This is the last SUE newsletter before the summer break, and I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to it so far this year.

Thank you to Cameron Wyllie and Andrew Moulden for their work on Scottish education; to Fotini Hamplová, who has both written for us and had the courage to set up a classical primary school in Edinburgh; and to Gillian Evans for her fantastic work on reading, the end point of which will be our forthcoming pamphlet on Why Reading Matters. You would think it would be obvious that reading matters, but as our expert on libraries Diane Rasmussen has explained, as often as not, indoctrinating ideologies are getting in the way of this most basic part of education.

Thanks also go to regular contributors Linda Murdoch and Jenny Cunningham, who – helped by ScotPAG’s Carolyn Brown – have exposed both the ‘mental health’ madness and the ‘transgender’ ideology that continues to weigh down our schools and the children in them.

A special thank you to Katharine Birbalsingh, who kindly gave up her time for a SUE online conversation, and to Nigel Biggar for his insights into history and the meaning of a civilised liberal education system. And thank you to our copy-editor, to Alex Cameron for his design support and contributions to everything we do, to Simon Knight for the weekly news roundup, and to Graeme Arnott for his thoughtful articles.

There are too many people to mention by name, but hopefully you all know who you are. If you don’t, then perhaps you can do even more for us next term!

Joking aside, I would also like to thank all the parents, grandparents and teachers who have contacted us over the year to let us know about all the good, the bad, and the far too often ugly things that are going on in our schools. This Substack is for you, and hopefully, with your support, we can all help to rebuild an education system that we are proud of and that our children thank us for in the years to come.

I mentioned last week that we have come across some disturbing stories in recent weeks in terms of the way schools work, or don’t work. Some children in Edinburgh, for example, find that their school is unable to teach Higher or Advanced Higher Maths and Physics, meaning that they have to travel around the city to find an appropriate class. These, of course, are children who are in more working-class schools, who find that an hour of their time is wasted on travel, resulting in missing or being late for their other classes.

Worse than this, we have also been informed about schools that celebrate, at least in private, the 60 percent plus additional support needs (ASN) pupils in their care. As the medicalisation of children’s difficulties grows by the year, schools can both potentially get more funding while being able to justify the plummeting exam results. But not to worry, these same schools can and do manage to keep their results looking good by providing an SQA in things like Barista Skills, which, on paper, counts as the equivalent of a National 5 qualification in Maths or Physics.

The old joke about what do you say to a Media Studies graduate – ‘I’ll have a cappuccino and a croissant to go please’ – now takes on a different dimension. Not to denigrate those who work in the service sector but teaching kids how to make coffee and calling this education is about as good an example of the lowering of standards and expectations of children as I can think of. To hide your falling levels of education behind this charade, and for the Scottish government and educational establishment to lay the foundations for it, is unforgivable.

Finally, as we hear about the £200k the SNP government is wasting on ‘anti-racist’ education, I am delighted to introduce Dr Bella d’Abrera, author of a new book that explains in detail how schools in America, Australia and the UK have abandoned traditional knowledge-based education in favour of indoctrination. As ideology replaces openness, history becomes shame, and eco-anxiety replaces any sense of human civilisation and progress, we find that the state is increasingly taking over from the family in the transmission of values.

Everything that SUE supporters and contributors have been reading and writing about since we set up is embodied in this fantastic new book. So, if you want something to read to get you ready for the new term check it out and let’s prepare for another round of education vs indoctrination. At times it may feel like we are banging our heads against a brick wall, but as more and more people expose what is going on it is only a matter of time before this wall comes tumbling down.

Enjoy the summer.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Mindless: how the education system is indoctrinating children and destroying our civilisation

Dr Bella d’Abrera is a historian, author and vocal commentator on education, culture and Western civilisation. After more than a decade at the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia, she and her husband, journalist Fred Pawle, founded Wyborn Press, a new independent publishing house for conservative authors. Her latest book is Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation.

We have arrived at a stage in Western civilisation in which sending our children to school is no longer a guarantee that they will emerge literate, numerate, or with enough knowledge of the world to successfully navigate life. The foundations of education have been deliberately removed from the curriculum and replaced with indoctrination. By the time they finish school in the public education system, your children will not be able to fill out a tax return or recite lines from Shakespeare, but they will certainly be able to lecture you on the patriarchy, systemic racism, the dangers of farting cows, and how to be a transgender ally.

Schools across the West have been transformed from centres of instruction into purveyors of dogma. Teachers are preying on the natural iconoclasm of children to instil in them a range of deranged theories about sex, gender, race and history. These ideas have been de rigueur among university academics for decades and are now the unquestionable orthodoxy on campuses in the West. Our universities are no longer in the business of imparting knowledge.

This is where the rot begins. Almost all future schoolteachers attend university faculties that have comprehensively embraced the new ideology with religious fervour. Critical race theory, queer theory, gender theory, post-colonial theory, critical disability theory, intersectionality, identity politics, decolonisation and ecocentrism now form the basis of the global education system which has been rolled out across the Anglosphere. If you had to design an educational system to wreak maximum damage on generations of people, this would be it, because it is founded on the toxic idea that all of life is defined by an oppressor/oppressed binary.

The new educational establishment has naturally deemed any criticism of this as a ‘far-right’ conspiracy designed to induce moral panic into the UK. The numbers tell us otherwise. In England, 72 per cent of schools are teaching that people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex, 25 per cent are teaching that some people or children ‘may be born in the wrong body’, and 30 per cent are teaching pupils that ‘a person who self identifies as a man or a woman should be treated as a man or woman in all circumstances, even if this does not match their biological sex’.

But it’s not just the raw numbers that reveal the endemic levels of indoctrination in Western schools, it is the type of individual who is emerging into society having had their brains rewired with antiscientific, antirational magical thinking. The system is producing the sort of individual who will hire an angle grinder, don a balaclava, and venture out under the cover of darkness to saw through the ankles of Captain Cook’s bronze likeness in a park in Australia to punish him for being a ‘racist coloniser’. It is producing the type of delusional person who believes that tossing the statue of a Bristol merchant who died 300 years ago into a harbour will put an end to ‘systemic racism’ in the United States.

It is creating legions of young people such as 20-year-old university student Anna Holland, who threw a tin of Heinz soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the understanding that her actions would somehow stop a climate apocalypse. It is a system which produces individuals such as the aptly named Saga, a 19-year-old self-described ‘Black supremacist’, who stood up at her white father’s funeral and accused him of being a ‘racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Trump-loving, cis, straight white man’. It clearly did not occur to Saga that she is the living embodiment of a man who was so utterly devoid of bigotry that he fathered a child with a woman of colour.

This is not how most parents would like their children to turn out. They anticipate that their beloved offspring will eulogise about how big-hearted, rather than bigoted, they were. They do not envisage that their child will grow up to be ignorantly and proudly dismissive of history and all those who have lived before us.

Unfortunately, it is at this juncture that the general public and the education system part ways. Classrooms have been transformed from places of learning into fertile training grounds for future generations of political revolutionaries who are ready to rise up and tear down Western civilisation to make way for the new, improved socialist utopia.

This politicisation is taking place at the hands of a particularly militant set of teachers who believe that their primary duty to society is to be agents of change in a world that they understand to be a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers such as race, sex, gender, disability and cultural background.

When exactly did the Western education system cease being about education? For centuries, the curriculum was classical liberal; this tradition could be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, which established the foundation of grammar, rhetoric and logic. In the Middle Ages, these ideas were coalesced into the seven liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). The later emergence of cathedral schools and early universities led to the creation and adoption of the structured curriculum which has defined Western education for centuries.

In this classical model, the teacher’s role was to transmit knowledge and to form children as virtuous citizens capable of sustaining and renewing society. In substance, an Australian schoolboy in 1960s, Perth still encountered an education recognisably descended from that of a grammar-school boy in nineteenth-century Britain, with its grounding in literature, history and intellectual discipline.

Yet by the 1960s and ’70s, progressive educators increasingly saw this continuity as a problem. To them, reproducing the cultural inheritance of the West was not a virtue but an obstacle. Over the following decades, they dismantled the old curriculum piece by piece. Today, although schools may look architecturally unchanged, what goes on inside is profoundly different. Behind the familiar façades lies a system redesigned to serve ideology rather than knowledge.

The sooner that society wakes up to the fact that the system is no longer what it was, the better. Home schooling is an increasingly popular alternative, but it still represents only a tiny fraction of the system. The establishment is now aggressively promoting its destructive goals. Florida preschool teacher DeDe Duffy, for example, boasts that ‘the only thing these kids r learning from me is (to) be gay’. Her advice to kids whose parents object to this is: ‘fuck your mom’. The system does not take kindly to public criticism and is highly protective of itself. In 2022, mothers and fathers who attempted to discuss the education of their children by speaking out against critical race theory and radical gender theory at board meetings were labelled domestic terrorists by the Biden administration. Herein lies a question central to this book: To whom do children belong? The parent or the system? Naturally, most parents still think that the children they brought into the world are theirs. The system thinks not. As a 2021 Washington Post op ed bluntly argued, ‘Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.’

We have established that there are many forces working to make children anxious in the classroom. In fact, if one were inclined to err on the side of conspiracy, it could almost seem as though the system were deliberately designed to destabilise and weaken. Certainly, there are no metrics suggesting an improvement in skills, a strengthening of mental health, or a firm grasp of enduring principles. Added to all this is the rising tide of mental distress caused by smartphones, which is a troubling development documented by Jonathan Haidt in his aptly titled The Anxious Generation. The data is alarming; the harm being done to young people is beyond imagining. It is not within the remit of this book to explore the full psychological consequences of smartphone and social media use, but in light of this evidence, it is astonishing that some schools still allow personal devices at all, let alone on top of the ideological confusion already overwhelming the classroom.

Education is central to the continuation of Western civilisation because it transmits the collective wisdom, skills and values that allow societies to flourish, innovate, and sustain themselves across generations. However, it may just be that after thousands of years, ours may become the first civilisation which is brought down by what is being taught in schools and universities. A combination of the erosion of critical thinking, abandonment of the pursuit of knowledge, obsession with political activism, high rates of illiteracy and numeracy, and the prioritisation of feelings over fact might well prove fatal for our institutions.

The irony is that the educationalists who have put us on this path claim that it is all in the name of progress. Instead, they are discarding all the technological progress made during the past three centuries, and all the intellectual progress we have made in the past two thousand years. For what? They haven’t fully explained, although I will do so in devastating detail later in this book. The education system is driving our culture towards superstition, division and failure. We cannot let this happen.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/25/why-anti-racist-training-should-have-no-place-in-our-schools/https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/25/why-anti-racist-training-should-have-no-place-in-our-schools/ Bella D’Abrera, Why ‘anti-racist’ training should have no place in our schools. Identity politics is making race the defining feature of young people’s lives. 25/06/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/cash-strapped-snp-government-spend-37331786 David Walker, Cash-strapped SNP Government spend £200k on ‘anti-racism education’ in schools. SNP Education Secretary Mairi McAllan welcomed the substantial spend on hiring 30 educators to ‘conduct anti-racist professional learning’ in schools. 25/06/26

https://news.stv.tv/scotland/single-largest-update-to-curriculum-in-a-decade-to-be-taught-from-august-2028 PA Media, ‘Single largest update’ to curriculum in a decade to be taught from August 2028. Education secretary Màiri McAllan said the changes will ‘drive excellence’ in Scotland’s schools 25/06/26

https://www.scotsman.com/education/watchdog-issues-scathing-critique-of-scottish-governments-pledges-for-post-school-education-8759996 Catriona Stewart, Watchdog issues scathing critique of Scottish government’s pledges for post-school education. 25/06/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/24/the-brighton-clinic-that-defied-the-puberty-blockers-ban/ Adrian Hart, The Brighton clinic that defied the puberty-blockers ban. Trans activists are still doing irreversible damage to children. 24/06/26

https://archive.ph/DKUC0 Helen Puttick, NHS withdraws cartoon of child being given puberty blockers. Campaigners criticised the NHS Lothian funded cartoon, which appeared in a resource for people with learning disabilities. 26/06/26

https://archive.ph/DzVsU Josephine Bartosch, Labour’s conversion therapy bill is not fit for purpose. 25/06/26

https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/baroness-cass-is-wrong-about-the-puberty-blocker-trial/ Sex Matters, Baroness Cass is wrong about the puberty-blocker trial. 24/06/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/john-swinney-humiliated-snp-edinburgh-37353610 David Walker, John Swinney humiliated as SNP Edinburgh councillors defy him and vote to allow men in female toilets. Edinburgh City Council will write to the UK Government to demand that new EHRC guidance which ensures men are banned from women-only spaces is scrapped. 26/06/26

https://archive.ph/2026.06.28-042745/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/media/article/bbc-apology-trans-story-darren-rigby-llq3kdqfn Nick Wallis, What the curious case of Darren Rigby says handout BBC trans coverage. After years of dismissing concerns about its reporting of transgender issues, the corporation has apologised for a story it got badly wrong. 27/06/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

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Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

Co-author, Jenny Cunningham, Why Transgender Ideology Matters: Social engineering and indoctrination in schools.

We are delighted to announce a special free SUE online event on Wednesday 1 July at 7 p.m. to launch our first pamphlet of the year: Why Transgender Ideology Matters: Social engineering and indoctrination in schools. Join Jenny Cunningham and Carolyn Brown in conversation with Stuart Waiton to discuss what is happening in schools and what we can do about it. Tickets are limited, so book yours here today.

From next week we want to report on how some schools are getting around their inability to teach certain subjects, like Higher Maths and Physics, by farming their kids out to other schools. Similarly, we want to look at how schools use the mass number of additional support needs (ASN) children to justify their terrible exam results, while also funnelling pupils into non-academic subjects to keep the statistics looking good while doing little to educate children.

If you have examples of any of these issues, get in touch: info@sue.scot

With so many Progress Pride flags being displayed by so many organizations, this week’s article by Lucy Beney describes the role of libraries in promoting transgender ideology to children. For a wider discussion about this issue, check out the SEEN in Publishing report on children’s trans-themed books.

Just when you thought the dangerous and illiberal dimensions of ‘trans’ ideology was on the wane, it now appears that the SNP are looking at a ‘conversion therapy’ ban, a ban that Claire Methven O’Brien believes will turn Scotland into a twenty-first century Stasi state that criminalised parents who question the ‘gender identity’ of their child.

Promoters of the new law argue that as long as you are ‘non-coercive’, or as long as you question your child in a ‘neutral’ way, everything will be fine. But as Claire points out, who will decide what is non-coercive or neutral? Personally, I’m not sure what neutral actually means in this context, nor do I think it is the state’s job to tell parents to be ‘neutral’ about their child’s fantasy of being ‘born in the wrong body’ or their desire for self-mutilation.

Down south, in Westminster, we also find claims that SNP MSPs are ‘working hand in glove‘ with radical transgender rights activists in a bid to scrap new guidance on protecting women-only spaces.

This is an attempt to overturn or ignore the guidance produced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in response to the Supreme Court ruling that the terms ‘women’ and ‘sex’ refer in law to their biological meanings rather than whatever you say your ‘gender’ is.

However, at the same time we now have a ruling by Scotland’s judge Lady Ross that housing transgender-identifying male prisoners in women’s prisons is unlawful.

While this ruling is to be celebrated, it does highlight the mess that the UK – and indeed much of the Western world – has gotten itself into, that we somehow have ended up with a legal confusion about what a man and a woman is, and need a judge to decide that it is wrong to put male rapists in women’s prisons.

But ignoring that for the moment, we should once again praise the For Women Scotland campaigners for pushing this through and for protecting women. More than that though, we also need to ask what this means for schools, if anything.

Schools are already under pressure to ensure that things like toilets are sex-specific, and like with the prison issue, the battle has largely been won in terms of protecting girls and separating the sexes where they need to be – such as in teenage sports activities. However, despite these successes we are still left with the wider problem of the general embrace, celebration and promotion of transgender ideology in schools.

This is why SUE has produced a pamphlet on this issue entitled, Why Transgender Ideology Matters: Social engineering and indoctrination in schools.

Download pamphlet here.

Here, we find that the ideas and concepts used by transgender rights activists remain embedded in our government’s guidance to schools. Gender identity is discussed as a fact, and schools overwhelmingly teach about self-identification and use activist groups to train staff. There is also a moral pressure on teachers to stay quiet and to comply with policies and practices that are not only highly contested and controversial but that lack any basis in science – and indeed common sense.

Additionally, the use of ideas related to children’s rights also allows schools to use privacy arguments while adopting new names and pronouns for a child without telling their parents that this is happening. On top of this, ideas about safety and bullying are used and abused by activists and schools to develop ‘inclusive’ policies that help to create a ‘progressive’ etiquette or form of caring ‘best practice’ that develops a new values system across schools.

One outrageous result of all this is that schools, pushed by the government, are training teachers across Scotland to counter ‘disinformation’, and of course the disinformation they are talking about is anything the activists decide is ‘hateful’ or ‘far right’ or ‘prejudiced’ – all packaged through the idea of countering extremism, which is anything that doesn’t come with a rainbow or a drag queen attached to it.

Here we find that anything with a whiff of conservatism gets it in the neck, and various problematic organisations are mentioned – including that vile, extremist body of people called parents’ rights groups!

This situation in our schools is unacceptable and unsustainable. For some, what is happening is tantamount to grooming or child abuse. These terms seem harsh, but at the very least we need to be pointing out that this is ideological, and as such, has no place being adopted throughout our schools.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Yeovil Library display

Lucy Beney is a former school counsellor, a member of the Steering Group of Thoughtful Therapists, and currently the Children’s Correspondent for Save Mental Health. Her paper Suffer the children: Why having a ‘mental health professional’ in every school is not the answer, was published last year. She also writes a Substack.

I was very interested to read about Protect & Teach’s experience with Exeter Library, in the excellent article by Professor Diane Rasmussen, in SUE Newsletter No158.

Libraries appear increasingly to be hiding behind a defence of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ to promote subject matter which is highly inappropriate for children and arguably has no place in local government buildings at all. There seems to be no understanding that not all ‘diversity’ is good, and that there are limits to what can be included if child protection and safeguarding are to mean anything.

In addition, libraries – which should, like schools, be fearless disseminators of truth and knowledge – are increasingly peddling ideological viewpoints rather than fact.

In June last year, a timeline spanned the street-level window of Yeovil Library, which outlined the history of the legality of anal sex, starting with the assertion that in the 1500s, ‘Anal sex is illegal and punishable by death under the Buggery Act...’. Various amendments in the law over time were outlined, relating to anal sex and gross indecency.

In this display, highly contested gender ideology was also presented as fact. There was a clear implication that human beings can change sex, which is not possible.

The timeline explained when the first phalloplasty and vaginoplasty surgeries were carried out. These were described as ‘the construction of a penis’ and ‘the construction of a vagina’. This is inaccurate, as it is not possible to ‘construct’ these organs – it is only possible to attempt a cosmetic approximation of these body parts. Such surgery is radical, invasive, and frequently condemns the patient to a lifetime of sterility, sexual dysfunction and ongoing medical treatment, which needless to say, was not mentioned.

Ironically, the timeline mentioned the damaging ‘hormone treatment’ inflicted on code-breaker Alan Turing ‘to reduce his sex drive’ – without explaining that this is the very treatment which gender ideologues would like to see legalised for use on gender-confused children.

The display was accompanied by a selection of books in the window, including Welcome to St Hell – My Trans Teen Misadventure, published by Scholastic in June 2022. This is the work of one Lewis Hancox, whose medical transition from female to male is documented on YouTube. In an episode released on 21st March 2013, entitled Lewis: My Transsexual Summer – Penis Surgery and Relationships, Lewis explains that ‘I’m not that much different down there to a guy who isn’t transgender’, while simultaneously speaking of the final stage of surgery, which is ‘getting implants for your balls’.

All the while, Waterstone’s gushes, ‘Hancox’s trailblazing graphic memoir tracks his younger self’s troubled journey to discovering who he really is’. Evidently nobody was curious or concerned enough to enquire why Lewis ‘hates her body’ or ‘knows she’s confused about who to snog’, even though the supposed ‘healing path’ involved overcoming ‘past trauma, confusion, hurt and dubious fashion choices in order to become the man he was meant to be’.

I wrote a letter of complaint about the display to my own two councillors, one a Conservative and one a Liberal Democrat. I received an automatic out-of-office reply from one, and no reply at all from the other.

I also complained to the county Library Service. Two days later, above the tagline ‘A Fairer, Ambitious Somerset’, I received an anonymous reply. ‘Libraries are not here to promote any particular viewpoint or agenda. We are here to provide information so that individuals can form their own opinions’, it explained.

The reply continued, ‘more broadly, we are proud to be a Council which champions inclusivity and diversity across our communities and contribute to a county where everyone is treated as individuals with dignity and respect’. There was not much dignity or respect in evidence for those who might not wish to have the sexual tastes of others, or the intricacies of genital mutilation, presented to them while returning books or attending a toddler group.

I challenged the Library Service’s entirely inadequate response, explaining how the ‘information’ they were providing was not only inappropriate and inaccurate, but that it was most definitely promoting a particular viewpoint and agenda. I also enquired where the Library Service’s boundaries lie, in providing information ‘so that individuals can form their own opinions’.

