RITISH schools are flouting the law on political impartiality – so why isn’t the government doing anything about it?
Maybe it’s because the partiality in schools is always left-wing.
By 2020, 32 per cent of self-identified ‘right’ or ‘fairly right’ Britons stopped airing opinions in teaching and research, compared with 13 per cent of centrists and leftists.
By the same year, 73 per cent of British school children had been taught at least one of: ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias’, ‘systemic racism’, ‘patriarchy’ and innumerable genders. A teacher was filmed tasking students with stepping forward in answer to their ‘white privilege’.
That was a crazy year: lockdown, BLM, etc. But in 2022, headteachers told the Guardian of their worries of continuing ‘far-right’ radicalisation among students.
Now, an audio recording has emerged of a teacher in Trafford, Greater Manchester, telling students 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’).
On the same day (a school day!) ten schools in Liverpool bussed about 100 minors to the Labour Party conference to distribute leaflets at the behest of the National Education Union. A teacher lamely claimed it was all the choice of the students.
A NEU representative says that ‘engaging with the democratic system, including taking part in lobbying MPs, or councillors or other elected figures, is a way children can learn about our parliamentary system’.
True, but when a partisan group organises the lobbying, and the lobbying is directed at a particular party’s conference, and the lobbying is for a particular policy, the lobbying seems partial.
The NEU is lobbying for school meals to be provided to all pupils, beyond Keir Starmer’s extension of the entitlement to all recipients of Universal Credit.
The teachers’ actions seem to violate the Education Act (1996), which 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 . . .’...<<<Read More>>>...
