teachers that failure to adopt this outlook would lead to them being failed. This should come as no surprise, given the General Teaching Council’s open promotion that being a teacher is all about social justice.
Part of this social justice agenda today means that, in theory, every subject should teach ‘anti-racism’ to children. Because concepts from this highly contested ideology, based on critical race theory, are infused throughout the curriculum, Scottish children are being educated about their ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’, or alternatively, their victimhood. Which begs the question, are schools places where a liberal and open discussion about issues is still possible, or have they become places where a new ‘correct’ dogma is given to them? The issue of freedom of thought and speech is one that Fraser Hudghton of the Free Speech Union will be addressing at the conference.
Concerns about a new dogma in schools will also be addressed by the brilliant Marion Calder of For Women Scotland. Helped by LGBT Youth Scotland clubs in schools and the purported ‘anti-bullying’ charity Time for Inclusive Education, transgender ideology continues to be promoted in Scottish schools – despite the UK Supreme Court ruling clarifying the legal definition of ‘woman’ and the doubts cast by the findings of the Cass Review of gender identity services for children and young people. Parents whose children have been socially transitioned (‘transed’) by schools will be with us to discuss what is happening and what we can do to challenge an approach that denies biological reality and potentially harms children.
JOIN US
The debate around next year’s election is a vital opportunity to highlight what is going wrong with Scottish education. But many of the same trends are apparent across the UK. If you believe our children deserve better, please get a ticket and join us on Saturday 15 November.
Stuart Waiton is chair of the Scottish Union for Education. He is a senior lecturer in sociology and criminology, an author and a journalist, with a particular interest in the overregulation and policing of everyday life.
This article (Why Scottish education matters – even if you don’t live in Scotland) was created and published by Academy of Ideas and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Scottish Union for Education
See Related Article Below
How can leftie teachers get away with this blatant indoctrination?
BRUCE NEWSOME
EVEN though teachers are breaking the law on political impartiality, they are now revealed to be teaching that the most popular political party (Reform), newspapers (Daily Mail and the Sun), and views (immigration should be controlled, and arrivals not accommodated in hotels) are ‘far-right’.
How do they get away with it? They seem even encouraged by their immunity to double down.
A month ago, an audio recording emerged of a teacher in Trafford, Greater Manchester, telling pupils that she has been countering protests against asylum hotels, where she saw her opponents ‘using Nazi salutes and throwing very racist abuse towards the people inside’. and using British flags to express racism and to intimidate (even though she claims not to be saying that British flags are ‘inherently racist’).
When a parent visited to complain, the school called the police, who detained him for eight hours. The school eventually apologised.
A few days later, ten schools bussed about 100 minors to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool to distribute leaflets, at the behest of the National Education Union. The NEU was lobbying for school meals to be provided to all pupils, beyond Keir Starmer’s extension of the entitlement to all recipients of Universal Credit. A teacher lamely claimed it was all the choice of the students.
A month on, we learn from a concerned parent that teachers at a chain of academies in England owned by Orion Education are teaching that Reform UK, the most popular party in Britain, is a far-right party, and that some supporters ‘have extremist views’.
A PowerPoint slide plots parties and ideologies on a dimension from left to right. On the far left are communists. On the far right are fascists. Reform UK is plotted slightly to the left of the fascists.
Other slides report that ‘critics’ complain that England’s flag is a ‘provocative and exclusionary symbol used by far-right groups to intimidate immigrants and minorities’.
Further slides warn that newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Sun ‘often publish dramatic headlines about immigration, especially about “small-boat crossings” in the English Channel’.
‘These stories sometimes use words like “flood” or “invasion”, making migrants sound like a threat.’
‘This type of reporting can make people feel afraid or angry, which far-right groups then use to support their arguments.’
The pupils (these slides have been shown to at least Year 10 pupils, aged 14 or 15 years) are instructed to ‘use trusted sites like the BBC, the Guardian [and] Parliament.uk, instead of sites like the Sun, random blogs or YouTube channels’.
Waving national flags and opposing immigration have become the new targets for educators, supplanting whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality. Inevitably, those identities are tied to national flag-waving and opposition to immigration.
By 2020, 73 per cent of British school children had been taught at least one of: ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias’, ‘systemic racism’, ‘patriarchy’ and innumerable genders. I’m betting that by the end of this year, an equal proportion of children will have been taught that Britain’s most popular party and newspapers, and views on immigration and asylum hotels, are far-right.
To remind teachers, local authorities, Ofsted, and the national government: the 1996 Education Act says that ‘the local authority, governing body, and head teacher shall forbid (a) the pursuit of partisan political activity by any of those registered pupils at a maintained school who are junior pupils, and (b) the promotion of partisan political views.’
The latest government guidance on the Act repeatedly warns schools to ‘ensure political impartiality’.
So how do teachers get away with political partiality?
Locally, education authorities are passing complaints back to schools or to Ofsted, which passes complaints back to schools. Schools are investigating themselves.
Parents volunteer as school governors, but schools routinely wait months before filling vacancies while they busily hold meetings without any external oversight.
Schools effectively appoint compliant parent governors by inviting applications before any open call for volunteers.
The school’s and trust’s own staff form the majority on the board, so can always out-vote parents.
When parents don’t gush about whatever the school does, the staff hold meetings without inviting them, or present information too late or vague for consideration, until their term expires or they quit.
Here’s a solution already normative in America. School governance should be open to the public. In some hearings, all attending parents can vote. In some constituencies, school boards must contain equal representation of parents and staff, and must be chaired by a democratically elected commissioner.
Let’s make education democratic again, in both accountability and bias.
This article (How can leftie teachers get away with this blatant indoctrination?) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
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