I reminded the Library Service that there can be no safeguarding or child protection without discernment and judgement about what is right and wrong, and what is beneficial and harmful, as numerous failings by councils across the country have made plain. While individuals should be treated with dignity and respect, not all ideas, beliefs and behaviour are worthy of ‘respect’. I questioned whether or not the library would, for example, approve a display endorsing slavery, or explaining the ideas of Hitler, or detailing the proclivities of ‘minor-attracted persons’, so that individuals can ‘form their own opinions’.

I then escalated the complaint to Somerset Council’s chief executive and to the leader of the council. The following day, I received a reply from the chief executive’s office, assuring me that my complaint would be investigated. Ten days later, I received their considered response. It came from the ‘Head of Customer Experience and Information Governance’, who had ‘reviewed the materials’ and apparently spoken to both the Head of Libraries and the Chief Executive. Here it is.

‘The Library Service often creates topical window displays, coinciding with related local or national events. On this occasion, the display was timed to coincide with Pride month, which sees a number of Pride events and marches both locally and across the country. The idea of our window displays is to provide library users with information pertaining to the topical event and to encourage those who are keen to learn more to access resources within the library.

‘A key role of the Library Service is to encourage education and learning. We provide information and resources which promote better understanding of a wide range of topics and enable service users to shape their own views and opinions. In order to do this, we aim to be factual and balanced.

‘I am sorry that you feel the recent window display was unsuitable and thank you again for taking the time to provide your feedback’.

Inevitably, my complaint was not upheld. I was given the option of complaining to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, who ‘looks at whether public bodies have followed the right steps when taking action or reaching a decision’. There seemed little point. No doubt Somerset Council were following all the correct procedures and protocols.

I confirmed that I was unsurprised by their decision, as we are living in a society which has lost any sort of moral or ethical compass and seemingly has no understanding of child development – or indeed respect for the wellbeing of children. I noted that in their reply, Somerset Council, despite a claim to being ‘factual and balanced’, did not even address the suitability for children of the display in question – clear evidence, for me, that children come low down on the council’s list of priorities.

At the time, however, the council’s own website stated that ‘the library is a great place for children, whatever their age. No one is too young for library membership’. It also declared that ‘schools, preschools and leaders of groups like the Brownies or Scouts can arrange to bring a class or group to the library’. A similar message remains on the website today.

There is currently a section on ‘Library spaces and support for teens’ too, which assures us that ‘libraries are safe places to meet friends, get support when you need it, and discover opportunities to learn, create and try new things in your local community’. Like what, exactly? Children can use computers, and there is ‘a filtering system to block inappropriate sites’. This protection evidently does not extend to the libraries’ own displays.

As the last SUE newsletter states, ‘the LGBTQ+ inclusion argument is used extensively by librarians and their professional bodies’. This should come as no surprise, given that the 2021 Census found that librarians are ‘among the professions with the most staff who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual’. It appears that the personal predilections of library staff may be influencing library policy, rather than the needs of the local community.

As a school counsellor, and in private practice, I have worked with many children whose depression, anxiety or gender confusion is deeply rooted in early sexualisation and the demands of identity politics to acquire a ‘label’ from the ever-growing menu of fantasy genders and sexualities. It is not for librarians and public officials to push their agenda of unlimited ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ at the expense of childhood innocence and teenagers’ peace of mind. What the ‘sex positive’ find titillating, too often children find terrifying. This has lasting consequences.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/BGxQg Alice ter Haar, ‘I went to private school, but don’t call me privileged’ 11/06/26

Joanna Williams

Has Bridget Phillipson belatedly realised she’s a Conservative?

The Education Secretary is getting tough on overprotective parents. ‘Coddling children won’t help them – it just leaves them less able to cope with the world we are preparing them for,’ she has warned mums and dads. Children, Bridget Phillipson has declared, need fewer lifts to school in the car, and more bike rides with fr…

Read more

2 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Joanna Williams

Joanna Williams, Has Bridget Phillipson belatedly realised she’s a Conservative? The Education Secretary’s shout out for traditional parenting is a refreshing departure from her track record – but I’m not celebrating 12/06/26

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15908455/In-past-idea-just-talking-child-land-you-JAIL-unthinkable-threat-REAL.html Claire Methven O’Brien, In the past, the idea that just talking to your own child might land you in JAIL would have been unthinkable. Now, it’s a threat that is all too REAL… 17/06/26

SEEN in Publishing

Through the Looking Glass: trans activism in children’s literature and library services

Through the Looking Glass, a report by SEEN in Publishing, Transgender Trend and Biology in Medicine, will be formally presented in a House of Lords committee room at the invitation of Baroness Jenkin of Kennington at 4 pm today…

Read more

2 months ago · 89 likes · 12 comments · SEEN in Publishing

SEEN in Publishing, Through the Looking Glass: trans activism in children’s literature and library services. A new report by SEEN in Publishing, Transgender Trend and Biology in Medicine describes the capture of children’s publishing and library services by trans activism 17/06/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/17/starmers-social-media-ban-will-do-huge-harm-to-young-people/ Emma Gilland, Starmer’s social-media ban will do huge harm to young people. Children and teenagers need more freedom, not less. 17/06/26

Reality’s Last Stand

Britain’s Study of Puberty Blockers Will Mostly Be a Pointless Waste

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2 months ago · 57 likes · 3 comments · Benjamin Ryan

Benjamin Ryan, Britain’s Study of Puberty Blockers Will Mostly Be a Pointless Waste. The study’s leaders have announced it will proceed after all. But absent a planned 2nd phase to study cross-sex hormones, the trial is likely to amount to not much more than a $14 million cash sink. 19/06/26

https://archive.ph/R9pnO Joanna Williams, The BBC’s kids’ shows are worse than what’s on YouTube 20/06/26

Helen Saxby, Whose Rights Are They Anyway? There is a strange argument from trans activists: that women don’t have ‘sex-based rights’ at all. 08/06/26

https://archive.ph/ZoJq3 Catriona Stewart, Exclusive:It would take 20 years of radical change to improve Scottish schools, education expert says. Professor Lindsay Paterson gave a coruscating summary of the damage to Scottish education and said the system would take two decades to repair 21/06/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

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Why transgender ideology matters: Social engineering & indoctrination in schools

What is SUE’s motivation for producing this pamphlet, as part of a series looking at failures in Scottish education?

In the Forward to the pamphlet, Penny Lewis argues that Scottish education is being used as a tool of indoctrination.

There is no subject area in which the process of indoctrination in Scottish schools is more clearly expressed than on the question of gender. Many teachers and pupils do not accept transgender ideology. They do not subscribe to the idea that a child can be ‘born in the wrong body’ or that men can choose to use women’s toilets if they ‘identify’ as a woman.

Nevertheless, Scottish government policy insists that teachers and pupils participate in ‘transgender fiction’. This can be through teachers ‘socially transitioning’ a child or adolescent who claims to be the opposite gender (sex) or no gender – following government guidance on supporting ‘transgender’ pupils and unquestioningly using their preferred name and pronouns; or through the presentation of a transgender identity as reality: referring to ‘trans children’ in Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) Education; and the celebration of adult transgender (transsexual) role models and icons in LGBT Inclusive Education.

Transgender activists know that most adults and parents do not buy the notion that you can change into a ‘trans’ individual through the administration of hormones (puberty blockers and cross sex hormones) and by having mastectomies or being castrated – in order to pass as the opposite sex. So activists direct their gender ideology towards children (particularly vulnerable children, with mental health conditions, autism and social problems, for example) and towards adolescents, who are susceptible to social contagions (like anorexia or self-harming – and now the social craze of gender transitioning).

The Scottish government are culpable for facilitating social transitioning, which almost invariably leads to minors seeking medical gender transitioning; for opening up schools to the direct influence of LGBT Youth Scotland; and for saturating the curriculum with gender ideology through LGBT Inclusive Education. It has framed its guidance on supporting ‘trans’ pupils, LGBT Inclusive Education and RSHP Education in terms of ‘children’s rights’ – a cover for following an activist adult agenda.

Lewis points out that the embedding of transgender ideology in the curriculum and the promotion of social transitioning in schools (often without parents’ knowledge) has had a ‘disastrous impact’ on the relationships between parents and schools. SUE’s ambitions for the pamphlet are to make parents more aware of the dangers facing their children and to strengthen the resolve of parents and concerned education staff to challenge government-led transgender indoctrination.

Chapters

1. Invoking ‘children’s rights’ & eroding parental authority

2. When peddling a lie causes harm to all and undermines our education system

3. Revised government guidance: time for educational professionals to start exercising judgement

4. Pernicious puberty blocker trial: social contagion is at the root of a medical scandal

5. Time for Inclusive Education (TIE): implementing LGBT Inclusive Education & insulating it from criticism and parental concern

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Please forward the pamphlet on to people in your network, friends and family.

As it’s Pride Month, I thought I might take a look at some of the discussions about this ‘pride’, helped by a great article from Lucy Beney, whose work we have mentioned before. But as we have a month of ‘pride’, I thought I would save this article for next week, while making this one point.

For many people, when they see the Pride flag – or what could be said to be, in reality, the ‘trans’ flag – hanging in their school classrooms, or hoisted on university flagpoles, there is a sense that something is being imposed upon them.

The discussion is often posed in terms of a culture war, and it can feel like one outlook or set of values is pushing out another one.

There is truth to this, but alternatively, we could ask what other forms of pride are there? Or at least, what other types of pride exist within our institutions?

I raise this, because another way of thinking about the rise and rise of this one form of pride, in our schools and educational establishments, is to note that perhaps it is not (or not just) that there is this powerful, lobbying, or forceful form of pride being imposed upon us, but rather that the adoption of the Pride/trans flag, and all the apparent ‘pride’ that goes with it, has emerged because there is nothing else. Or at least, there is nothing else – no sense of pride – among significant sections of the professional class and those who now run our institutions.

If there is some truth to this, we have to ask the question, what has been lost, and why?

With this question in mind, this week’s article is about Nigel Biggar’s book The New Dark Age. Here, Graeme Arnott discusses the book and raises the question about who and what values can replace our (post) modern embrace of the rainbow world.

As it happens, I generally agree with Biggar’s approach that he spelled out in a previous SUE newsletter. But the question of values – and especially the values promoted in our schools – is one that deserves more thought, and Nigel’s book is a great starting point for this discussion.

Before that, and as we are in the process of publishing a pamphlet on reading, I thought it would be worth checking out a recent discussion about why some children are ‘unable to read by secondary school’.

Going back to my previous point, it is noticeable that in this discussion about reading in Glasgow, Councillor Aitken observes that part of the difficulty is that ‘over a quarter [...] of pupils in the city speak English as an additional language’ and that there are ‘175 different languages spoken by pupils in Glasgow’s schools’.

As a big fan of the city of Glasgow, where I lived from almost 20 years, I like the idea that this great city is, or can be, an international city of significance. However, despite the ‘diversity is our greatest strength’ mantra, the point that our ‘betters’ need to get a handle on (and quickly) is that if a city has so many different people and nationalities, it’s important that at some point, and around some key ideas, there is an assimilation or a coming together of people. And this, one would suggest, is not going to happen by enthusiastically waving a rainbow flag.

As the old politically correct poster used to say, ‘Scotland: One Country: Many Cultures’. The reality of course, is that without a cohering set of values, without pride in something other that your own culture, all we will be left with is ‘many cultures’, and no country to speak of.

The solution to the reading problem being offered is to use synthetic phonics, the very system that Scotland turned its back on, and a system that was ‘introduced in England by Michael Gove when he was education secretary’.

It is a highly welcome sign to see that some councils are now recognising the error of their ways and adopting this approach.

To get a better assessment of this change, I asked SUE contributor and reading expert Gillian Evans what she thought. This is what she had to say:

‘The most revealing aspect of this story is not that Glasgow has discovered some children are reaching secondary school unable to read. The more important question is why Scotland’s education system failed to identify and address these difficulties much earlier. In reality, Glasgow is not ahead of the curve, it is 30 years behind it!

‘The proposal to introduce systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) across Glasgow schools should be welcomed, but it is important to recognise that SSP is not a new discovery. Scotland was one of the pioneers of modern systematic synthetic phonics through the work of researchers such as Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson more than 25 years ago. The Clackmannanshire Study provided some of the strongest evidence in the world for the effectiveness of SSP. The issue has never been a lack of evidence. The issue has been the inconsistent implementation of that evidence across Scottish education.

‘Glasgow is considering creating a register of children who cannot read. However, if Scotland’s assessment system routinely measured and reported reading attainment in a meaningful way, such a register would already exist.

‘The Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSA) do not provide parents, schools or policy-makers with a clear measure of reading age. As a result, pupils can progress through the system without anyone having a transparent understanding of whether they are reading at, above or below age expectations. A separate register of non-readers is effectively an acknowledgement that the current assessment framework is not providing the information needed to identify literacy failure early.

‘A child does not suddenly become a non-reader at the age of 12. Reading difficulties are typically identifiable within the first years of schooling and can often be corrected through timely intervention. When a pupil reaches secondary school unable to read, this represents a failure of identification, monitoring, intervention and accountability.

‘The lesson from Glasgow should therefore not simply be that more phonics is required. The lesson is that Scotland already possessed much of the necessary evidence over two decades ago but failed to ensure its consistent implementation. Future reform must focus on evidence-based instruction, routine monitoring of reading attainment, transparent reporting to parents, and early intervention before literacy difficulties become entrenched.

‘If reading attainment were measured and reported with the same rigour that we expect in public health, schools would not need to create separate registers of non-readers. They would already know who these children are, when they first began to fall behind and what support they needed to catch up.’

It would appear that our ‘progressive’ educators may be learning their lesson on this fundamental question of reading. Perhaps I would suggest that they also set their minds to thinking more broadly about how to create a country that inspires a sense of pride among all of the children, from all of the different backgrounds, about being Scottish and British. Then perhaps, children from different cultures, helped by an education system that actually knows what it is doing, will have a passion and drive to learn to speak, read and write one of the world’s great languages.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Who will win the culture wars?

Graeme Arnott works as a vocational assessor with apprentice electricians. He’s currently reading lots of C. S. Lewis.

Nigel Biggar is an Oxford moral philosopher and theologian who has spent recent years being monstered by the very institutions he spent his career serving. He is therefore not writing about the culture wars from a safe distance. He has been smeared by association, misrepresented, and professionally intimidated by colleagues he naively expected to share a commitment to honest inquiry. His experiences give this book something that purely academic treatments of the subject lack: the authority of testimony.

His central argument is straightforward and, once stated, one difficult to dispute. The culture wars are real. They are not, as some on the Left would have us believe, a distraction manufactured by conservatives to deflect from economic grievance. The culture war is a fundamental clash over our past, our present and our future. And, as such, there are fronts in every institution, every area of life that defines a genuinely healthy civil society. Habits of being are systematically driven out and replaced by ideological enforcement, bad-faith argument, and the professional intimidation of dissenters. The result, Biggar warns, risks a new dark age of conformity and institutional failure ushered in not by fanatics alone but facilitated by the accommodation and acquiescence of those who should know better.

The book is at its most compelling in its personal account of the intellectual vices corroding academic life. Biggar names names and cites chapter and verse. This is a grippingly furious book which makes it difficult to put down. But Biggar’s fury is always controlled fury; and that control makes its reading even more compelling. In one striking chapter, to keep his temperature down, he refers to himself in the third person. It is a small, wry detail that reveals the discipline the book demands of itself and implicitly of its readers.

His constructive response is rooted in the tradition of J. S. Mill. What is needed, Biggar argues, is not less liberalism but better liberalism (an argument that reminded me of the argument made by socialists with regard to the Soviet Union). What is needed, Biggar argues, is a muscular recovery of the intellectual virtues that Mill identified as the foundations of free inquiry: self-control, patience, charity, humility, respect for opponents acting in good faith, and the courage to speak clearly. These are the foundational virtues upon which the entire edifice of academia rests. Without them, the institutions which we depend on for truth-seeking will accelerate their drift toward enforced intellectual conformity.

So far, so compelling. But then there is the book’s subtitle: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars. That subtitle coloured my entire reading of the book. It is a striking formulation from a Conservative peer who has been careful throughout to distinguish between the civility of liberal approach at getting to the truth, and liberalism as ideology. The distinction, that transformation from liberal to liberalism, is highly significant for Biggar’s argument. But it raises a question that the book doesn’t quite answer: if the Millian method and the liberal ideology are as separable as Biggar states, why have liberal institutions so consistently chosen the latter over the former? The universities, the museums, the professional classes are not illiberal outsiders who have captured liberal institutions from outside. They are the liberal establishment, doing what liberal establishments, given sufficient time and autonomy, apparently do. There was no need for liberalism to knock down the castle’s walls because the liberals were on the inside sitting at their desks.

This brings us to the irony, or the fundamental problem, at the heart of the subtitle. The call for liberals to win the culture wars may be less a strategic prescription than an expression of guilt. To ask liberals to cure what liberalism has produced is not unlike asking the Conservative Party to repair the damage of 14 years in government. The diagnosis may be accurate. The diagnostician may be entirely sincere. But the prescribed agents of change have already demonstrated that they were part of the problem. I think the people in this country have had enough of experts, Michael Gove once famously said. It might well be the case that we’ve had enough of liberals too.

This is not a reason to dismiss the book. Quite the opposite. Biggar’s diagnosis is precise, his evidence is carefully marshalled, and his account of the intellectual virtues required for genuine truth-seeking is as clear a statement of what has been lost as you will find anywhere. For those working in Scottish education, in museums, in public institutions of any kind, this book provides both intellectual backbone and practical orientation. It clarifies why isolated battles over curriculum content or open debate feel connected to larger forces: because they are.

Read it for the diagnosis. Read it because Nigel Biggar is a good man who has been treated shoddily. Read it and admire it for the courage it took to write. But when you read it, bear in mind that subtitle. Because if not the liberals, whom?

The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars.
Nigel Biggar, Polity, £20.00

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/oGx72 Josephine Bartosch, Institutional feminism against women. The likes of Julia Gillard and Jess Phillips have enabled misogyny. 31/05/26

https://archive.ph/dKr1q Daniel Sanderson, Murrell ‘trying to protect’ Sturgeon over items dropped in plea deal. Purchases including women’s sportswear and briefs and hair stylers were remov from the indictment before Peter Murrell pleaded guilty in the embezzlement case. 03/06/26

Biology in Medicine

Response to NHS England consultation on cross-sex hormones in children

The NHS is consulting on whether cross sex hormones should be provided to children under 18 years old. The medical evidence so far is that these interventions are harmful, so they are no longer available on the NHS. However, it is still possible to receive a private script for those aged 16 and 17, and there is no restriction on those over 18. Primarily…

Read more

3 months ago · 16 likes · 3 comments · BiologyinMedicine

Biology in Medicine, Response to NHS England consultation on cross-sex hormones in children. Clinical policy for prescribing of masculinising and feminising hormones for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence or dysphoria. 03/06/26

https://archive.ph/gPFKv Joanna Williams, Gareth Southgate has exposed the real crisis young men face in Britain. The toxic masculinity panic gripping our nation ignores the true challenges and lived experiences of white working-class boys 05/06/26

https://archive.ph/aMaVj Janice Turner, Please, don’t bring your whole self to work. 05/06/26

https://news.stv.tv/west-central/some-children-unable-to-read-by-secondary-school-glasgow-councillors-hear Sarah Hilley, Some children ‘unable to read by secondary school’, councillors hear. It comes as Glasgow primary schools are rolling out a new system to ensure every child can read 06/06/26

https://archive.ph/yxgOl Albert Tait, Oxford professor cancels lectures after abuse from pro-trans protesters. Law academic abandons series of talks following interruptions from ‘intimidating’ activists. 07/06/26

Sarah Phillimore, The police have a duty to be impartial. 11 months after victory against Northumbria, we are here again against Wiltshire Police. Of all the organisations we have lost to gender identity, the police are among the most serious casualties. 08/06/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/08/starmers-social-media-ban-is-driven-by-pure-hysteria/ Joanna Williams, Starmer’s social-media ban is driven by pure hysteria. The PM’s crackdown on teens’ social-media use is illiberal, irrational and will have vast unintended consequences. 08/06/26

https://archive.ph/yQwfl Georgia Lambert, Number of children with Send support plans rises 11.6% in a year. The total number of pupils classed as having special educational needs has risen to 1.9 million as ministers promise to overhaul ‘unsustainable’ system. 11/06/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

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Following the verdicts in the case of the murder of Henry Nowak, it is interesting to listen to people attempting to argue that there is not a two-tier form of policing in the UK when there is so much evidence that there is.

Racism is a bad thing. Being against racism is a good thing. That we live in a less racist society is a great thing. And serious surveys suggest that we are, in fact, one of the least racist countries in the world.

However, this is often not the perception.

Find a group of young adults and ask them if they’re racist. You’ll find that none of them are. Then ask them if they think other people are racist and that racism is a big problem in the UK, and they almost all say it is.

When I ask my students this, I point out to them that ‘despite you all stating you’re against racism, you appear to think everyone else is racist!’ I’m stretching the point, but not by much. So, what explains this disparity?

I’ll give you a couple more anecdotes.

When my son was about to start school, I visited the primary’s open day. Here I was informed by the deputy head that part of my five-year-old’s education would include two anti-racism training sessions. I thought this was strange.

Fast forward to high school, and my son’s best friend was a South Asian kid called Sahil. One day I asked my boy where Sahil’s family was from and he was shocked. ‘You can’t ask that Dad,’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s racist!’

A few years later, my daughter took Higher History. She’d already been taught about the trans-Atlantic slave trade and native Americans, and in her final year a major topic was the civil rights movement in America. The teacher was so focused on this issue that half the year was taken up by this topic and much of the rest of the curriculum was never taught, so the pupils had to learn in their own time about the New Deal and other aspects of post-war American history. Not to worry though, of course, because the question on the exam paper was all about the KKK.

Not that any of these subjects are unimportant, but noticeably, throughout her History education, she had heard nothing of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment; in fact, it’s safe to say that the teaching of Western civilisation, or simply British history in the round, was either superficial or non-existent.

Race and racism matter, but when it becomes an obsession we have a problem.

One of the best American sociologists of recent years, Russell Jacoby, talks about multiculturalism and similarly points out that it is not multiculturalism per se that is the issue, it’s the ‘cult’ of it.

The former anti-racist trainer Adrian Hart explains this cult well when talking about how even nursery schools get in on the action. For example, he explains that, Glasgow, nursery schools were sent an anti-racist pack, on the basis that “the earlier you can pick up any tendency towards discriminatory or prejudicial behaviour, the better chance you have of successfully tackling it”. Elsewhere, nursery schools in Kent are training staff in challenging racist statements from toddlers.

As Hart observed, anyone who has concerns or questions about this obsession knows full well that they should keep their thoughts to themselves. Why? Because racism is no longer a matter of politics of debate, or simply of education, it has become the new secular sin.

My son’s anti-racist training started 20 years ago. Hart’s pamphlet The Myth of Racist Kids was written 15 years ago. Since then, as we have noted, anti-racist education in Scotland and across the UK has gone into overdrive.

The implicit condemnation of all things white – or ‘WHITE!’, as Humza Yousaf would say – has become more explicit in the teaching of ‘white privilege’, helped by the Anti-Racism in Education Programme that aims to embed anti-racism in every subject.

Ignore for a moment the moralising and dogmatic quality of this ‘education’, the distortion of history, and the miserable and one-sidedly negative representation of white people and ‘white’ history, and think about what impact this approach has on kids who are not white – some of them at least.

This is a particular problem in inner-city areas and poorer parts of society, although the problem is a general one.

The problem is this. If we treat, for example, black kids as different. If we create generations of teachers who feel the moralised weight of anti-racism on their shoulders. If we teach that all the problems for black people are historical. We then risk creating a culture that cannot hold young black people to account. We fail to hold them to the same standards of behaviour as everybody else. We create a generation of young people who turn into Ali G caricatures, who spit, ‘is it cos ah is black’ or ‘it’s my culture’ or ‘don’t you diss me’, every time you attempt to challenge bad attitudes or actions. In other words, you risk creating a generation of infantilised, glaikit, aggressive victims who often lack basic self-control and at times use violence as a first resort.

Perhaps the best thing written on this matter was a letter by a black Berkeley history professor during the BLM riots in America.

Condemning the one dimensional and often factually inaccurate representation of the policing of black people, he argued that the major problem for young black people was that they were being patronised by ‘progressive’ authorities, constantly portrayed as victims, and as a result, were being educated to blame everybody but themselves for their difficulties. Here is just an excerpt from his letter, but the whole thing is worth a read:

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

He concluded that ‘No message will more surely devastate their futures’.

The tragedy of all of this is that, in my opinion, we not only have a two-tier system of policing in the UK, but also a two-tier system of education. Through it, young people from minority groups are desocialised – brought up in a limited environment, imprisoned in the bigotry of low expectations, patronised and demoralised.

All this is done in the name of anti-racism!

On another, although perhaps strangely connected note, below we have an article about youth unemployment and the role that ‘therapeutic welfarism’ has played in this. Strangely connected, because one could argue that another form of ‘desocialisation’ comes in the form of mental health labels. For far too many young people today, adopting this type of ‘victim’ label is yet another trap that lowers expectations and demoralises so many young adults.

Oh, and as an aside, as well as receiving anti-racist education at the age of five, the deputy head, on my visit to the school, also proudly explained to me that my son would be receiving therapeutic education in the form of regular circle-time talks. What could possibly go wrong...?

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Blame therapeutic welfarism, not the job market, for youth unemployment

Dr Linda Murdoch is a retired Director of Careers at the University of Glasgow.

Alan Milburn’s report makes several worrying observations about the increasing detachment of the young from work, but his conclusions duck laying the blame where it belongs!

Former Health Secretary Alan Milburn was commissioned by the current UK government to lead an independent investigation into the soaring rates of young people who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET). The 220-page interim report, Young People and Work, points out that the number of NEETs has risen to more than one million (the highest it has been in 12 years) and that 60 percent of all NEETs and 45 percent of 24-year-old NEETs have never worked. This rise is costing the UK taxpayer an estimated £125 bn a year. Milburn concludes that the country’s young people have fallen victim to poorer mental health and a changed world of work. Milburn therefore argues that because of these vulnerabilities the government needs to provide less onerous pathways into work.

Today, youth unemployment stands at between 12 and 16 percent, depending on how you calibrate the figures. When I began work as a careers adviser in the early 1980s, in many parts of the UK this figure was 50 percent. Although today far more school-leavers go on to higher education, making it difficult to draw direct comparisons, what is incontestable is that of the one million NEETs, more than 600,000 are classed as ‘not actively looking for work’. In the 1980s, this category was unheard of, as the young had no choice but to take up the offer of a place on the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) or Youth Training Scheme (YTS) or have their Supplementary Benefit of between £14.30 and £20.55 a week (depending on age) withdrawn indefinitely.

The other incontestable change is that today’s NEETs are inclined to claim that mental health problems are stopping them from seeking work. Milburn himself says that those who say they are NEET due to a ‘work-limiting’ health condition such as anxiety, depression or stress has risen by 70 percent. Although the report acknowledges that the welfare state pays disability benefits that are higher than the minimum wage, he resists the obvious conclusion that it is incentivising disability at the expense of taking work. Instead, he says that there are not enough jobs for the young, and that those that do exist are difficult to get or too demanding for this cohort, who appear less resilient than their predecessors.

Milburn ignores the growing evidence that suggests the increasing difficulty employers have in getting many young people to show any kind of commitment or work ethic at all. Many of 705,000 jobs currently being advertised are in shortage areas that do not pay well, such as social care and retail. However, it is also reported that the applicants for these jobs are overwhelmingly from those who originate from non-EU countries. It seems that those who were educated differently, in more traditional cultures, have more of a work ethic than British youth.

The report also ignores the fact that many young people turn up their noses at jobs that only pay the minimum wage, and think that those who take them are mugs, as they can get just as much – or more – by staying at home, particularly if you claim incapacity and disability benefits.

Numerous employers have testified to the low number of applicants or the no-shows for interviews for not only entry-level jobs but also apprenticeships and other training opportunities. Others insist that many young people lack initiative, drive and resilience, and too often cite mental health concerns when faced with the demands of the workplace.

Young people have become increasingly resigned to a view that work is not for them. When asked why they do not accept entry-level or low-paid jobs, many say that they do not want to start a job that they might not like or find too much to cope with. Moreover, many fear coming off benefits only to have to go through the trouble of reapplying for them when the job doesn’t work out for them. They value the sense of security that comes from getting a regular income from benefits without having the responsibility of working for it. As most live at home, parents are increasingly footing the bill.

Compare this outlook to the 1980s, when kids were desperate for any job and embarked on YTSs and YOPs as the only potential way to get one. Being on benefits was a source of shame, and taking training places or jobs, however lowly, provided a sense of dignity.

This is not young people’s fault but a result of the way they are now increasingly socialised into adult life. Education, and its insistence on focusing pupils on their mental health and wellbeing, is a root cause of our failing work ethic.

The current generation of 18- to 24-year-olds is the first full cohort to be educated wholly under the changes made to school education in Scotland through the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), and the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme in the rest of the UK. These policies, which elevated the importance of feelings and competencies over the key foundation of knowledge, were introduced in primary and secondary schools in Scotland in 2005, and a bit later in England and Wales.

These developments are key because their purpose was to ensure that pupils feelings took precedence over their thinking processes. Of course, ‘feelings’ are important facets in a young person’s development, but the change implemented was that they now took precedence over learning facts and other kinds of knowledge. The logical conclusion is that if learning knowledge makes you feel uncomfortable or stressed, then it should be avoided at all costs. As a result, education risks becoming more about validating a pupil’s emotional outlook than about giving them the knowledge-based confidence to go out into the world and make something of themselves.

These developments in the curriculum were underpinned by a cultural change in society whereby psychological fragility was valorised as a more authentic reflection of what makes us human. This ethos of frailty has become a central facet of how young people now understand themselves and the relationships they build with the wider world. This can be seen in how young people often tell you about their ADHD, autism, OCD or anxiety when introducing themselves. In Scottish schools, a record 299,445 pupils are registered with Additional Support Needs (ASN), equating to 43 percent of the total student population – double the figure for 2015. It should be no surprise then that this is reflected in young people’s attitude to work when this is how they are encouraged to view themselves. In education, as in work, personal vulnerabilities have become the primary consideration.

The accommodation to vulnerability is mirrored in the Welfare State.

Most children whose parents already claim child disability benefits go straight on to adult disability benefits, thus increasing the disincentive to work. The largest of these benefits, Personal Independence Payment (PIP) (England and Wales) and Adult Disability Payment (ADP) (Scotland), are awarded solely on the claimant being able to show they have lowered living or mobility functionality, not ability to work. In the majority of cases, these claims do not require verification from a trained clinician.

As there is no requirement to get a job, penalties do not apply to these benefits. Benefit penalties only really apply to those who are actively looking for work and receiving the Jobseeker’s Allowance benefit, the value of which has dropped: in 2010 it was worth £98 per week, but now it is £91 per week.

Not only is it the lowest-paying benefit, but Jobseeker’s Allowance, unlike disability benefits, can be stopped if claimants fail to show that they are actively looking for work. Because Jobseeker’s Allowance declines in relative value and comes with the harshest penalties attached, claimants are incentivised to transfer on to incapacity or disability benefits. In short, claimants get more money for not looking for a job. Not only does this valorise not working or looking for work, but there is also a plethora of welfare advisers – including Citizens Advice, Help to Claim, and We are With You, as well as those employed directly by the state (e.g. Social Security Scotland) – who see it as their job to maximise entitlement to benefits, especially if the person is facing sanctions and or financial hardship.

This notion that it pays to claim incapacity and disability benefits, instead of working or looking for work, is supported by a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies report Why has the NEET rate risen?, which suggests that the increase in the numbers in this group is largely due to the rise in applications for health related/no work requirement benefits. Indeed, in most regions of the UK, notably Scotland, this is the only reason for the sharp rise.

Welfarism is incentivising disability at the expense of the work ethic. It has been reported that an 18-year-old who claims the full range of incapacity and disability benefits can get £21,000 (tax free) while the minimum wage for an 18-year-old stands at £22,500 (before tax). That is not to deny that there is a significant lack of decent jobs in the UK; red tape, regulations and high tax rates have led to a lack of good-quality entry job opportunities for the young. However, it begs the real question: that even if there were good jobs, would today’s youth have a work ethic to take them up?

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/cZhjC Josephine Bartosch, Gender self-ID was never the law. Barrister Akua Reindorf KC speaks about the controversial trans guidance the government is so loath to implement. 26/03/26

https://archive.ph/xJu5T Steerpike, Named: The MPs gunning to overturn trans guidance. 03/06/26

https://archive.ph/Gmduf Jenny Lindsay, Anyone who remembers ‘awkward’ adolescence should be alarmed by Greens’ push for ‘conversion therapy’ bill. SNP ministers must be less catastrophically stupid on this issue than they were on gender self-identification. 25/05/26

https://archive.ph/KJMY0 Szu Ping Chan, One in seven university graduates are Neets. Flagship government review says number of economically inactive young people has hit record high. 28/05/26

Saving Culture (from itself)

Island of Strangers: How 'Diversityism' Broke Britain and Why Free Speech Is Now Impossible

Imagine you are living a totally normal life in the United Kingdom. You’ve never been in trouble with the law. One night, you are awoken from your sleep by a loud banging at the door. It’s the police. You are dragged from your home, thrown into a cage in the back of a police van, and taken to the station where you are held for many hours. You have no ph…

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3 months ago · 155 likes · 54 comments · Jenny Holland

Jenny Holland, Island of Strangers: How ‘Diversityism’ Broke Britain and Why Free Speech Is Now Impossible. An excellent, must-read new book from The Free Speech Union’s Dr. Ben Jones. 31/05/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/01/why-does-a-museum-want-to-cancel-its-own-charles-dickens-exhibition/ Sean Walsh, Why does a museum want to cancel its own Charles Dickens exhibition? Britain’s absurdly right-on heritage sector is slowly destroying its raison d’être. 01/06/26

Running the Room

Reclaiming the Classroom: How to Fix Student Behaviour in Australian Schools

I had the pleasure recently of being invited to speak at the CIS, Sydney. Here’s the video of my presentation, plus a panel with the wonderful Manisha Gazula, principal of Marsden Road Primary School. Hosted by the inimitable Blaise Joseph…

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3 months ago · 34 likes · Tom Bennett

Tom Bennett, Reclaiming the Classroom: How to Fix Student Behaviour in Australian Schools. My thoughts at the CIS panel event, Sydney May 2026. 02/06/26

Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Education Needs Humans, Not Just Apps

Responding to: Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn’s appearance on the No Priors podcast…

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3 months ago · 60 likes · 4 comments · Jenna A. Robinson

Jenna Robinson, Education Needs Humans, Not Just Apps. Apps are insufficient to provide students with a rich, comprehensive educational experience, and human and physical elements will always be essential. 02/06/26

Running the Room

Building desired behaviour- new Flemish guidance for schools published.

One of my favourite projects I’ve been involved with recently has been supporting the Flemish Government as it developed new guidance on school behaviour and culture…

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3 months ago · 40 likes · 2 comments · Tom Bennett

Tom Bennett, Building desired behaviour- new Flemish guidance for schools published. A new way to approach behaviour in Flemish schools. 03/06/26

https://www.thetimes.com/article/b98c4ee7-a558-4fa4-99cd-365e574a2fd5?shareToken=ee2b955f755291d95d0605d2d17ea1d3 Marc Horne, Scottish schools must provide single-sex lavatories, judge rules. The judgment that unisex facilities discriminate against girls came in a case brought by the parents of a pupil at East Calder Primary School. 04/06/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/jk-rowling-warning-after-scottish-37249714 Lucinda Cameron, JK Rowling’s school warning after Scottish council loses court case on gender neutral loos. A judge blasted a Scottish council after the parents of a little girl in primary 1 said she didn’t want to use the toilet while boys are there – and told the authority ‘SNP guidance is NOT LAW’. 04/06/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

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Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

If you’re looking for a wee bit of summer stimulation – something to read on the beach and make you feel a little smug that you’re actually educating yourself – you could do worse than pick up a book by Lindsay Paterson called Lessons from Scottish Schools.

We’ll be reviewing the book soon, but before we do that, I thought it would be worth going back to the controversy over the ‘unfair’ Higher Maths exam discussed last week.

To that end, below you will see a detailed article by Andrew Moulden, who explains that ‘Scotland’s retrograde curriculum changes have resulted in more S5 pupils being unprepared for the rigours of the relatively unchanged Higher Maths course’.

The changes being referred to here relate to the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). To get a feel for what he is talking about, I got in touch with a friend of SUE to ask him, as a teacher, what had gone wrong. In particular, I wanted to know about this idea of ‘teaching to the test’ – a term that is often used to suggest that children are, in a sense, taught how to tick the correct boxes without understanding much about what it is they’re ticking. Here is what he said:

We have in Scotland, from primary one to third year of secondary school, what is called a broad education. Unfortunately, despite, or perhaps because of the name, it’s pretty broad but barely education.

Rather than having a tight curriculum that acts as a series of building blocks for kids’ knowledge over the years, the CfE ruined education in Scotland.

It did this by getting rid of structure and recognised achievement levels and expectations. It got rid of an expectation and reality of tests, measurements of progress, and rigour. Without this rigour what happened was that schools and teachers were left largely to themselves, and they had little or no pressure upon them to push children to reach certain benchmarks. So, when it came to teaching them National 5s, where kids do need to actually know something and have to pass something, you’re left with a bunch of children who often know very little.

You can see this in the declining standards in maths, reading and science in Scotland, for example.

The loosening of the curriculum or a disciplined building up of essential bodies of knowledge meant that primary schools were left adrift, and it continues in the first few years of high school. Some schools are better than others, but overall, the system has failed.

Given all of this, nobody is really being held to account and there is little sense of what a structured and purposeful education looks like. The Curriculum for Excellence is vague and meaningless and there is very little that is specific – has your child learned this, achieved that, passed the test and so on. There are no real standards.

Having failed to teach so many children and given them the broad knowledge we would previously have expected, schools are then left with a massive problem – how to get ill-educated children to pass exams!

After failing to teach them anything, they’re suddenly in qualification years and schools are under pressure to help kids who don’t know much to get the grades. So, we teach to the test – and teachers kind of cheat, whether that is allowing coursework done at home, by whom, we don’t really know. By helping with coursework in class and having more qualifications where a pass is achieved by work that is not done under exam or exam equivalent conditions. And we literally teach to the test – train them to pass exams – which can work but doesn’t mean we have well-educated children.

I think teachers are under a lot of pressure and qualifications are increasingly seen in terms of gaining points for the school, ticking the ‘pass’ box by hitting the required numbers, so we work out short cuts to get kids to pass – and that’s all.

In many respects, what is being described here is the takeover by progressive educationalists in Scotland – something that happened in many other countries.

Progressive teachers and senior educationalists hate traditional education and see it as dry old men in worn out suits talking at children, rather than listening to them. Feeding them boring and unnecessary facts rather than being ‘experimental’. From this perspective, talk of children’s rights and pupils as ‘active learners’ replaced structure and authority based on knowledge. Teaching fads and an obsession with technology were rushed in, undermining authoritative expert teachers – the sort of teachers who really know their stuff but aren’t that touchy feely.

This came at a time of New Labour and a growing desire to create citizens in a new way: through schools. And so we ended up with a combination of a push to prioritise social justice education and a demotion of education itself – something the Tories in England attempted, with some success, to limit, but something that was adopted wholeheartedly in Scotland.

What this all means for a subject like maths, as Andrew Moulden explains below, is having to deal with more and more children who lack the knowledge, the building blocks, the facts and figures, and the ability to think, which together enable them to deal with exam questions that don’t fit within the formulaic standard ones they have been trained to expect.

Ironically, it turns out, that disciplined education, hard work, rigour, and – dare one say – a lot of chalk and talk by knowledgeable teachers working within a structured environment with clear expectations, turn out to be exactly what you need to create critical-thinking kids.

Tragically, children in Scotland, having been ill educated for years, are left without a genuine broad education and a deep knowledge of subjects that allows them to think on their feet. For those having to deal with this situation, there is a serious problem. As Andrew Moulden notes, ‘Higher Maths teachers cannot build critical thinking on quicksand’.

A big thank you to Andrew for allowing us to reprint his article. Check out his brilliant website, which aims to be ‘the simplest, clearest, fullest and most rigorous free maths resource for Scottish secondary students’.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Higher Maths: the impossibility of ‘teaching to the test’

Andrew Moulden is a Glasgow-based maths teacher, ex-Principal Teacher and ex-headteacher, who now runs a tutoring centre and is working towards an MSc in Computer Science.

In a BBC article published shortly after the 2026 Higher Maths examination, which provoked a 15,000-signature petition protesting its alleged unfairness, an S5 pupil who hopes to study medicine said that she had felt ‘well prepared’ as she had ‘done four years’ worth of past papers’.

Explaining that she had ‘got really upset’ while sitting the non-calculator Paper 1, the pupil said: ‘I thought I was really prepared, and had the impression that I was over-prepared but it was so different to what I’d done before.’

This pupil’s experience was far from unique, but it drew predictable criticisms, with some teachers pointing to ‘four years’ worth’ of past papers as evidence of a shallow revision strategy. Yet blaming the pupils doesn’t get to the root cause, and in that respect, the petition has something of a point.

Reality vs perception

Objectively, this year’s Higher Maths papers were entirely fair. This has been robustly demonstrated by two separate analyses by Maths.scot (Paper 1) and by the Scottish Mathematical Council (both papers).

Yet subjectively, many candidates were genuinely distressed when faced with Paper 1, saying that they found it ‘totally unrecognisable’ and ‘out of step with every previous paper’.

To understand this situation, we must bridge the chasm between the objective reality and a great many pupils’ subjective experiences.

Teaching to the test

Several commentaries have suggested that ‘teaching to the test’ may be the primary reason for candidates’ ill-preparedness. James McEnaney, writing in the Herald, claimed that ‘a lot of what happens in National 5 and Higher courses is just some version of teaching to the test’.

Likewise, Dr Stuart Waiton, writing in the Scottish Union for Education Newsletter, warned of ‘school education coming to be a relatively unthinking form of teaching to the test’.

The Scottish Mathematical Council hinted similarly: ‘Teachers should embrace clever examination questions which do not mirror routine types but encourage deeper thinking, preparing students with such questions in class whenever possible.’

The true nature of Higher Maths

The Higher Maths Specification, published in 2013 by the Scottish Qualifications Authority and inherited by its successor body, Qualifications Scotland, details the course content, how it should be taught, the structure of the two exam papers, and how pupils should prepare for assessment.

The specification states that the course is intended to provide ‘breadth, challenge and application’, aiming to ‘motivate and challenge candidates’. Pupils should be prepared to ‘think logically, provide justification or proof, and solve problems’, and to ‘communicate mathematical information with complex features’.

Reasoning skills should include ‘analysing a situation’ and ‘explaining why a particular solution is appropriate in a given context’. Approaches to learning and teaching should include ‘solving problems and thinking critically’, as well as ‘explaining thinking, and presenting strategies and solutions to others’.

In respect of the exams, the specification says: ‘Candidates draw on and extend the skills they have learned during the course.’ The papers should ‘provide opportunities for candidates to apply skills in a wide range of situations, some of which may be new’.

With roughly 65% of marks allocated to routine operational skills and 35% dedicated more to reasoning, the exam papers are designed to test higher-order thinking, including some new and unfamiliar contexts, beyond the course content and skills.

Therefore, true ‘teaching to the test’ should mean teaching in such a way that actively prepares students for the actual test, including non-routine questions requiring interpretation, analysis and extension of the taught content.

So what has gone wrong?

The underlying causes of this situation lie not within Higher Maths but in the structural dismantling of Scotland’s previous curricular strength from P1 to S4 over the past two decades.

The Scottish 5–14 curriculum, used from the early 1990s until 2010, was built like a scaffolding system. It split mathematics into clear strands mapped across six strict levels (A to F) with highly specific attainment targets at each level. Progression was gated by teacher judgment backed by a bank of national tests, confirming mastery of each outcome at each level. Because the steps were small and sequential, it was difficult for a student to develop substantial gaps in their knowledge or skills without it being flagged.

Curriculum for Excellence, on the other hand, replaced this tight scaffolding with expansive ‘experiences and outcomes’ and multi-year ‘benchmarks’ that frequently favour generic competencies over specific skills. Progression from P1 to S3 is tracked loosely across broad bands as ‘Developing’, ‘Consolidating’ or ‘Secure’. Under this amorphous framework, a student can easily coast through primary or early secondary education appearing to be ‘on track’ because they have grasped general concepts, while fundamentally lacking mathematical fluency. Without regular diagnostics and interventions, group work and cross-curricular projects can mask significant learning gaps.

Similarly, the one-year National 5 represents a step backwards from the two-year Standard Grade. The Credit paper was unashamedly rigorous, abstract and targeted solely at upper-quartile ability. Passing Credit (grades 1 or 2) meant that you had proven your readiness for Higher Maths.

By contrast, National 5 Maths emphasises algorithmic drilling and predictable question formats. Teaching approaches imported from National 4 or Applications of Maths further compound these factors. Students can comfortably achieve at least grade B at National 5 by picking up accessible marks across a broad, shallow syllabus, despite substantial deficiencies in their knowledge and skills.

In addition, Standard Grade included mandatory ‘investigations’. Students explored open-ended mathematical scenarios by devising conjectures, proving results, communicating findings, and suggesting further avenues of research. At Credit level, this required genuinely deep understanding and helped students develop the emotional and cognitive resilience needed to get stuck but work their way out, providing a far superior foundation for Higher Maths than National 5, where no such rigour exists.

Scotland’s retrograde curriculum changes have resulted in more S5 pupils being unprepared for the rigours of the relatively unchanged Higher Maths course. Teachers, faced with this reality, do their absolute best. They teach the core content and drill their pupils in past paper question types, thereby helping them gain as many routine marks as possible. As a result, because truly strong mathematical foundations are now rarer, students rely heavily on pattern recognition and familiar wording rather than genuine understanding. The moment an exam introduces even slight changes to layout, focus or vocabulary, widespread confusion follows.

Concluding remarks

True ‘teaching to the test’ for Higher Maths would include exactly what the Scottish Mathematical Council says it should: ‘clever examination questions which do not mirror routine types but encourage deeper thinking’.

But Higher Maths teachers cannot build critical thinking on quicksand. The architectural failures of the current curriculum mean that the foundation years (P1 to S4) are no longer designed to build the necessary stamina, deep fluency or problem-solving resilience. When Qualifications Scotland designs an exam that perfectly satisfies the rigorous demands of the Higher specification, they are testing a student body that has been systematically deprived of the structural scaffolding needed to meet it.

What now? If Scotland wants to close the traumatic disconnect between student perception and exam reality, tweaking individual exam papers is not the answer. The solution requires looking backward to move forward. Policymakers must shelve the Hayward proposals, which threaten to further dilute external exams into internal assessments, and inject the systemic rigour of the old 5–14 framework and the unfiltered challenge of Standard Grade Credit back into secondary education.

Until the curriculum is explicitly redesigned to cultivate deep knowledge and mathematical independence over superficial pattern recognition, true ‘teaching to the test’ will remain an impossible task, and thousands more capable, hard-working students will continue to underperform at Higher.

Share Scottish Union for Education

News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/i2gHq Victoria Smith, Women should not have to apologise for their rights. There is nothing cruel about women wanting single-sex spaces 25/05/26

Biology in Medicine

Our letter to the new Secretary of State

The Rt Hon James Murray MP…

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3 months ago · 23 likes · 3 comments · BiologyinMedicine

Biology In Medicine, Our letter to the new Secretary of State. Welcome to Office and Priorities for Evidence-Based Healthcare Communication and Practice 26/05/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/28/how-the-blob-keeps-trans-activism-on-life-support/ Lauren Smith, How the Blob keeps trans activism on life support. Vast sums of taxpayer cash are still being funnelled into NGOs promoting dangerous medical misinformation to kids. 28/05/26

Roots & Wings with Frank Furedi

What is a Moral Crisis?

Policymakers in Britain have finally woken up to the fact that the nation faces a generational crisis. Around one million young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training (NEET). Their number of has grown by 195,000 over the past two years and if present pattern continues the size of this cohort will continue to increase in the ye…

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3 months ago · 27 likes · 1 comment · Frank Furedi

Frank Furedi, What is a Moral Crisis? Why have so many young people have become victims of a culture of low expectations? 01/06/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)

Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

SUE will be publishing three pamphlets over the next few months, including one on reading and one on history. The first pamphlet, however – written by Jenny Cunningham and Carolyn Brown – looks at the continuing promotion of transgender ideology in schools.

Below, we have an introduction to this pamphlet which gives a summary of what is going on.

Usefully, Malcolm Clark has written about this topic on his Substack. As he notes, just when we thought that transgender ideology was on its last legs, we find that the UK government plans to gift £21 million to the LGBTQ+ lobby. More than this, he notes that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has produced their new draft guidance following the UK Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender. The guidance is, however, not without its flaws, and outrageously, the EHRC’s video introducing the guidance neglects to mention the word woman!

Despite Malcolm's concerns, Sex Matters give the new guidance 8/10 and others tend to see the positives. Personally I'm a legal sceptic and tend to think that the law bends to the will of the elites and their prejudices unless they face public pressure to do the right thing.

We will wait to see if the UK parliament approves the EHRC guidance, and if they do, what this will mean for women's spaces and trans ideology.

As Malcolm explains, behind the scenes the many virtuous politicians who have bought into the idea that you can magically become a different gender have been pecking away at the challenges made to the transgender movement. We have, for example, the comedic appointment of transgender rights ally Harriet Harman as the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Women and Girls, while up here in Scotland we have a transgender Green MSP elected to Holyrood proclaiming that he will be pushing for biological men to be allowed to use the women’s toilets in the Scottish parliament.

In Scottish schools, as Jenny explains below, the same old rubbish is being encouraged. Transgender rights activist organisations are still operating in schools and setting the policies, and children – from primary school onwards – are being educated about being transgenderism.

As we have pointed out a number of times, there are no genders, there are only sexes, and there are two of them. There are boys and there are girls. To educate children about ‘being trans’ is not only a lie, but it is harmful to children.

For transgender rights activists, simply saying this is seen as an assault on ‘trans kids’. However, the opposite is true. Educating children about their biological reality is liberating because it means that confused children can be liberated from the identity trap they are being placed in.

All forms of identity activism are a trap of sorts. Viewing yourself primarily as ‘black’, for example, and seeing everything and everyone through this prism inevitably results in you becoming a caricature of yourself and your ‘blackness’.

Adoption of a ‘trans’ identity is arguably even more of a trap, because it demands such an intense inward focus on your own body, your physical existence and being, which makes it difficult and arguably impossible for a ‘trans’ person not to be obsessed by their sense of self and their body and the reaction of everyone around them to their special identity.

Something that should be a simple fact of who you are suddenly becomes everything, and this fact of life becomes life itself. Not only is this extremely boring, but it restricts you from getting out and on in the world outside yourself.

Tragically, promotion of this confused self-absorption is now what passes as enlightened education, and our politicians and educational leaders need to be held to account for what they continue to do to our children.

Rid education of gender ideology and stop medical gender transitioning

Dr Jenny Cunningham is a retired paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for 30 years.

Introduction

Much has changed since the Scottish Union for Education published the pamphlet Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: What’s wrong with government guidance? (2023). [1] This condemned the way in which the government’s document Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools: Guidance for Scottish Schools (2021) became the conduit for introducing gender ideology into education policy and the curriculum. It allowed transgender activist organisations, chiefly LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS), to directly shape policy and enabled LGBTYS to set up pupil groups in schools and ‘advise’ education staff. The Guidance encouraged teachers to socially transition pupils who claimed their ‘gender identity’ was the opposite of their natal sex. Pupils have been allowed to change their name, pronouns and even dress in school – sometimes without their parents being informed. This undoubtedly put many of these children or adolescents on a trajectory towards gender identity services, seeking medical transitioning through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even surgical ‘realignment’ (e.g. mastectomy, castration, and modification of reproductive organs).

The decisive changes included the following.

• On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that the term sex in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex and not gender. This means that female-only facilities, services, and charities, and female categories in sport, should exclude biological men, and the same applies to lesbian relationships and associations.

• In Scotland, a Court of Session decision, a week later, obliged Scottish primary and secondary schools to provide separate toilets for boys and girls.

• The Cass Review on behalf of NHS England (an internationally recognised study, comprising seven systematic reviews) found that there was a ‘very weak’ evidence base for all aspects of paediatric medical gender transitioning. The Review cautioned against the social transitioning of minors. [2] On the basis of the Review, the UK Health Minister banned the prescription of puberty blockers for under-18-year-olds, and NHS Scotland paused the use of both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in those under 18.

• The Cass Review was reinforced and superseded by the US Department of Health and Human Services Review, which found the quality of evidence for paediatric gender transitioning to be ‘very low’. [3]

Rid education of gender ideology and stop medical gender transitioning includes five essays exploring some of the issues encapsulated by these two demands. Four are written by Dr Jenny Cunningham, retired community paediatrician and SUE member, and one by retired depute principal educational psychologist Carolyn Brown.

1. Revised government guidance on supporting transgender pupils in schools: time for educational professionals to start exercising judgement – uses the Scottish government’s revised Guidance on supporting transgender pupils in schools to illustrate that the government has paid lip service to the developments outlined above. It has made some minimal technical changes (associated with single-sex provisions), but the framework of the Guidance is identical to the original LGBTYS prototype, and the content remains the same disingenuous transgender ideology. Educational professionals are urged to apply rational judgement to the Guidance in five key areas: (i) the notion that children and adolescents can have an inner ‘gender identity’ different from their sex; (ii) the unholy marriage between transgender ideology and gender transition medicine; (iii) social transitioning of pupils continues to be encouraged by the Guidance despite Cass pointing out that this is not a neutral act but an intervention; (iv) misrepresentation of statistics supplied by transgender activists; (v) a major vector of gender ideology indoctrination is third-party activists, namely LGBTYS and Time for Inclusive Education (TIE).

2. Time for Inclusive Education (TIE): implementing LGBT Inclusive Education and insulating it from criticism and parental concern – examines the intimate relationship between TIE and the government’s LGBT Inclusive Education. TIE presents itself as a charity addressing ‘homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying’, eliding sexual orientation and transgender identification. It provides resources for teachers and a national professional learning course for all education staff. It has set up a new Digital Discourse Initiative to provide teachers with ‘tools’ to counter online prejudice and disinformation. This raises the following questions: ‘whose prejudices?’ and ‘what disinformation?’ The government and TIE emphasise that parents cannot withdraw their children from LGBT Inclusive Education as it is spread throughout all curricular areas.

3. When peddling a lie causes harm to all and undermines our education system – Carolyn Brown illustrates just how widely the Guidance is being used in schools. All councils refer educational services to the Guidance; a high proportion of schools support self-identification by pupils as ‘trans’ and teach concepts such as gender identity; many use LGBTYS and TIE to provide professional development for staff and for advice on planning and projects. The ‘lie’ at the heart of transgender ideology – that children can be transformed into their preferred gender – is made material through social transitioning. This poses a danger to all children – the individual and those compelled to deny the reality before them. Several pieces of research indicate that adult deception undermines trust between adults and children, provoking insecurity and anxiety; and when deception is normalised, children can adopt antisocial behaviours such as lying and cheating. Trust between schools and parents is being damaged. Brown interviewed two senior educationalists in August 2025, both expressing disquiet about the promotion of gender ideology in schools and the unscientific nature of the Guidance.

4. Invoking ‘children’s rights’ and eroding parental authority – examines the emergence of the ‘children’s rights movement’ from the 1960s and the growing rift between advocates for children who emphasised children’s needs and a movement that pressed for children to have quasi-adult rights. Until children emerge from childhood through development and maturation, they are dependent on adults – primarily their parents. Hence parental rights are inseparable from the interests of children. From the start, the children’s rights movement was oriented towards laws and the courts, especially International Law, for example, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UNCRC has become a vehicle for advancing adult agendas in the name of children’s rights, often at the expense of parental rights. This has been amply demonstrated since the UNCRC has been incorporated into Scottish law. For example, the government has justified the introduction of LGBT Inclusive Education as being UNCRC-compatible. More recently, it has been the basis of the Children (Withdrawal from Religious Education and Amendment of UNCRC Compatibility Duty) (Scotland) Act 2026. Its aim is to assert a child’s right to oppose their parent’s wish to withdraw them from religious education and/or observance.

5. Pernicious puberty blocker trial – social contagion is at the root of a medical scandal – begins with the proposed UK puberty blockers trial as it brings into sharp focus the maleficence of the medical transitioning of minors who are confused or distressed about their gender. The Cass Review argued that puberty blockers should only be prescribed in clinical trials. Numerous critics, including the authors of the US Department of Health and Human Services Review, argue that the trial is scientifically and ethically wrong. There is still a wilful obscuring of which group of transgender-identifying minors are caught up in this medical and ideological snare. The majority of them are adolescents, predominantly teenage girls. The scandal is that this phenomenon has all the characteristics of a social contagion rather than an objective psychiatric condition.

References

1. Scottish Union for Education. 2023. Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: What’s wrong with government guidance. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bei_RpeJHl_-CMjmtOGx-hyPLMS4dK2V/view

2. Cass H. April 2024. The Cass Review: independent review of gender identity services for children and young people. Final report. https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

3. US Department of Health and Human Services. November 2025. Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices. https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/gender-dysphoria-report.pdf

News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/4o6XL Stephen Daisley, Scotland’s parliament is in thrall to transgender activists. 18/05/26

https://archive.ph/FJ3bZ Daniel Sanderson, The private-school past of Green MSP who ‘grew up starving’. Q Manivannan attended an expensive school and university in India before campaigning to be voice for the ‘working class and marginalised’ at Holyrood. 23/05/26

https://www.gbnews.com/news/woke-madness-primary-schoolchildren-white-privilege-education-anti-racism-drive Dan McDonald, Primary schoolchildren told to be mindful of their ‘white privilege’ under education ‘anti-racism’ drive. 18/05/26

https://archive.ph/FGQ1W Paul Sagar, The scandal of two-tier degrees Extra time infantilizes students. 19/05/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/19/labours-conversion-therapy-ban-will-do-untold-harm-to-children/ Bev Jackson, Labour’s ‘conversion therapy’ ban will do untold harm to children. Adults could be criminalised if they question a child who claims to have been ‘born in the wrong body’. 19/05/26

https://archive.ph/BQT5e Geraldine Scott, Single-sex spaces must be based on biological sex, guidance rules. 21/05/26

Malcolm Richard Clark, The Rainbow Thieves Are At it Again. Just when it seemed the LGBTQ+ lobby was in retreat the UK government is set to gift it £21M of taxpayers money. It will now use this to embed trans ideology even deeper in our institutions. 22/05/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)

Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

Voltaire, author of Treatise on Tolerance (1763)

Has the world turned on its head?

I ask this because there are so many words that are used today by ‘right thinking’ people that end up meaning the very opposite.

Such is the case with the word tolerance. I’ve mentioned this before, i.e. that those who emote about how tolerant they are strangely appear to be the most intolerant of people – ‘I’ll tolerate anything. EXCEPT YOUR HATE!’, they scream.

It comes as no surprise then to find out that around a fifth of children and young people surveyed say that they refrain from sharing their political opinions due to fear of being criticised. Worse still, a quarter said they had been asked to stop sharing their views at school.

There are intolerant people on all sides of politics, but I’m guessing that most of this intolerance is coming from people who define themselves as progressive, and of course, tolerant.

An example of this was shared by a young man attending a further education college who explained to me that after the recent election, both of his teachers came into class ‘devastated’ by the supposedly horrifying rise of Reform. It didn’t even occur to them, he noted, that some of the students in the class may have actually voted for these devils!

You don’t have to be a Reform supporter to recognise that something fundamental has changed here.

When I was at school and then college, you may have had an idea about the politics of your teachers, but sharing your political opinions in class was simply seen as unprofessional. Today, it’s like the world has turned on its head, and once again the ‘tolerant’ teachers appear to lack the comprehension or ability to behave as adults who understand their role and the historical expectation of educational neutrality.

Another world-on-its-head thing is sex education. Once, sex education was seen as limited in terms of both the need for it and its scope, but now it has become increasingly vital, it seems, even for very young children. But it is worth bearing in mind that the intolerant people mentioned above are the same people who are seemingly so liberal and tolerant about sex and sex ed. Perhaps they are not all they appear to be?!

Here, for example, we find a planned Labour Party initiative for a ‘summer of sex’ so that kids as young as eight can be taught about sexual pleasure.

It’s seen as pretty uncool to not be relaxed about all things sex today, but you don’t need to be a so-called prude to think this is, at the very least, odd.

In the not-too-distant past, liberal educators who were ‘cool’ about sex tended to express this in terms of allowing kids their space to grow and to experiment and to experience what were called rites of passage. Adults would give moral guidance, but teenagers were expected to have some space to grow up.

Today, the seemingly ‘liberal’ approach to learning about sex – as with every aspect of life – is for self-appointed progressive educators to colonise it with their ideologically informed expertise, to take any guiding role away from parents, and indeed to take away from young people the freedom to navigate their personal lives responsibly in their own way.

Rather than thinking about this summer of sex as some kind of libertarian initiative, it would be more accurate to see this as yet another example of the ‘lanyard’ class intervening and attempting to manage your child’s ‘soul’.

Seen by some as a positive expression of an age of sexual freedom, these types of initiative are produced by individuals, including many professionals, who hate the idea that children, their parents and peer groups can develop their own world of intimacy without their intervention. Freedom for people to create their own culture away from the gaze of the ‘right thinking’ set, is the very last thing they want.

As I wrote in the handbook Teenage Sex: What should schools teach children?:

Through the establishment of relationship education in schools, an area of young people’s lives, which up until recently was left alone, has become both professionalised and problematised. And rather than allow young people to develop their own network of friends to discuss sex and relationships, an attempt is being made to break the ‘power’ of the peer group, and in its place establish a network of teachers, counsellors and health specialists. By replacing peers with professionals, the incredibly important framework that peer groups and friendships provide for young people’s development will potentially be undermined.

Finally, you may have seen the controversy about the recent Higher Maths paper that resulted in a petition with 14,000 signatures of complaint.

At a time when exams are coming to be seen as a traumatising exercise that some see as a form of child abuse, this reaction – and indeed this spontaneous level of complaint – seem, on the surface, to be concerning.

Interestingly, and impressively, some teachers, like Andrew Moulden (check out his website), have come out fighting and have defended the maths questions that some of the pupils found so difficult.

It appears that the wording of some of the questions threw some of those taking the exam. The terms used were, apparently, ‘unrecognisable’ and ‘weird’. But why is this?

SUE, while being big fans of exams and of a knowledge-based education, is also concerned about school education coming to be a relatively unthinking form of teaching to the test. To look into this a little further, I asked a maths teacher with an impressive knowledge of Higher Maths, and this is what she said:

I have no way of testing what follows, but I suspect that this is actually quite a wicked, multi-factorial problem, involving some combination of:

– ‘Higher Maths booklets’ that schools produce being too limited in their scope (lacking challenge).

– Students having weaker vocabulary and lower reading comprehension ability than used to be the case (it is worrying that so many of them were bamboozled by the combination of a standard adjective and a standard noun – ‘linear’ and ‘factor’).

– Lower concentration levels, higher distractibility (due to TikTok, gaming, etc).

– The growth of ‘maths video’ culture (passive rather than active study).

– Teachers, including those on social media, attempting to predict what will be on a paper (students therefore don’t study sufficiently broadly).

– Students looking at answers too quickly when working on maths questions, rather than struggling for some time and in the process developing true resilience (I see this on a daily basis; the capacity for original mathematical ‘creation’ seems to me notably lower than it used to be).

– Insufficiently challenging homework exercises and the growth of short-answer multiple choice homeworks on Google Classroom etc.

– Over-reliance on past papers and under-use of resources that vary in style (e.g. textbooks).

If even half of the above is to some degree valid, then it’s an extremely knotty problem, and one that would require substantial reworking of Scottish education, as it now is, to overcome.

As you can see, the problems we face in education in Scotland are substantial, but they are also resolvable and there are plenty of teachers out there who know what to do and I suspect many attempt to do the right thing even if this means going against the grain.

There is, however, another problem in schools and that is the rapid rise of mental health labels being given to children.

Below, Graeme Arnott has usefully taken a look at some of the most recent evidence about this problem, evidence that the Scottish government and education experts should take a long hard look at.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Does labelling our kids with mental health disorders create the very problem that this process is meant to resolve?

Graeme Arnott works as a vocational assessor with apprentice electricians. He’s currently reading lots of C. S. Lewis.

I’ve just read a review article, published in January 2026 in Nature Reviews Psychology, by Lucy Foulkes and colleagues at the University of Oxford and University of Toronto. The paper is the kind of work that makes you wish certain people in government had read it before they acted, rather than after. I am not a psychologist, but I know something about competence, and I recognise it – and its absence – when I see it. And the question I want to ask, having now read both the paper and the Scottish government’s Mental Health Strategy 2017–2027, is a simple one: where, on the Dunning–Kruger curve, does the strategy sit?

What Foulkes’ research actually says

Foulkes’ paper is careful and measured. The authors are skilled academics who hedge, qualify, and call for more research. That’s what one expects from an academic paper. But the caution isn’t just for show and is itself part of their story. Indeed, by itself it’s a beautiful meta-strategy that not only underpins their argument but structurally supports it. The paper, in other words, would carry less weight if it were more confident in its findings.

Foulkes and colleagues review the evidence for the kind of mental health awareness campaigns that have proliferated across schools, universities, and workplaces over the past two decades. And, perhaps not unsurprisingly, they find a picture that is considerably more complicated than the campaigns themselves tend to, or would like to, acknowledge.

On the positive side, there is reasonable evidence that well-designed campaigns might reduce stigma, improve what researchers call ‘mental health literacy’, and increase help-seeking behaviour. Those would be real successes. The paper does not argue otherwise. But, the authors point out, not all outcomes have been tested for all campaigns.

However, and it’s a very considerable however, the evidence for harm is also real; and tragically, it’s not getting better. Several high-quality trials of universal school mental health interventions have found negative effects: an increase in internalising symptoms, meaning that pupils who received the intervention ended up reporting more anxiety, more low mood, than those who did not. One large trial, conducted across 153 schools with 12,166 student participants, found that a mental health awareness programme produced long-term negative effects measured 9 to 12 months after the intervention. These are not marginal findings from poorly designed studies. These are the findings that emerge precisely when the methodological quality is highest – findings which have ‘prompted concerns about the potential risk versus the benefits of interventions’.

The experimental evidence is perhaps even more interesting. Studies in which participants were exposed to mental health awareness content in controlled conditions found that such content can change how people understand and label their own experience but without changing the underlying symptoms.

Participants who were read psychoeducational material describing trauma in broad terms were more likely to describe watching a violent film clip as a trauma even though they significantly did not report greater distress. Similarly, individuals shown social media posts normalising anxiety became more likely to believe that they too might have an anxiety disorder and that mental health problems are more prevalent than they actually are. Hence, the central concern of this essay. Like the participants in the film clip study, despite their newfound beliefs, their self-reported anxiety did not in fact increase. What the awareness materials changed, in other words, was not the individual’s experience but their interpretation of their experience: the language that they used to make sense of themselves. Mental health interventions at their educational institution gave them a label; and in turn they internalised that label.

This is what the researchers call ‘concept creep’ – the semantic expansion of harm-related terms like trauma, anxiety, and disorder until they cover territory they were not designed to cover. It was an awareness of this ‘creep’ that, in part, brought about the defeat of Liam McArthur’s Assisted Suicide proposal. There is experimental evidence that as the concepts expand, they lose their value and people’s perception of harm becomes less serious. For example, I am nervous about whether this article is accepted and well received but it would be an exaggeration and inaccurate to say that I am anxious about it. But as clinical terms, like anxiety, become a social currency, those who most need the currency – people with genuine, severe mental illness – find it devalued. And it’s hardly surprising to learn that some of them feel angry about it.

One mechanism the paper explores is the nocebo effect: the phenomenon whereby telling people they might be at risk of experiencing negative symptoms can cause those symptoms to appear. It is the shadow of the placebo effect.

A meta-analysis of 73 studies found a moderate nocebo effect across conditions and treatments. In a separate meta-analysis, the participants given a trigger warning prior to reading negative content, of the type given to Aberdeen University’s students reading J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, were found to have more anticipatory anxiety than participants not given the warning. The paper suggests that mental health awareness campaigns may operate similarly, and that by encouraging people to pay close attention to their psychological state, to interpret ordinary emotions as potential disorder, they thereby produce the very symptoms the campaigns were designed to address. The authors are careful not to overstate this. But they note that the conditions for nocebo effects are precisely those that many awareness campaigns create: an invitation to identify with a list of symptoms, and the message that such symptoms are common, perhaps inevitable. Give them the label and they become that label.

For the sake of at least some brevity, I will draw attention to only one study, of more than 700,000 young people, which found that having a classmate diagnosed with a mental disorder in the ninth grade was associated with a higher risk of others in that class receiving a diagnosis later. Although the mechanisms for this outcome are unclear, the researchers suggest that something like social contagion is possible. Awareness campaigns delivered in educational settings may amplify rather than contain that process. The entire crux of the article, and this piece, rests on the uncertainty of that modal verb. Sometimes, on some occasions, it might be good not to talk.

What the Scottish government did instead – and what it could do next

Against this background, consider what the Scottish government’s Mental Health Strategy 2017–2027 requires of Scotland’s schools.

The strategy states:

Along with literacy and numeracy, health and wellbeing is one of the three core areas that are the responsibility of all staff in the school. All adults who work in Scotland’s schools have a responsibility to support and develop the mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing of pupils, as part of what is referred to as ‘Responsibility of All’. [my emphases]

It’s worth pausing to let that opening sentence fully sink in. That framing positions mental and emotional wellbeing as a curricular responsibility on a par with reading, writing, and arithmetic. This does two things simultaneously. First, it elevates mental wellbeing to the centre, the core function, of what schools are for. And, second, it borrows the Curriculum for Excellence model of ‘Responsibility of All’ – something that was originally designed to ensure that all teachers reinforced literacy and numeracy within their own subjects – and applies it to mental health support.

But the analogy does not hold. Reinforcing literacy across subjects means asking a history teacher to insist on good written expression, or a science teacher to model careful reading of source material. These are things history and science teachers actually know how to do and know how to teach. What the strategy asks of them in relation to mental health is categorically different. It asks them to ‘support and develop the mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing’ of pupils as a standing professional obligation. All adults who work in Scotland’s schools be they a janitor, a classroom assistant, or a supply teacher covering a period on a Friday. All of them, by this mandate, are now practitioners in the psychological development of children.

My own response if a student were to tell me that they were struggling would be to listen, to take it seriously, and to direct them to someone qualified to help. I am a BRC trained first aider, and I understand that role precisely: I stabilise, I do not treat, and I hand over to someone with the relevant expertise as quickly as possible. The whole logic of first aid depends on that boundary. The strategy’s aspiration that mental health training should become ‘as common as physical first aid’ actually uses the right analogy but then proceeds to ask something the first aid model explicitly forbids: ongoing, primary responsibility for the patient’s condition.

There is no hand-off built into the ‘Responsibility of All’ model. And there is, more troublingly, no apparent awareness that the intervention might not help – or worse, might actively harm. This is where the Dunning–Kruger analysis becomes most pointed. The strategy reads with the confidence of a document written at the low end of the curve: just enough knowledge to be dangerous; not enough to recognise the risks. It does not ask whether awareness campaigns might produce nocebo effects. It does not ask whether social contagion might amplify rather than contain distress. Nowhere in the document does it use the word iatrogenic – the medical term for harm caused by treatment itself – because it operates within a framework that has no slot for that possibility. While ministers congratulated themselves on ‘raising awareness’, robust trials were finding that universal school programmes actually increased internalising symptoms when measured months later. The very interventions sold as prevention may have, where it already existed, amplified distress. And where there was no mental health concern; it may well have caused it.

This outcome was not simply the result of naive optimism. This is an outcome of utopian thinking at its most fundamentalist. This is a closed system of reasoning from which negative outcomes have been (deliberately?) excluded in advance.

The logic runs like this.

Mental health problems cause suffering.

Awareness reduces suffering.

Therefore, more awareness causes less suffering.

Not only is the logic unshakeable, but each step sounds perfectly reasonable. But that chain of logic not once passes through the question of mechanism, or evidence, or the possibility that the intervention might produce the condition it is designed to prevent.

Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss could not update his belief that we live in the best of all possible worlds because his metaphysics guaranteed the conclusion before the evidence arrived. The Scottish government’s strategy has a similar structure. It is committed to the good outcome by the terms of its own framing. It produced an argument that was valid and assumed no one would question its truthfulness. A case of what Gawain Towler calls elsewhere, the choice of the gesture over the outcome. Yet another example of performative policy making that prioritises feeling caring over being effective.

The strategy was published in 2017. The Foulkes paper, summarising experimental evidence from the following years, finds that the evidence base remains thin, that most evaluation studies are of low quality, and that the high-quality trials are precisely the ones most likely to find negative effects.

I want to be careful here about precisely what this paper is saying. Christian Waugh, a professor who shared the Foulkes paper on LinkedIn shortly after its publication – and whose post Foulkes herself liked – made a point worth heeding. Waugh noted that bloggers were using the paper to suggest that mental health awareness is simply harming young people. Mental health awareness classes might harm the mental health of the participants, but it might not. Foulkes’ paper itself lays out a genuinely nuanced picture. The awareness movement has made real gains in reducing stigma and bringing previously unacknowledged suffering into view. The pendulum, Waugh observed, can swing too far either way. He is right. This piece is not an argument for silence about mental health. It is an argument for competence in how we speak about it.

The Scottish government’s current Mental Health Strategy expires next year. That moment represents a genuine opportunity to produce a strategy which would look very different from its predecessor in several specific ways. It would, first of all, be written with the appropriate humility about what is known, and what is not. It would commission independent evaluation before scaling any intervention. Access to those independent evaluations would be open and publicly available. The strategy would not wait 5 years to review itself but would be responsive as research emerges – service station stops, at regular intervals – where the question is asked honestly: is this working, or is it causing harm?

References

Foulkes L, Winterburn I, Sandra D, et al. The psychological consequences of mental health awareness efforts. Nat Rev Psychol. 5:173–184 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00532-7, https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-026-00532-7 [Accessed 4 May 2026.]

Scottish government. 2017. Mental Health Strategy 2017–2027. https://www.gov.scot/publications/mental-health-strategy-2017-2027/documents/ [Accessed 10 May 2026.]

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/BmV6E Joanna Williams, The London school where pupils are fighting back against striking teachers. 13/05/26

https://archive.ph/4lHEQ Janet Eastham, BBC News boss: I was driven out by trans activism. Fran Unsworth says she was bullied by gender ideologues employed by corporation. 16/05/26

https://archive.ph/2026.05.17-055720/https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26111292.academics-criticise-edinburgh-university-bosses-transparency-row/ Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco , Academics criticise Edinburgh University bosses in ‘transparency’ row. 17/05/26

https://archive.is/2026.05.16-001758/https://unherd.com/2026/05/inside-the-capture-of-the-bbc/?edition=us Rob Burley, How transgenderism killed impartiality. 16/05/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/17/the-gross-hypocrisy-of-teen-social-media-bans/ Bella D’Abrera , The gross hypocrisy of teen social-media bans. The same politicians calling for more online regulation are also pushing explicit content in the classroom. 17/05/26

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/18/university-administrators-in-scotland-are-helping-to-spread-antisemitism-but-theyre-so-dumb-they-dont-even-know-theyre-doing-it/ Stuart Waiton, University Administrators in Scotland Are Helping to Spread Antisemitism but They’re So Dumb They Don’t Even Know They’re Doing It. 18/05/26

https://archive.ph/6mMAu Sanchez Manning, Mother sues all-girls school for ‘admitting transgender pupil’. Joanne Donoghue sent her three daughters to Beverley High School, which she had attended as a child, but learnt a biological boy had been admitted ‘secretly’. 15/05/26

https://archive.ph/z85QP Charles Hymas, Schoolchildren taught black people cannot be racist to white people. Pupils as young as seven told they have responsibility to be aware of ‘white privilege’. 17/05/26

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Correggio, detail from Allegory of Virtues (c. 1529–1530)

Well, the election is done and dusted, and the result is as expected. Tragically, the national question up here appears to block out many concerns about everyday life and indeed about education, and so the ‘progressive’ Scottish establishment continues to rule.

Nevertheless, some of the important issues about education – not least of all the declining standards and the need for a knowledge-rich curriculum – were aired during the campaign, and we have Conservative and Reform MSPs who will hopefully continue to raise these concerns.

SUE’s job over the next five years will be to research and highlight where things are going wrong and also where things are improving.

The lack of state-funded free schools in Scotland makes it difficult to challenge or replace failing state schools, but there are efforts being made to develop some schools that are fee-paying but affordable.

We’re keen to see how these initiatives develop and are also thinking about alternative ways of educating children.

The fact that the Internet exists means that online education is now a possibility. I was thinking, for example, of creating a History of Western Civilisation course. Ideally, this would be accredited, but as there is currently no such qualification – or at least none that I can find – certification seems unlikely. Perhaps it would be worth doing anyway, simply to have it there for parents and children to access?

As well as questions about the curriculum, there is the wider issue of the types of values that schools promote.

This was one of the most interesting aspects of the discussion we had with Katharine Birbalsingh, who runs the remarkably successful Michaela Community School in England, and James Sibley, who having worked at the school is now trying to set up a similar school in Scotland.

When describing the values that Michaela promotes, Katharine put it all rather simply. Gratitude, kindness and personal responsibility were things she identified as being important, and as she pointed out, these are things that even ‘woke’ educationalists would support.

But then she explained that this falls down in too many schools today, when the idea that personal responsibility for doing your homework or behaving is replaced by a victim mentality that is encouraged in these schools. Of course, Katharine noted, all teachers want children to do their homework, but too many see the issues of racism, or gender identity, or poverty, or special needs and mental health as reasons why children should be treated differently and not be held to account by teachers.

In the end, personal responsibility is lost in this sea of victimhood, and the idea of something such as duty to others starts to disappear. The idea of making sacrifices for something bigger than yourself – your classmates, the school, your family or community – is something that is agreed with in theory but in a ‘woke world’ quickly disappears.

‘Progressive’ schools talk about being kind and caring, she pointed out, but this is a performative form of kindness – one where you describe yourself as a kind person but never actually do anything for other people.

This is a brilliant summary of what is fundamentally wrong at the heart of the social justice–based system we now have in Scotland, because it is one based on a political and therapeutic idea of kindness, as opposed to personal acts of truly useful kindness. Those subjected to this approach to education may believe they are kind because they are aware of trending causes (transgenderism, racism, etc.), but then they do nothing to help their family or neighbours, or, for example, by offering their seat to an elderly woman standing on the bus. Worse still, many have been encouraged by school-based social justice activism to adopt the grievance mindset that accompanies it, with fellow citizens cast as either allies or enemies: ‘I know these old people don’t share my kind view of the world, so f*** them. They don’t help me, so why should I help them?’

The tragedy in all of this is that through the language of kindness we are actually encouraging a generation who increasingly think only of themselves, of their identity or their supposedly virtuous feelings about the world, while doing nothing for others and, in fact, becoming increasingly distanced from their own family, neighbourhoods and community.

Small rituals of sacrifice, James Sibley noted, educate children to respect other people and think of other people ahead of themselves. These are values that are informative for a dignified life, he notes, at both an individual and a collective level. Woke values, on the other hand, are a form of political ‘kindness’ that is being indoctrinated through progressive education.

The values at Michaela, James noted, encourage a young working-class boy to grow up to be a good husband, to care about his work and the people he works with, to be a good boss and to live a dignified life. The kindness of progressive educators is one that says you should vote Labour in England (or SNP or Green), or you should care primarily about Palestine, or systemic racism, or the latest ‘correct’ cause. It all sounds very social and caring, but behind it we find individuals who are, at the level of real moral values, being educated in a miserable form of selfishness: ‘I feel therefore I am.’

The educational ethos of progressives, as Nigel Biggar explained in a previous SUE newsletter, has become one that institutionalises vices rather than virtues – encouraging intemperance, thoughtlessness, impatience, selfishness and arrogance. Katharine and James brought these ideas to light and gave a brilliant illustration of how they can be countered.

You can watch the interview with Katharine and James here.

One of the issues of concern regarding the promotion of social justice – specifically critical social justice – perspectives in education comes in the form of teaching training. Below we have a ‘pilot project’ – an initial look at the nature of teacher training in Scotland – a piece of work we hope to build upon to assess the extent to which our teachers are being trained to be not educators but social justice activists.

We are keen to talk to trainee teachers or anyone who has a knowledge and experience of what teachers are being taught. If you can help with this work, please get in touch: info@sue.scot

Stuart Waiton, SUE Chair

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Analysis of teacher education handbooks in Scotland for critical social justice orientation

Jane Fenton is Emeritus Professor of Social Work Education at the University of Dundee

Introduction

This paper examines the programme handbooks of university-provided teacher education in Scotland to evaluate the extent of their critical social justice (CSJ), as opposed to liberal, orientation. Eleven universities in Scotland provide teacher education, and I was able to access four programme handbooks for analysis: two undergraduate, two postgraduate. It proved very challenging to obtain the material.

Methodology

The initial systematic review of programme handbooks was conducted with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5), a large language model AI assistant. The AI was used to:

• Identify and code CSJ terminology and frameworks within the handbook documents

• Create comparative tables of findings across institutions

• Apply the CSJ indicator framework consistently across all handbooks

The analysis searched for two categories of CSJ markers:

1. Explicit CSJ or identity politics language:

• Anti-racism / racist / racism

• Patriarchy / patriarchal / misogyny

• Heteronormativity / heterosexual / LGBTQ / transgender / gender identity

• White privilege / whiteness

• Decolonising / colonial

• Ableism / ableist

• Intersectionality

2. General CSJ framing terminology:

• ‘Social justice’ (especially when defined as systemic change)

• ‘Equity’ (versus equality)

• ‘Transformative’ (learning, practice, teaching)

• ‘Anti-bias’ / ‘surface bias’

• ‘Challenge assumptions’

• ‘Problematise’ (critical theory–specific term)

• ‘Way of being’ (identity focus)

• BAME/identity-based programmes

• ‘Lived experience’

• ‘Systemic’ / ‘structural’

• ‘Wider societal structure’

• ‘Challenging meritocracy’

• ‘Cultural shift’

• References to inequality as systemic

• ‘Agential’

• ‘Socially transformative’

All AI-generated analysis was reviewed, verified against the original source documents, and critically evaluated by the researcher. The final interpretations, conclusions and implications drawn from the analysis are the researcher’s own.

Findings

The analysis found no instances of explicit identity politics language across the four university handbooks examined. However, there were abundant examples of softer CSJ-informed framing throughout all programmes.

Of equal significance was the marked absence of traditional liberal education markers. None of the following appeared in any of the handbooks: knowledge transmission as primary goal; equality of opportunity (versus equity of outcome); viewpoint diversity as a professional value; multiple perspectives on contested issues; freedom of conscience for teachers; teaching as profession versus activism; evidence-based practice (without ideological framing); or neutrality and impartiality in contested areas.

Conclusion

The analysis provides evidence of CSJ capture at the programme level across all four institutions examined. While explicit identity politics terminology (anti-racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, white privilege, decolonising, intersectionality) was absent from programme handbooks, the pervasive use of CSJ-framework language (social justice as core value, equity over equality, transformative practice, challenging assumptions, anti-bias work, and systemic analysis) indicates substantial ideological embedding.

The absence of hard identity-politics language from these general, high-level documents may reflect strategic ambiguity rather than ideological neutrality. The CSJ frameworks evident at programme level, particularly the emphasis on transformative practice, challenging assumptions, and systemic structural analysis, create the conceptual architecture within which more explicit identity-politics content can be introduced through module-specific teaching, reading lists, and classroom discussion. Further investigation into module specifications, required reading lists, and actual teaching materials would be necessary to determine the full extent of CSJ embedding at the content level.[1]

However, the complete absence of liberal education markers from all four handbooks is perhaps the most concerning finding. The systematic exclusion of knowledge transmission as a primary goal, institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, multiple perspectives on contested issues, and freedom of conscience suggests that Scottish teacher education has comprehensively rejected liberal educational principles in favour of a transformative, activist model. This is not simply the presence of one ideological framework alongside others; it is the replacement of liberal education with CSJ as the organising principle. This has significant implications for the intellectual and pedagogical diversity of the teaching profession in Scotland, for the neutrality expected in state education, and ultimately for the educational experiences of children and young people whose teachers have been trained within this monocultural ideological framework.

Note

[1] I was able to obtain a module grid for only one of the programmes and found core modules entitled ‘Race, Colonialism and Decolonisation’ and ‘Inclusion in Scottish Education: Diversity and Difference’, as well as optional modules entitled ‘Gender Justice: Feminist Approaches’ and ‘Queer Theory’.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/ZcJHf Toby Young, Worried your child is being radicalised? Try this tip. 30/04/26

https://archive.ph/LjYcF Catriona Stewart, Women to take union to court over concerns its ‘non-binary’ equality policy is unlawful. Women members of the Community union said they tried to raise their concerns internally but faced threats of disciplinary action. 02/05/26

https://archive.ph/2026.05.03-192428/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/scottish-pupils-are-falling-behind-how-will-politicians-help-njjv0bw6h Douglas Fraser, What Are Politicians Doing To Stop Standards Falling in Schools? We look at the curriculum changes introduced by the SNP. 03/05/26

https://archive.ph/2026.05.05-223821/https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/snps-track-record-on-education-has-been-unmitigated-disaster-heres-what-needs-to-happen-8498419 Cameron Wyllie, SNP’s track record on education has been unmitigated disaster. Here’s what needs to happen. Cameron Wyllie highlights the lack of focus on education in the Scottish election campaigns and the need to restore discipline in the classroom. 05/05/26

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15804293/Exam-board-pupils-GCSE-language-classes.html Will Hallowell, Fury as British exam board to allow pupils to use gender-neutral pronouns in GCSE language classes - despite terms not being recognised by countries. 09/05/26

https://www.gbnews.com/news/woke-madness-triggered-students-walk-out-lectures-unpunished-offended Dan MCDonald, Triggered students given the right to walk out of lectures unpunished if they feel ‘offended’ 11/05/26

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/09/teach-us-quit-students-confront-striking-staff-school/ Janet Eastham, ‘Teach us or quit’: Students confront striking staff outside school. Up to 80 students taught in assembly hall by only one teacher at London school after mass walkout. 09/05/26

https://www.uklfi.com/concerns-grow-over-scottish-teachers-group-promoting-anti-israel-propaganda-in-classrooms UKLFI, Serious Concerns Raised Over Scottish Teachers’ Group Promoting Anti-Israel Propaganda in Classrooms. A teachers’ organisation in Scotland is promoting politically partisan and arguably antisemitic materials for teachers to use in Scottish classrooms including to very young children. 09/05/26

https://archive.ph/Somm3 Anon, A trans clinic is pumping my daughter full of testosterone against my wishes. The NHS has banned the use of cross-sex hormones in the under-18s, so why are private clinics still offering them? 11/05/26

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx21j20l9wlo Mark McCool, Pupils hopeless and crying after ‘poorly worded’ Higher Maths exam. 11/05/26

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Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

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It’s election day tomorrow, and we’re hoping that – whoever gets in – the state of education in Scotland will improve.

Sadly, while education in schools has arguably never been so politicised, there is at the same time a rather limited political discussion about education within and among the political parties.

The only consensus appears to be around banning mobile phones, but this, like a number of other issues that are raised, is either to miss the point or has nothing to do with education.

A disciplined school, for example, with disciplined teachers, would not need to ban phones, although they may still decide to do so.

The Greens win the prize for talking about everything other than education – poverty being the key issue that MSPs like Maggie Chapman focus on.

Talking about reducing poverty can be discussed on its own terms, but we still need to address the falling standards and the knowledge-light education that is limiting the potential of children in Scotland. Talk of education being ‘fair, inclusive and properly resourced’ does nothing to address the problems we face, but then the therapeutic social justice ideas of the Greens are already embedded in our schools, so it is no wonder that they cannot see the problems, let alone address them.

Even the issue of indiscipline is reduced to issues of ‘poverty, trauma [and] inequality’ by Chapman.

The Greens are interesting to look at, partly because the wish list they present for education is what is already happening and what has created the problems we now face.

For them, reforming the curriculum for excellence simply means more of the same: less homework, fewer exams, the scrapping of assessments, and a bit more politics in the form of climate justice and trade union ‘education’. The evils of fossil fuels via the Industrial Revolution and of empire and slavery are also to be prioritised in schools if the Greens get their way – as if this is one-eyed and miserable view of the world is not already being taught in many schools.

For Labour, there is a similar sense that ‘throwing money at it’ will save the day – a pledge to hire 2000 ‘education recovery’ specialist teachers to address literacy and numeracy gaps being one example of this. Whatever one thinks about this, at least there is a recognition here that there is a serious problem in terms of the falling levels of the basics in schools, which is one of the reasons that we are producing a pamphlet on reading.

There is also a growing recognition of the knowledge-light nature of the curriculum at the moment, with Labour and especially the Tories and Reform pushing this. The Tories and Reform are both arguing for self-governing schools, like the Michaela Community School in England run by Katharine Birbalsingh. Reform is also pushing for standardised tests and exams as a primary method of assessment.

With the growing use of AI, there is a serious problem with essays and continuous assessment methods being used to assess both school and university students. Despite this, most people in education, especially those who run institutions, are continuing to ignore this development. Exams have always been a useful form of assessment. Today, the need for exams has never been more urgent to prevent qualifications becoming increasingly meaningless.

Interestingly, in terms of AI, if you ask Google about the political parties’ policies on education, it lists all the main parties except Reform. It’s a common joke in my office at work that AI is a social justice warrior, and it rarely fails to deliver. But on the plus side, when schoolchildren and university students use it to write their assessments, they can be fairly confident that the ‘correct’ political perspective dished out by their AI friend will be in line with the opinions of their activist educators.

Talking of which, it’s worth checking out the EIS Manifesto for education. Here, once again, you’ll find nothing about education itself, and an awful lot about how to indoctrinate children. They even warn that if political parties don’t adopt their proposals, cynicism will rise among voters and will be ‘exploited by populists and those even further on the right wing of politics’.

I can appreciate that unions have always tended to be on the left, but I’m fairly confident that in the not-too-distant past, turning educational institutions into left-wing training camps would have been seen as, at the very least, creepy and wrong, if not damn right Orwellian.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Katharine Birbalsingh and James Sibley for speaking to us last week.

James, in case you don’t know him, is an aspiring headteacher who, after working with Katharine for seven years is now trying to set up his own school in Ayr.

This discussion was probably the most useful and interesting one we’ve had since we set up. Not least of all because of what Katharine explained in terms of the ‘values’ that her school promotes. What she said was so straightforward and embodied so much common sense, but at the same time, is so radical in today’s times. I’ll explain what I mean next week, but it goes to the heart of everything that is wrong with Scottish education.

Katharine is an inspiration for anyone who wants to transform schools. From nothing she created the best school in the UK in a matter of years. Why is everyone not trying to learn from her? As I will explain next week, hopefully with a recording of the conversation, her common-sense approach to education hits at the very heart of our social justice educators, and despite, indeed because of her success, she is hated for this.

The SUE Manifesto for Education

Below we reprint the SUE Manifesto for Education. We launched the Manifesto at the event with Katharine, and James and are now collecting signatures from anyone who would like to put their name to it. More than this, we want people to let us know what they think of the Manifesto. What do you think we get right and wrong? And how might it be improved? Education is all about ideas. We need clear ideas about education to make a difference in the world. Sign up and get involved in the discussion.

The Scottish Union for Education believes our education system needs radical reform. We have a crisis in schools and colleges that won’t be solved by rebranding quangos, changing ministers, or more breakfast clubs. What we really need is a major cultural shift to roll back the radical teaching reforms that have taken place over the past two decades. We need to return to a system which places knowledge at its heart.

Knowledge is our inheritance

Knowledge is not, as the radicals suggest, simply about filling children’s heads with facts, or as the neuroscientists argue, extending their long-term memory. Knowledge is our inheritance, everything we have learnt in the arts, humanities and sciences and everything we have added to the world that is innovative, beautiful and meaningful. Introducing our children to this common resource is the purpose of education. We need to revive this knowledge-based approach, and to reject the soft skills and wellbeing agendas that currently shape our education. This radical reform is urgently needed to provide young Scots with the abilities, and understanding, they need to make their way in a changing world.

A knowledge-based society is democratic

So much of Scotland’s cultural inheritance is bound up with an enthusiasm for learning and intellectual curiosity. In To a Louse, Robert Burns wrote about the great gift of seeing ‘ourselves as others see us’. It was a celebration of our capacity to make judgements without personal bias, emotion or self-interest, the idea that we could all be objective, given a good education. With objectivity came a serious expansion of human knowledge, the extension of the right to vote and the idea that everyone could contribute to public life. Until very recently we had one of the best education systems in the world because, as a society, we placed a high value on reason and imagination. Our forefathers took science, literature and history seriously and recognised their importance in all aspects of life, from national economics to personal development.

The Curriculum for Excellence cut our connection with the past

When Scotland introduced the Curriculum for Excellence in 2010, it abandoned that precious legacy. This is not an overstatement; we should not underestimate how impoverished and mechanistic our education system has become. Today’s school leavers seem to know much less than their parents and grandparents. Their learning is narrow and yet unfocused; their homework is dull and formulaic. Teachers complain that they are encouraged to ‘teach to the test’, rather than risk introducing children to potentially redundant ‘information’.

Our children are not inspired

The fact that such large numbers of children are absent from school suggests that the education system, without knowledge at its heart, has lost its core sense of purpose. School seems to have left Gen Z less curious, and more anxious, than preceding generations. It would be easy to blame war, technology, politicians and mobile phones for this motivational crisis. Society, families, and changes in technology undoubtedly play a role, but Scotland needs to take a long hard look at its education system and the flawed theories on which it is based.

Our schools are being politicised

The SNP government has used the absence of curriculum content to politicise schools and universities. School values are no longer related to education and personal development, but the government agendas. The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) now argues that Social Justice - trans ideology, Critical Race Theory and zero-carbon agendas are professional ideals. Under the cover of professional standards, ethics and inclusion, many PGDE teacher training courses operate a McCarthy-like culture that demands political conformity. Trainees are still, despite the Cass Report, being ‘taught’ that it’s OK to hide the social transitioning of a child from their parents.

Our history is being rewritten

Not satisfied with training the next generation to ‘toe the party line’, there is a growing trend to rewrite history and to condemn previous generations for their attitudes on women, race and sexuality. Our common history is rarely treated as a source of inspiration, but understood instead as a realm of abuse and violence. This contempt for our predecessors is a deeply destructive cultural phenomenon.

Restoring a culture that places a high value on intellectual curiosity and wants to learn from the past, will not be easy. Change is something that must begin with parents and teachers rather than with politicians.

Seven changes that could transform Scottish education

1. Dump the Curriculum for Excellence and put knowledge back at the heart of education.

2. Drop all policies that undermine the authority of the teacher and their expertise.

3. Create a system of standard assessment, particularly for reading ages.

4. Outlaw McCarthyism in the General Teaching Council for Scotland and PGDE courses.

5. Support our libraries, museums, theaters and galleries to give children an inspiring introduction to the achievements of past generations.

6. Stop teaching transgender ideology and critical race theory to children.

7. Give Parent Councils power to hold schools to account.

Please share this manifesto with your friends and family and discuss it with anyone interested in the election and the future of education. Vote for the candidate in your area that recognises the need for education reform.

Share Scottish Union for Education

News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.johnsmithcentre.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2026_Youth-Poll-Report_DIGITAL.pdf Loose, E., Greenwood-Hau, J., Barnes, E., et. al. (2026). UK Youth Poll 2026.

https://archive.ph/I8GCv Joanna Williams, Is it any wonder young people won’t fight for Britain? 22/04/26

https://archive.ph/Gc5HE Eir Nolsoe, Two thirds of UK teenagers to have mental health problem by 2030. Report finds disorders such as anxiety, depression and ADHD already affect 51pc of 15 to 19-year-olds. 29/04/26

https://archive.ph/YT6wl Janet Murray, Even mentioning JK Rowling’s name gets you cancelled by the pro-trans mob. The chair of a charity was forced to apologise for not demonising the Harry Potter author in an interview. 29/04/26

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/04/28/will-teaching-teenage-boys-that-masculinity-is-toxic-really-reduce-violence-against-women-and-girls/ Stuart Waiton, Will Teaching Teenage Boys That Masculinity is Toxic Really Reduce Violence Against Women and Girls? 28/04/26

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/prison-service-could-face-avalanche-37073120 Mark McGirvern, Women locked up with men in jail could spark barrage of legal claims for prison service. Solicitor predicts SPS’s trance stance will lead to a huge legal headache. 27/04/26

Read Some Piaget Please, Where were all the trans children?

https://archive.ph/a0JgU Kathleen Stock, The rewriting of campus history This week’s Sussex judgment ignores reality. 01/05/26

Joanna Williams

The collapse of moral responsibility

Last week, I wrote that work has been robbed of meaning, and we all suffer as a result. I wrote that ‘deference to process rather than purpose transforms all jobs into bullshit jobs. No one assumes responsibility for the very duties they should be performing.’ This week, I want to suggest some reasons why this is the case…

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4 months ago · 59 likes · 3 comments · Joanna Williams

Joanna Williams, The collapse of moral responsibility, Why work no longer has meaning. 01/05/26

https://archive.ph/FIDhH Julie Bindel, How inclusive Iceland succumbed to ‘trans madness’. Once a beacon of progress, the Nordic country has become an authoritarian ‘gender Gilead’, and its citizens are terrified for the future. 28/03/26

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Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

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Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

The Holyrood elections are a week today, so next week will be our election special. Our Manifesto is available to read here or via the ‘manifesto’ tab at the top of the Substack menu bar, and we would love to get your thoughts about it: info@sue.scot

In the Manifesto, SUE’s Dr Penny Lewis has produced something that I think is both substantial but also practical, and we hope that it will generate a genuine discussion about what education in Scotland should be.

One of the central themes of the Manifesto is the need to focus on knowledge. However, especially now that the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is taking a bit of a kicking (not least of all because of declining standards in schools), almost everyone appears to be giving a nod to this idea that education needs to be about knowledge. But we have to ask – especially when those who have been peddling the knowledge-light CfE for so long have suddenly become converts to knowledge education – what does a knowledge-based curriculum actually mean?

We will be exploring this idea over the coming months. Here, I thought I would say something about this with reference to the idea of childhood and civilisation, largely because both are being undermined today.

We have noticed before that the notion of ‘children’s rights’ is one that confuses the idea of adulthood and childhood. This confusion of what distinguishes a child from an adult is one of the reasons that schools have found themselves facing opposition from parents, and even street protests, about their age-inappropriate sexuality education. Indeed, this was an issue we raised in our very first Substack newsletter.

This confusion is also one of the reasons that transgender ideology is promoted to even primary-aged children, often assisted by false claims made about those who question this ideology.

Transgenderism is not all about sexuality, but it is tightly bound up with it, as it is with the idea of sex, your body and even your genitals. Is this something that should be on the RSHP curriculum for young children?

What is understood to be age-appropriate (something that the vast majority of parents still get) and age-inappropriate (something that far too many educators get wrong) is a cultural accomplishment. The separation of children from adults and the ‘invention of childhood’ came about with the development of society, a shift from the pre-modern to the modern world, and the ideas of the Enlightenment and civilisation.

In medieval times, children from the age of seven were largely treated as mini adults. Over time, however, their overexposure to the adult world was seen, by more enlightened thinkers, as uncivilised and immoral.

This great accomplishment of treating children and adults differently meant that children were not expected to be civilised, educated and mature. Increasingly, children were understood to be innocent. As a result, it was recognised that they should be protected from certain aspects of the adult world.

From Locke to Rousseau, there were many differences in how Enlightenment thinkers addressed the question of raising children. The common strand, however, was that they all understood that there was this thing called childhood, and that it was separate and distinct from adulthood.

In discussions today about what education should be, it feels like we have moved backwards, despite talk of being ‘progressive’. There is, for example, far too much talk about children being ‘creative’, or the need for children to ‘express themselves’, and far too much criticism of knowledge or specifically facts-based learning. The idea that children should receive ‘rote learning’ at school – even for things like their times tables – has come to be seen as unenlightened, backward and almost a form of abuse.

But before we ask children to ‘think critically’, they need something to think with. This is where knowledge (and facts) come in.

School education was, and in the very best schools still is, a civilising process that gives our children the historical legacy of our understanding and achievements: Knowledge education is civilisation transferred from one generation to the next.

Robert Tressell, the working activist, writing in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, put it like this:

The accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers – is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil. It is not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people who exist today, and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all. Every little child that is born into the world, no matter whether he is clever or dull, whether he is physically perfect or lame, or blind; no matter how much he may excel or fall short of his fellows in other respects, in one thing at least he is their equal – he is one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before.

Historically, it was not considered ‘right wing’ to think that children needed to be given this knowledge from their adult educators. Nor was this transfer of knowledge and facts seen as limiting or restricting a child’s imagination or their ingenuity. Rather, it was seen as a vital part of being a child that you needed this knowledge before you could become a mature, educated and thinking adult. To be an ‘heir of all the ages’ you need the inheritance of knowledge.

For the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, this separation of childhood and adulthood was liberating for children because it freed them from the responsibility of the world and from the world of politics. It was a time and space for growth, shielded from the ‘merciless glare of the public realm’. A time when the ‘old world’ of human historical knowledge, was passed on to the next generation: the greatest possible building blocks of the best that had been thought and said that allowed emerging adults to stand on the shoulders of giants and to then, as adults, make the world afresh.

If I were to give an age differentiation to childhood and adulthood, I would put it like this: Children up to the age of 16 need to be given the knowledge of the world. Young people, by which I mean between the age of 16 and 18, begin to explore this world for themselves and in higher education (and indeed in the adult world) we develop to become the critical thinkers of tomorrow.

Far too many educators appear to have lost the distinction between childhood and adulthood. We see this in the various age-inappropriate forms of sexualised education in schools, but we also see it in the ‘progressive’ talk about children as ‘active learners’ who are ‘critical and creative’. We also see it in the age-inappropriate politicisation of education by third-party ‘educators’, and the social justice education promoted through our headteachers’ organisation. As we see below, in Diane’s excellent discussion about ‘captured’ librarians, we even see this confusion in the books that our children are being encouraged to read.

The more I look at the ‘progressive’ educators who are degrading Scottish education, the more I am convinced that when they say ‘critical’, what they are really expressing is cynicism. With this as their emotional starting point, they become not the facilitators but the most serious barrier to knowledge, to civilisation, and to childhood.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Are librarians a safeguarding threat to children?

Professor Diane Rasmussen is a qualified librarian, a former Professor of Social Informatics, and UK Column’s Commissioning Editor for Written Content. She is a member of the Scottish Union for Education’s Editorial Team, an Advisory Board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, and an Executive Committee member of Common Knowledge Edinburgh.

The Herald recently published an opinion piece by James McEnaney, its education reporter, claiming that ‘Cutting school librarians is a clear threat to pupils’ support systems’ in Scottish schools. At first glance, it would seem to the casual reader that doing so would indeed be detrimental to our children. But is this unquestionably true?

If you believe that librarians should be in the business of providing books with content about rape, suicide, murder, illegal drug use, and coerced underage sex with teachers, then perhaps you agree.

In March, the Daily Mail reported that a Manchester-area secondary school librarian had removed 193 ‘inappropriate’ books based on instructions from the school’s administration. The article gave seemingly innocuous examples of the offending titles, such as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight and Michelle Obama’s Becoming. The school placed the librarian under investigation for safeguarding concerns because she had provided these books in the first instance, and she eventually resigned before the disciplinary procedure was completed.

The report stated that the school used AI to complete the list of inappropriate titles, which made the story even more interesting; could AI determine what secondary school pupils should not read? The Mail article linked to a more detailed article on the case by Index on Censorship. According to this article, Emily, the librarian involved, said, ‘We have the exact same group of children who come in every single day, and a lot of them are LGBTQ+, a lot of them are neurodivergent, and they come into the library because it’s their safe place.’ The LGBTQ+ inclusion argument is used extensively by librarians and their professional bodies, including the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in the UK and the American Library Association. This, in my view, is a distraction from the dangerously explicit nature of the content within these books. Much of it has nothing to do with LGBTQ+ material.

Index on Censorship’s report makes it clear what was actually happening behind the story, which is increasingly happening in American libraries and is now coming to the UK, via Emily’s case: librarians are disingenuously using the guise of ‘censorship’ and the manufactured threat of ‘book burning’ to make the public think there is sinister action behind those who seek to limit access to age-inappropriate content. This is an inversion: it is the opposite. Let’s explore this further.

Across America, a new documentary called The Librarians is now being screened in libraries across the country. It is available for free streaming on the PBS through 9 May 2026, although a VPN set to the United States is needed to watch it from within the UK. The film’s website reveals that it has received high praise as an ‘official selection’ at Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and others. Sarah Jessica Parker is one of its executive producers; it would seem that the funders behind the project need further investigation. The film is filled with emotive content, all of which sides with the supposedly brave librarians who have sacrificed their jobs, their mental health, and indeed their personal safety to fight for the right of children to read without the threat of censorship. The librarians interviewed in the film claim the parents of the children they serve in their libraries seek to vilify the librarians. After all, all the librarians ever wanted was to educate children and support their intellectual and library development, correct? What could possibly be wrong with their intentions?

As a former librarian who also educated future librarians for two decades, a basic tenet of librarianship is to ensure that your library’s services and collections meet the needs of your readers. In a school library, this naturally should involve input from the children’s parents, and public librarians should incorporate the desires of those who pay council tax within their local authority. If parents or other authority figures are asking to have input into children’s collections, librarians should engage in dialogue with those concerned, rather than play the victim and frame themselves as individuals targeted by those who only seek to destroy them. What about the concerns of parents, such as Christians and Muslims, who hold religious views that counter exposure to explicit content? Their views, in the librarians’ claims, are seen as hateful and not inclusive. We again can see the inversion occurring here.

I recently interviewed Bonnie Wallace for UK Column. She is a concerned mum in Texas who has been tirelessly fighting the inclusion of age-inappropriate books in children’s library collections. In the interview, she mentioned books available in children’s collections, such as Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer, in which a 12-year-old boy ejaculates into a squid, which his mother then cooks. Bonnie also talked about Boy Toy, featuring a 12-year-old boy entering into a sexual relationship with his teacher. The examples became even more graphic as our discussion proceeded, as she read excerpts from other books describing graphic scenes of not only sex involving underage children but also other types of criminal activity.

These books are available in school libraries and children’s sections of public libraries in the US, and also here in the UK. On UK Column, I also have interviewed the brave women of Devon-based Protect & Teach, which leads a growing group of concerned parents who are questioning and fighting the inclusion of explicit materials in schools and libraries. Earlier this year, I interviewed Protect & Teach leaders Cathy Mudge, Jenny Dingsdale, and Gilli Blick about Exeter Library’s 2025 purportedly child-centred event called Queer Fest. From the interview write-up:

Cathy has written an accompanying article for UK Column, ‘Queer Fest at Exeter Library: Devon County Council’s Child Safety Test‘, which outlined the event and clear child safeguarding problems involved. The article includes graphic photographs taken at Queer Fest that provide irrefutable evidence of inappropriate sexual objects and materials being displayed to people of all ages who entered the library on the day.

In this interview, Protect and Teach members detailed the contents of Queer Fest, the concerns they raised with the library manager prior to the event taking place, and how those concerns were dismissed. These included how to measure for the correct condom size, the display of dildos, and explanations of illegal sexual practices such as chemsex. Children who attended Queer Fest were encouraged to provide their contact details via a QR code in exchange for sweets.

The discussion then broadened to the deeper issues underpinning Queer Fest, including the sexualisation of children, the attack on children’s developing minds, how it paves the way for paedophiles, the role of academic queer theory in breaking down boundaries, this misuse of the Equality Act 2010, and the globalist agenda behind it all.

They made a lucid point in the interview: in the past, authorities could determine whether a child had been groomed or otherwise exposed to inappropriate behaviour if they knew about sex. Now, because sexual content is mandated in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence as well as Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in England and Wales, social workers can no longer use sexual knowledge for determination for safeguarding because all children who are growing up in the UK are required to learn about it now. The only devolved nation in which parents can remove their children from this content is Northern Ireland, as Hugh McCarthy has reported.

Librarians are trained to protect intellectual freedom and fight censorship, which is certainly a worthy, if difficult, position to take in 2026. With UK government actions such as the dubiously named Online Safety Act 2023 claiming to protect children from harmful content online, which truly impacts Internet users of all ages, freedom of access to information is at risk for everyone in the UK. Scotland led Westminster in these censorious efforts through its Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. Humza Yousaf, the then First Minister, wanted people to be arrested for what some, including UK Column’s Brian Gerrish, have called ‘hurty words’, while placing sexual and criminal content in front of children as a national requirement is labelled ‘inclusive’ by the Scottish government. Here, we see the paradox in which ‘misgendering’ via social media a man dressed in make-up and a dress is worse than exposing children as young as eight years old to graphic novels such as Gender Queer, which depicts a young person performing oral sex at the request of an older person.

Just a bit of surface-level research can uncover what the librarians are under the guise of censorship. In all fairness, it is not only the librarians but also the authors who are behind the agenda. On 10 April, EveryLibrary, an activist group affiliated with the American Library Association and that claims it ‘builds support for libraries and helps Americans fight book banning in their communities’, posted a YouTube video of young adult author Katherine Applegate saying that ‘they’ have ‘banned’ her book ‘about trees’ called Wishtree, when there are simply some parents who don’t want their children exposed to gender ideology instantiated by an anthropomorphised plant. Here is a direct quote from the book:

Some trees are male. Some trees are female. And some, like me, are both.

It’s confusing, as is so often the case with nature.

Call me she. Call me he. Anything will work.

Yes, it is confusing, especially to children and their developing minds. Parents, grandparents, and all taxpayers in the country should have a look in their local library to see what books are present in the children’s collections. It is guaranteed that it will not take long to find content containing violence, graphic sex, drug use, and more. Then it is up to us to decide, individually and collectively, whether this is what you believe children should be exposed to – and act accordingly if not.

In my professional opinion, the safety of our children is at stake. Do not let librarians tell you that they are simply protecting children. Based on the definition of safeguarding, they are doing the opposite. If you don’t believe me, watch the official trailer for The Librarians, read the new young adult novel Sibylline by Melissa de la Cruz – in which teenagers have a threesome with a dead body – and then decide for yourself.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/eOeU3 Louise Eccles, Are you a weak-willed parent? The behaviour tsar wants a word. More children are acting, getting suspended and even biting teachers Tom Bennett says parents should look at themselves before blaming schools. 18/04/26

https://archive.ph/ph9hT Julie Henry, Revealed: How ‘inclusive’ policies risk keeping violent pupils in mainstream education. In an exclusive report, The Telegraph lays bare the fatal consequences of a Left-wing policy that seeks to cut the rate of expulsions. 13/04/26

https://archive.ph/eUm1r Octavia Evans, My daft university issued a trigger warning for chocolate addiction. I hoped to be challenged intellectually at Roehampton but instead its students have been infantilised to the point of farce. 11/04/26

https://www.scotsman.com/education/new-school-for-youngsters-with-trauma-finishes-construction-6790902 Ryan McDougall, New school for youngsters with trauma finishes construction. 20/04/26

https://archive.ph/h098A Rachel Amery, Kezia Dugdale appointed new chair of LGBT+ charity Stonewall. 19/04/26

Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

If You Want Readers, Start with Better Books

Book: Before Austen Comes Aesop: The Children’s Great Books and How to Experience Them…

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4 months ago · 103 likes · 6 comments · Jenna A. Robinson

Jenna A. Robinson, If You Want Readers, Start with Better Books. Before Austen Comes Aesop tackles an essential topic: what should children read to prepare them for the Great Books of Western civilization? 21/04/26

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/6cc0aad5dbe40952 Joanna Williams, The young have been taught that hard work is optional. Robbed of pride and purpose, the economically inactive react not with anger but with passivity. 22/04/26

https://archive.ph/npDQV Peter James, Why is a chatbot deciding what books our children read? 25/04/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)

Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

Arguably the best headteacher in the UK, Katharine Birbalsingh of Michaela Community School, is coming to talk to SUE.

Katharine has created a state school that competes with and often beats Eton, in terms of results.

Widely seen as controversial for being overly strict, traditional, conservative and stifling individuality, Michaela has become both famous and infamous amongst educators and politicians.

Come along this Wednesday and have your say. Get your tickets here.

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Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)

Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

The Enlighten educational research group invited Michael Gove to speak about the state of politics last month. The discussion about education was largely limited to the discussion with the audience (around an hour and a quarter into the event). You can watch his speech here.

As the Holyrood election draws ever closer, education does appear to have become a talking point.

Gimmicky ‘goodie bag’ offers from the SNP to P1 pupils have been ridiculed, while SNP candidate Deidre Brock found herself on the defensive having appeared to dismiss the importance of reading, writing and arithmetic now that we have calculators and computers.

Perhaps more seriously, John Swinney announced that the SNP plans to ban phones in classrooms, a policy that Labour and Reform support. Meanwhile, the Greens want to set up play-based kindergartens, meaning that primary school proper would begin at the age of seven.

All these ideas seem a bit gimmicky to me, even the phones one, but at least there is more talk now about the need for a knowledge-rich curriculum coming from the Conservatives and Reform, as well as from groups like Enlighten.

However, it was another development in education that caught my attention this week, and that was the discovery that Perth and Kinross Council (and one assumes other councils will be doing the same) are to appoint a Toxic Masculinity Officer.

£50,000 has been set aside for this worker, who will be developing an appropriate ‘curriculum in primary and secondary schools’ in the area, to ‘tackle misogyny and toxic masculinity’ and ‘promote a whole school approach to preventing gender-based violence’.

The local constituent who informed me of this development has asked for clarification about the evidence of this toxicity and has raised his concern about treating all boys as a toxic problem.

There are a variety of issues that can be raised about this, not least of all the problem that boys – especially white working class boys – are ‘still at the bottom of the class’, and very little appears to be said about this situation.

Unfortunately, difficult educational issues are easier to ignore when they don’t fit within the ‘correct’ cultural agenda. One also gets the feeling that too many politicians and educationalists reach for ‘toxic’-type policies rather than engaging with the broader issue of behaviour in schools more generally. Turning bad behaviour into a culture war issue is unlikely to achieve much and risks stigmatising boys and one-sidedly labelling girls as victims or potential victims of their classmates.

On another culture war issue, I originally wasn’t going to mention the Axel Rudakubana inquiry, as too much can be made out of atrocities. But it is worth noting the problem identified by a headteacher who tried to warn colleagues about the dangers that this boy represented. Her warnings were closed down by the mental health professional who described the concerns being raised as a form of racial stereotyping.

I think we can all agree that stereotyping is wrong. It is wrong in terms of race as it is when related to different sexes. Better to encourage teachers to use their judgement than to institutionalise a ‘whole-school approach’ to any ‘group’ of children. Perhaps then we can focus on the small number of serious cases and do something about them.

The wider problem of discipline is schools is a matter that should concern us, and we have tended to focus on the lack of authority of teachers in schools. However, as Tom Bennett, the UK government’s ambassador for attendance and behaviour, has noted, a significant part of the problem is also that too many parents are both failing to discipline their own children and then complain when schools do so.

Interestingly, Bennett, who spoke at SUE’s most recent conference and is not some kind of crude authoritarian by any means, notes that despite visiting about 1600 schools, he has found ‘no school’ that is ‘too strict’.

It sounds like a throwaway line, but I think it is worth thinking about what Bennett is saying rather than dismissing him as some crass hard-ass simply because he talks about rules and boundaries and punishment.

One wonders whether his approach would be labelled as ‘toxic’ by our own ‘enlightened’ educators?

Noticeably, one of the schools that Bennett has visited is Michaela Community School – a school run by Katharine Birbalsingh that is labelled as the strictest school in England. And as you may already know, Katharine is going to speak to us later this month. Tickets for the event can be found here.

Finally, as it is one year since the UK Supreme Court ruling about sex and gender, I thought it would be useful to hear from Carolyn Brown, one of the fearless campaigners who has pushed to get transgender ideology out of schools.

When it comes to boundaries, as Carolyn explains, far too many schools continue to recognise the most basic boundary that exists in the real world – that of sex.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

Scottish Election 2026: gender identity ideology has created an education scandal

Carolyn Brown is a retired Depute Principal Educational Psychologist and ScotPAG Convenor

Our Scottish government has overseen and funded the embedding of gender identity ideology (GII) activism into its education systems and processes. There is evidence of GII in nearly all its primary and secondary schools. GII as a concept is evident throughout its guidance for schools. GII is referred to constantly in this guidance, not as a hypothetical or metaphysical construct but as a concept which definitely exists. The facts that there is no evidence for the existence of gender identity and that the concept is highly contested are never referred to.

GII in Scottish education is in core curricular subjects such as Mathematics and English; in pupil social groups; in staff professional development; and in school development planning. A study conducted by ScotPAG and Women’s Rights Network Scotland (2024) found that all Scottish councils referred their education services to the Scottish government’s ‘trans’ guidance for schools.

The schools guidance, along with the activities of third-sector activist groups such as LGBT Youth Scotland, Stonewall and TIE (Time for Inclusive Education), and parts of the RSHP (Relationships Sexual Health and Parenthood), has resulted in an education system that has been set up for the purpose of teaching our children the details of GII and queer theory. This is not education, it is indoctrination.

ScotPAG and SUE have been writing about this and repeatedly attempting to engage with our politicians. We have warned repeatedly about the harms being caused to children and families and the education system itself:

A Manifesto for Confusion, Ten False Claims Refuted, When peddling a lie causes psychological harm, Enthralled by TIE!

So it was a great step forward to lead a roundtable event, hosted by Tess White MSP, in Holyrood on 5 March 2026. In addition to the panel of professional speakers and ScotPAG members, MSPs, parents and professionals from education, health and social work were in attendance. The panel speakers were:

• Carolyn Brown, Retired Depute Principal Educational Psychologist and ScotPAG Convenor

• Dr Brigid Daniel, Professor Emerita, Queen Margaret University

• Maggie Mellon, Senior Social Worker

• Dr Anne Woodhouse, Consultant Clinical Psychologist

The meeting lasted one hour, which could only ever scrape the surface regarding ScotPAG and SUE’s warnings about the captured nature of our education system. But it was an excellent opportunity to raise and discuss concerns with MSPs about the parlous situation that the Scottish government and education leaders have allowed and facilitated in Scottish schools.

All attending MSPs voiced major concerns in response to the evidence and statements made by the highly experienced and respected professionals. Both Rachael Hamilton MSP and Sharon Dowey MSP registered their commitment to highlighting what has become an educational scandal, in the new parliamentary session. Rachael Hamilton stated that having listened to the panel speakers, she was particularly worried about the erosion of boundaries for children that this ideology has caused, and for safeguarding children in general. She stated that if she was returned to Holyrood, she would be pushing for an examination of what is happening in the Scottish education system and the impact of GII on children and their families.

A major issue raised during the meeting by Douglas Ross MSP was the observation that despite making numerous attempts to engage with the Scottish government, ScotPAG and others, including parents, had been rebuffed. Mr Ross highlighted the fact that such behaviour from the Scottish government was entirely unacceptable. The meeting agreed that it would appear that the Scottish government is not only ducking its responsibility for being accountable to its citizens, it is simply failing to listen. One thing is for sure: the Scottish government has backed itself into a corner and is refusing to admit its folly. ScotPAG, SUE, and those who realise what is happening in our education system will make it our business to stand our ground an make it clear that we need change from the Scottish government. Here’s what we need the Scottish government to do:

1. embrace reality

2. stop peddling self-ID delusions

3. stop funding activists

4. remove all guidance promoting GII

5. start listening to experienced professionals knowledgeable about child development

6. understand the detail of what is meant by child safeguarding

7. listen to parents who have experienced the terrible harms of their children being ‘transed’.

Read the full statements made by panel members on 5 March here:

https://www.scotpag.com/

Share Scottish Union for Education

In 2026 SUE wants to focus our work on reading.

Alongside our campaigning work – organising local meetings and hustings – we hope to produce a Handbooks and a Manifesto on Scottish Education.

We are intending to initiate a campaign to get Scottish kids’ reading again. We want Scottish children to reach the standard they once occupied – world class. Sadly, this standard has been allowed to degenerate. We are failing our kids.

All this costs money. Please help our campaign. Upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIBER and/or DONATE. SUE needs you.

News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/10/students-should-not-be-marked-on-their-lived-experience/ Joanna Williams, Students should not be marked on their ‘lived experience’. Universities are swapping exams, essays and grammar to make assessments more ‘culturally responsive’. 10/04/26

https://archive.ph/gV1HE Benedict Smith, Scottish Greens propose new tax on ‘elitist’ private schools. Party vows to make independents ‘pay their fair share’ using the existing business rates system. 07/04/26

https://archive.ph/og2Bq Simon Johnson, Phillipson ‘refuses to meet’ women who secured Supreme Court trans ruling. For Women Scotland accuses minister of ‘blocking’ talks to mark first anniversary of key legal decision. 12/04/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/lgbt-youth-scotland-chief-quits-37009839 John Glover, LGBT Youth Scotland chief quits after Express reveals ‘Walter Mitty’ CV discrepancies. The charity confirmed that an investigation would be taking place into the allegations around his hiring as it highlighted it needed to take ‘additional steps’ to ensure it was legit. 14/04/26

Restore Childhood

What to Actually Read With Your Kids This Summer

Last week’s pieces on the Landmark Books going out of print and the broader disappearance of traditional childhood education brought in thousands of new readers. The question we heard most in the comments was the same one…

Read more

4 months ago · 25 likes · 4 comments · Natalya Murakhver

Natalya Murakhver, What to Actually Read With Your Kids This Summer. A grade-by-grade guide to the history books worth their time, most of which you won’t find on a school reading list. 13/04/26

https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/26014943.plan-delay-children-starting-primary-school-age-7/ Gillian McKay, Children would not start primary school until age seven under a plan by the Scottish Greens. 13/04/26

https://archive.ph/2026.04.11-122104/https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26012115.snp-minister-condemns-governments-single-sex-policy/ Rebecca McCurdy, Holyrood hustings debates single-sex spaces in schools. 11/04/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/john-swinney-slammed-over-goodie-37006938 John Glover, John Swinney slammed over ‘goodie-bag gimmick’ for P1s as school standards plummet. The SNP were criticised over the decline in Scottish education despite nearly two decades in power and were accused the ‘gimmick’ would help Scots forget. 14/04/26

https://www.scotsman.com/education/deidre-brock-snp-candidate-answers-critics-over-comments-on-literacy-and-numeracy-in-schools-6577727 Catriona Stewart, Deidre Brock: SNP candidate answers critics over comments on literacy and numeracy in schools 16/04/26

Hazard Ratio: Benjamin Ryan

The Author of the Controversial Finnish Study on Youth Gender Care Responds to Critics

Earlier this month, Finnish researchers published an analysis of national health records that found that the use of specialty psychiatric care, which they considered a proxy for serious mental health problems, surged among youth who underwent gender-transition interventions…

Read more

4 months ago · 101 likes · 24 comments · Benjamin Ryan

Benjamin Ryan, The Author of the Controversial Finnish Study on Youth Gender Care Responds to Critics. A new study found a surge in psych care typically reserved for severe mental health problems following gender-transition interventions in youth—prompting sharp pushback from transgender advocates. 17/04/26

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Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

At the Scottish Union for Education, we have become preoccupied with children’s reading – so much so that we are about to publish a multiauthored pamphlet on this essential aspect of education. This obsession has developed because reading seems to be a skill continually failed by the misnamed Curriculum for Excellence, although some schools – to their credit but on the sly – do ignore the centralised diktat when it comes to teaching reading.

Reading is important. That goes without saying. But why?

Of course, being able to read effectively allows children to access information. All taught subjects require children to be able to read effectively in order to transfer knowledge from books and worksheets to their brains. Without this learned skill, children cannot access a huge proportion of any subject they need to learn in school.

However, once reading has been mastered and become a low-order skill, information can be absorbed while the reader deploys other cognitive functions such as thinking and considering, which then support understanding and retention. An accomplished and mature reader deploys more than just the technical skills required to access the text but, as T. A. van Dijk and W. Kintsch explain in their Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (1983), ‘much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided by the text itself but must be drawn from the language user’s knowledge of the person, objects, states of affairs, or events the discourse is about’.

So, as children get older and their knowledge base expands, they can derive more meaning and understanding from the text their eyes are moving across on the page.

A love of, or fascination for, reading is something we can all enjoy throughout our lives. A long time ago at Dumfries Academy, for Higher English, I read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. And, apart from the few action scenes, it bored me. To be fair to the great man, I wasn’t much of a reader then. I struggled and would often default to kicking a ball instead of doing my homework. But a few years ago, For Whom the Bells Tolls was the choice of someone in my book club, and the experience of reading it was Damascene for me. I spent the last few pages sobbing. Obviously Hemingway hadn’t revised his ending. No, the change had been inside me. My experiences of life, death, living and loving had expanded. And by rereading this book, my understanding of humanity became clearer.

I was reading Joanna Williams’ Substack on class, politics and reading last week. She was commenting on research about how poorer people seem to be reading more than their affluent ‘betters’. She commented that,

Members of all three of these lower-income, less well-educated groups name reading as one of the primary ways they spend their free time. Yet the higher up the income and cultural capital scale we go, the less likely this is to be the case. The Ambitious High Earners and the Elite turn to video games, sport and travelling for recreation. Books do not get much of a look-in. [...] What’s most concerning – depressing, even – is that we have an educated elite qualified to undertake internet trawls to detect AI and botched quotations, but reluctant to read whole books in order to engage properly with a political argument.

Of course, it doesn’t automatically follow that the sections of society which do read will engage critically in political discourse. However, it may well be that working-class voters – frequently dismissed as ‘gammon’ and pilloried for (supposedly) unthinkingly accepting ‘right wing’ (or rather, non-progressive) viewpoints – at least have a basis for their voting decisions, unlike those throwing the rotten veg at them.

The point is that if we can’t teach this particularly unnatural human skill to all children and support the instillation of a lifelong familiarity with and love of reading, we are denying future generations the full richness of humanity on offer, the ability to engage in political discourse, and a shared and universal experience, as well as access to basic practical necessities.

It is an adult responsibility, particularly of teachers, to engender a love of reading in the next generation – to give children the best of the past in order that they are able to take charge of the future. And we need politicians brave enough to push for a curriculum that embraces this necessity.

And now, I’m delighted to present another article from Cameron Wyllie. Taken from his personal Substack, here Cameron looks at which books we should be encouraging children to read.

Simon Knight Secretary of SUE

What books should we teach in Scottish schools?

Cameron Wyllie is a retired headmaster. His blog is ‘A House in Joppa‘ and his podcast (with Rod Grant) is ‘Two Heads Are Better Than One’.

As a retired English teacher (my mother used to say ‘teacher of English’ to avoid ambiguity), I was interested to read that the Curriculum Leader for English at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh has decided that Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men should no longer be taught there because they are ‘dated’ and ‘problematical’.

Let me say at the outset that it is, of course, entirely up to any teacher to decide, within the limits of good sense and – for older students – within the terms of the exam syllabus, what they teach their classes, but this decision did get me wondering. These two books have been taught in English classes in Scotland for a long time, Mockingbird as an outstandingly written semi-autobiographical novel about the US, family and racial prejudice, and Of Mice and Men – with its title from Burns – about friendship, dreams and nature, and yes, there’s a fair bit about prejudice (race, disability, misogyny) in there too. Additionally, Steinbeck is, of course, an ‘important’ writer by any standards.

This question of how you select books is a fraught one. Of course, there’s no point in teaching texts to young people just because they are ‘great books’ if they can’t understand or appreciate them. I refrained from teaching T. S. Eliot to First Year because only 2% of the pupils would have got anything from it – apart from that bloody Mystery Cat. So teachers have to be realistic and look for age-appropriate material. Then there’s the issue of academic ability (a concept rarely spoken of these days); if you are teaching a mixed-ability class, where do you pitch your choice of material? I recently tutored (to keep my hand in) the child of friends – a clever young man – who attends a local secondary school and who had, for the literature content of National 5 English, been taught half a dozen poems by Norman MacCaig and [...] a television programme (there is a media option). Now, MacCaig, though not in my personal view what you would call a great poet, is a ‘good teach’ (as is another set Scottish poet, Carol Ann Duffy), but rather than teaching a play or a novel, a TV show?

You see, this begs the question, what is it exactly we are teaching literature for? Almost anything in the great canon of English literature is going to be ‘dated’ simply because most of it is old, but it’s presumably there because it’s thought to contain themes of timeless interest – love; war; childhood; man’s relationship with nature or with God and, of course, man’s general inhumanity to man. Apart from Macbeth, which I think almost any young Scot would like if it were taught to them properly, I wasn’t myself that keen on teaching Shakespeare, but no one can deny that he’s dealing with the big stuff, and there’s lots of wee Hamlets and Romeos and Juliets sitting in these classes, regardless of ethnic background or creed. We seem to be stretching a lot these days in the direction of trying to ensure that what’s taught is very immediately and obviously relevant to today’s young Scots. For example, the book mentioned as a possible replacement for these two classics is The Hate U Give, a young adult book, which I freely confess I haven’t read, firstly because I haven’t been a young adult since the Falklands, and secondly, because of that problematic ‘U’. I am sure it’s very good – it’s won a number of awards for children’s literature – and I’m sure I would want to encourage young people to read it, but is it of the merit necessary to stand up to detailed classroom teaching? And – truth to tell – is it really any more relevant to young people at Gillespie’s than the books being proscribed?

So, yes, we want our young people to enjoy texts taught to them in the classroom, but that enjoyment needs to go in hand with two things. The first is challenge: it’s good for young people to take on things that may seem a bit hard at first – that’s what a skilled English teacher is for. The second is that the books offered to our young people – of course age-related – need to have clear literary merit; they need to be well written. Most young people probably only read something like a dozen plays or novels over their years in the English classroom, plus some poems, and these days, increasingly, they watch some films and maybe even TV programmes. We need to ensure that everything moves and amuses and excites them, but we also mustn’t patronise them by taking the risk – yes, I know this is a cliché – of ‘dumbing down’.

And finally, let’s remember in this discussion that there is a compulsory Scottish element in the National 5 and Higher exams. How does that sit in terms of datedness and relevance? I tutored someone else recently through Ena Stewart Lamont’s Men Should Weep, which struck me as an accomplished chamber piece of very dated (melo) drama. Whereas I am delighted to see the continued presence of Sunset Song as a set novel, which takes place over a hundred years ago in a part of Scotland very few young Scots will have ever heard of but which has a universal resonance which moves young readers over and over again.

In essence, I understand removing texts that some young people – or even some teachers – might find offensive, but we have to be careful that, in censoring a text like To Kill a Mockingbird we don’t replace it with something which is just the flavour of the month. Please them, yes, excite them, yes, but also let’s make them think.

In 2026 SUE wants to focus our work on reading.

Alongside our campaigning work – organising local meetings and hustings – we hope to produce a Handbook and Manifesto on Scottish Education.

We are intending to initiate a campaign to get Scottish kids’ reading again. We want Scottish children to reach the standard they once occupied – world class. Sadly, this standard has been allowed to degenerate. We are failing our kids.

All this costs money. Please help our campaign. Upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIBER and/or DONATE. SUE needs you.

Share Scottish Union for Education

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/08/the-uglification-of-britain/ James Dixon, The uglification of Britain. Our lives are being diminished by the charmless concrete jungles we inhabit. 08/04/26

https://archive.ph/2026.04.08-051406/https://www.scotsman.com/education/ideological-capture-education-experts-press-government-on-concerns-about-trans-schools-guidance-6566451 Catriona Stewart, ‘Ideological capture’: Education experts press government on concerns about trans schools guidance. The group of education experts has been pushing the Scottish government for a full dialogue on its transgender schools guidance 08/04/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/07/the-dangers-of-gender-affirming-care-are-now-undeniable/ Jo Bartosch, The dangers of ‘gender-affirming care’ are now undeniable. A new study from Finland shows that puberty blockers and hormone treatment deepen troubled kids’ distress. 07/04/26

https://spectator.com/article/this-study-shatters-the-trans-myth-about-mental-health/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email Joanna Williams, This study shatters the trans myth about mental health 09/04/26

Andrew Doyle

The alphabet soup gets thicker

Around fifteen years ago, I had a stand-up routine in which I would bemoan the ever-expanding initialism for sexual minorities. First it was LGB, then LGBT, then LGBTQI. I ended up increasing it gradually until every letter of the alphabet was represented and had its own assigned meaning. It was more a memory trick than a joke, but it always landed well…

Read more

4 months ago · 390 likes · 35 comments · Andrew Doyle

Andrew Doyle, The alphabet soup gets thicker. A Canadian politician has just coined ‘MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+’. Run for the hills. 10/04/26

SEEN in Publishing

Interviews from Publishing's Coalface: Oldspeak Bookshop

SEEN is Publishing is delighted to have spoken recently with the proprietor of Oldspeak Bookshop in Long Melford near Sudbury, which is dedicated to free speech and common sense. Oldspeak has had stalls at the Battle of Ideas and New Culture Forum…

Read more

4 months ago · 14 likes · 3 comments · SEEN in Publishing

SEEN in Publishing, Interviews from Publishing’s Coalface: Oldspeak Bookshop. No independent bookstore is more independent-minded than Oldspeak Bookshop in Long Melford near Sudbury, which was opened to champion freedom of expression and common sense. 11/04/26

https://archive.ph/mpBWE Benedict J. Smith, Scottish Greens propose new tax on ‘elitist’ private schools. Party vows to make independents ‘pay their fair share’ using the existing business rates system. 07/04/26

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/snps-inappropriate-school-sex-education-37000891 David Walker, SNP’s ‘inappropriate’ school sex education could be ripped up by parents under Tory plans. Gender ideology is still being taught in secondary schools, and the SNP tried to force councils to ask teenagers about anal sex, with plans for parent panels being put forward by the Scottish Conservatives. 12/04/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)

Katharine Birbalsingh, arguably the greatest headteacher of modern times, is coming to speak to SUE supporters. Save the date: Wednesday 29 April (8 p.m.).

If you are not aware of Katharine’s record with Michaela Community School, Google it. The achievements of her and her staff are mind-boggling. Described as a school based on strict behaviour systems, with traditional teacher-led instruction and a focus on knowledge, in terms of results, Micheala competes with Eton, but without the £63,000 a year price tag.

Get your tickets here before they run out.

One of the achievements of this community school is that it combines brilliant teaching with a promotion of Britain, rooted in shared values and national pride. The school is in a borough with a highly diverse population, but as Katharine notes, for a multicultural community to work, it needs common values and a sense of national belonging.

Discussing the link between classical education and a connection to a sense of responsibility for your nation, Joanna Williams usefully explains that this does not mean being one-eyed nationalists. However, what many children appear to be taught today is an alternative, warped sense of their country and their past – one that is undermining any sense of patriotism, belonging, fellowship or connection with past generations.

As she notes, when only 11 percent of people aged 18–27 say they would fight for Britain, we know that something is going seriously wrong.

A key reason she identifies for this negative view of being British is that almost half of this cohort of young adults think that Britain is a racist country.

Racism, Williams argues, has been recast as a secular sin – a moral stain on everything and everyone from the past. And this is being educated to children by our schools.

The tragic irony in all this is that the very ideas that have led us to oppose racism, and indeed that inspired anti-racists like Martin Luther King, stem from classical and enlightened thought, from the best ideas of Western civilisation: liberal ideals, the belief in democracy, and commitment to human equality.

As she concludes:

Rather than teaching children to feel disdain towards their country, we need a school curriculum that introduces them to both the positive and negative elements of their nation’s story within the context of the moral and intellectual gains of Western civilisation. And rather than encouraging children to dwell on their own vulnerability, we need to open their minds to humanity’s tremendous potential.

The shift in schools to focus solely on the most negative aspects of the past, and indeed to invent some along the way, is a serious problem for society. Alongside this, as American Natalya Murakhver explains, we have also seen the ‘best children’s history books’ go out of print in the last few decades. As she notes, ‘The genre of history books that celebrates American achievement, Western civilisation, and individual heroism without an organising framework of oppression has become nearly impossible to find in mainstream publishing.’

As we move towards next month’s Holyrood election, we need to double our efforts to get our politicians thinking about what education in Scotland should be all about. Getting back to an understanding that many of the great ideas and forms of knowledge are a product of Western civilisation would be a great starting point.

One group doing exactly this is Enlighten, who have launched their own manifesto that elevates the need to re-establish a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’.

Schools should be given greater autonomy, they argue (like the Michaela Community School), developed alongside ‘clear national guidance’, with the ‘breadth of the S4 curriculum ... restored’.

As former Director of Education Keir Bloomer explains, ‘There are two large problems with [the Curriculum for Excellence]. Firstly, the place of knowledge in the curriculum has been devalued ... Secondly, there is no adequate specification of curriculum content’. For the next Scottish government, he notes:

We must be big enough and bold enough to admit when we have made a strategic mistake, and reverse it before any more damage is done.

By focusing on knowledge and the best that has been thought and said as the basis for education, we can change our schools and we can change Scotland. The bleak and often inadequate education our children are receiving at the moment, in far too many schools, can be turned around. Hopefully, we can learn from the best, and our conversation with Katharine Birbalsingh will help provide us with some inspiring ideas about what we can do to help this.

SUE supporters have been in touch recently to promote election hustings in their area. We would encourage people to attend these events and to help get the message across to our future elected officials that, with their help, our schools can be world-class.

Finally, I’m delighted to present another article from Cameron Wyllie. Here, Cameron looks at the push to ban exams.

Stuart Waiton, chair of SUE

Let’s ban exams! (Yeah, yeah)

Cameron Wyllie is a retired headmaster. His blog is ‘A House in Joppa’ and his podcast (with Rod Grant) is ‘Two Heads Are Better Than One’

We are at a terrible time in politics: in the world! In the UK! In Scotland!

Now we know that the turnout in the forthcoming Holyrood election will be low. Knocking on a door on Sunday, I canvassed a man who said, ‘Is there an election then?’ This reminded me of ‘Alias Smith and Jones’. Jones says, ‘Most people in the world know exactly where they were when John Kennedy was assassinated.’ Smith replies, ‘Oh, is he dead then?’

For the moment, I need to concentrate on the Greens. I have a friend who is a very clever woman who is a very keen Green, and I respect her knowledgeable arguments very much. I think if the Greens weren’t led (in England) by Mr Polanski, then they would be doing much less well, but what will they do when suddenly, in an emperor’s new clothes moment, they realise he’s a (very) clever, very personable, very funny man who is an absolute chancer. And – I have to ask – when will they get back to ... like ... climate ... and the environment? But, hey, there may be a plan there somewhere.

In Scotland, of course, the electorate has actually seen the Greens in government – and it wasn’t good. Unsurprisingly, the Scottish Greens are benefitting rather less from the Gorton and Denton/Polanski bounce than they might have hoped, as people ponder their record. Still, they will probably have more MSPs in a couple of months than they have now.

We await all the party manifestoes to see what they say about education, and, of course, I expect those of us sympathetic to the needs of frontline teachers must prepare for disappointment. But the Greens, always up for a jolly bit of newsfeed, have given us two proposals: no homework in primary school and no exams.

Well, you know, no homework in primary school – I would have thought – damages the most disadvantaged kids most, but the Greens, who are essentially a middle-class bunch, might not have thought that through, but this is not anything about which I can claim much expertise, so I’ll leave it to primary school specialists. No more projects done with mum and dad to admire! No more making a Christmas card for people in hospital. Just LOTS more time for ‘Bomb Soldier 6’.

But exams. Really? Do they think that even our new 16- and 17-year-old voters, bless them, getting their voting slips with five weeks to go to Higher English, will fall for that?

What is it that Ross Greer has against exams? He has clung to this frankly batty policy since he was a wee boy at the Youth Parliament. And yet they are promoting it now, when it is becoming increasingly clear that the explosion in AI means that it is exactly now that we will start moving towards ‘old-fashioned exams’ in the hall with two pens in case one runs out, because that will be the only way to ensure that what you’re seeing is, by and large, the student’s own work. How is it that they are proposing to assess, if exams are not at least part of the process? One senses there’s a little green parrot sitting on Mr Greer’s shoulder advocating kindness – I have no problem with that – and in between squawks about gender and genocide, advocating that school should be a positive experience for all, and that no one should ‘fail’. I like this squawking – I squawk this myself – but the way to achieve it is through a much more radical transformation of the whole educational system, which better fits the educational experience to the needs of the child, not by removing the most legitimate means of assessing them, the ‘gold standard’ of the SQA exams. Sorry, sorry – we must remember that that organisation is itself transformed into ... Qualifications Scotland. What a masterstroke of transformational change. And so much money for the rebranding designers. And so much fresh blood! (Actually, none of that).

Exams aren’t just assessments of course, they are qualifications. (‘Hamish! Get off that Play Station! Get your head in these books and get some QUALIFICATIONS! Don’t make the same mistakes your dad did!)

I have no doubt that in the brave new world of Green Continuous Assessment, involving perhaps some kind of grade-point average (never involving an exam, of course) an accommodation would be met with Scottish FE and HE institutions – indeed, they might even be involved in the planning of it. That is, assuming that Scottish universities and colleges still exist, given the shocking funding situation. It may indeed be that some rocks have to melt in the sun – but that’s another rant for another day.

But what about universities in other places – do we really think that HE and FE institutions in England and Wales and everywhere else, will just acquiesce to the ‘Scottish Certificate’? ‘Jamie has a score of 806 and a merit in mindfulness and community planting. He has shown a granite mindset in his struggles with literacy.’ Nah.

But, of course, the thing that is most extraordinary about this is that any move away from the (relatively) level playing field of examinations is most damaging to the most disadvantaged children in Scotland. It would – and this is blindingly obvious – cause the poverty-related attainment gap (remember that, Nicola?) to widen. Middle-class parents know ways of helping their children do better, and have the money to achieve it. While, of course, extra purchased tutoring and input from Granny (emeritus Professor of History at the University of Life) helps in exams, it’s more potent when actual bits of work are being done at home. Me, I like the idea that at 9 a.m. on the 30 of April, some 60,000 kids will open the Nat 5 English paper at the same time. No tutor, no granny, no AI, just them and their mates. Long may these fateful exam seasons bring quality control to Scottish education. And good luck, boys and girls!

In 2026 SUE wants to focus our work on reading.

Alongside our campaigning work – organising local meetings and hustings – we hope to produce a Handbook and Manifesto on Scottish Education.

We are intending to initiate a campaign to get Scottish kids’ reading again. We want Scottish children to reach the standard they once occupied – world class. Sadly, this standard has been allowed to degenerate. We are failing our kids.

All this costs money. Please help our campaign. Upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIBER and/or DONATE. SUE needs you.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

Joanna Williams

Class, politics, and reading

Matt Goodwin’s new book, Suicide of a Nation, has prompted a flurry of articles criticising the author’s casual approach to referencing and use of AI. I have yet to read the book, and this is not a review…

Read more

5 months ago · 26 likes · 2 comments · Joanna Williams

Joanna Williams, Class, politics, and reading. Why is Matt Goodwin’s new book a bestseller? 01/04/26

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15692769/Teaching-union-debate-Supreme-Court-trans-genocide.html Eleanor Harding, Largest teaching union to debate whether Supreme Court ruling on trans amounts to ‘genocide’. 31/03/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/02/the-classroom-is-no-place-for-anti-reform-activism/ Joanna Williams, The classroom is no place for anti-Reform activism. The NEU conference could not have been clearer: teachers want to swap traditional schooling for woke indoctrination. 02/04/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/03/why-so-many-children-are-now-classified-as-disabled/ Frank Furedi, Why so many children are now classified as ‘disabled’. Millions of perfectly healthy children are being set up for a lifetime of state dependency and unfulfilled potential. 03/04/26

https://archive.ph/pZq4V Catriona Stewart, ‘Boys call me love’: Rising misogyny crisis in Scotland’s schools. Female teachers are reporting feeling intimidated and undermined by a rising tide of misogyny in Scottish classrooms. 04/04/26

https://archive.ph/2026.04.05-104608/https://www.scotsman.com/education/head-of-scotlands-last-all-boys-school-teach-young-men-to-be-vulnerable-to-counter-manosphere-6563326 Catriona Stewart, Head of Scotland’s last all-boys school: ‘Teach young men vulnerability’ to counter manosphere. As head teacher of Scotland’s last remaining all-boys school, Huw Jones believes instilling emotional resilience is key to tackling toxic masculinity. 05/04/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/03/sean-connery-and-the-war-on-toxic-masculinity/ Alex Cameron, Sean Connery and the war on ‘toxic masculinity’. Giants like Big Tam represented a working-class outlook which has been remorselessly attacked by the elite. 03/11/20

https://archive.ph/DiiK1 Catriona Stewart, Apprenticeships should be valued the same as university degrees, says ex-exams chief. Former Chief Executive of the SQA Dr Janet Brown said only a radical overhaul of public perception would secure the future of Scotland’s education system. 06/04/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/04/her-penis-journalists-have-given-up-on-telling-the-truth/ Janet Murray, ‘Her penis’? Journalists have given up on telling the truth. The Observer is not alone in swapping accurate reporting for trans-activist campaigning. 04/04/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)

It has been reported this week that East Lothian Council’s new gender guidance, ‘Gender Statement – Supporting Transgender Children and Young People in Schools’, says that pupils as young as 12 should be allowed to socially transition, changing their names and pronouns without their parents’ knowledge. The document stated that, ‘It [is] vital not to share information with parents or carers…’.

As has been highlighted on this substack by SUE board member, Dr Jenny Cunningham, a retired paediatrician and author of SUE’s pamphlet, Transgender Ideology in Scottish Schools: What’s wrong with government guidance?, social transitioning is not a benign act of ‘respect’ but is often a pathway to medical transitioning.

Further, the Cass Review cautioned that, ‘it is important to view [social transition] as an active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning’.

This latest outrage by local government regarding Scottish school kids demonstrates that the approach to the Cass Review by national and local government, along with various transgender activist organisations, has at best been ignored [ignorant] and at worst is wilfully disingenuous and dangerous.

As tumbleweed passes through Holyrood as politicians’ attentions turn to the coming election, the SUE Team wait with bated breath for the manifestos of the main parties in particular, in respect to the question of education.

According to the recent Lord Ashcroft Poll, ‘Holyrood 2026: Public opinion and the Scottish Parliament elections’, education rates are very low in the priorities of voters. Among voters of the SNP, not at all. But no party can claim the educational high ground.

When it comes to ‘outcomes’, when asked how well the SNP government was doing when it comes to standards in Scottish schools, only SNP voters could muster a 51% satisfaction rate, all other voters fell way below that figure.

For Cameron Wyllie, ex-Headteacher and columnist for The Scotsman, education is an issue that opposition parties could ‘weaponise’ as ‘…the SNP’s abject failures in education are their most obvious target.’

SUE’s intervention in the coming election is to help turn the tide and put education centre-stage during the election cycle and beyond. Education is more than just ‘education’, it is both a social good and a moral project, but it has been corrupted and become a vehicle for social engineering by the elites in and out of government.

Illustrating this sad truth, this week’s feature article is by academic Jane Fenton. Jane unpicks and reveals the problem of the pathologisation of personality traits and eccentricities in students in higher education. She argues that this therapeutic approach inevitably metamorphosed into identity under the influence of Critical Social Justice Theory.

Finally, we would ask our subscribers to help us in our intervention in the coming election. We have big plans but little money. So, if you support our goals of putting education at the heart of political and social life, please dig deep and become a paid subscriber and/or make a donation.

Alex Cameron (Stuart Waiton will return next week)

In 2026 SUE wants to focus our work on reading.

Alongside our campaigning work – organising local meetings and hustings – we hope to produce a Handbook and Manifesto on Scottish Education.

We are intending to initiate a campaign to get Scottish kids’ reading again. We want Scottish children to reach the standard they once occupied – world class. Sadly, this standard has been allowed to degenerate. We are failing our kids.

All this costs money. Please help our campaign. Upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIBER and/or DONATE. SUE needs you.

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How critical social justice theory fuels the expansion of disability adjustments in universities

The issue

In a previous article for this substack, I argued that critical social justice theory’s central concept, the hierarchy of power and privilege, has damaged higher education by shaping campus culture and orthodoxy. It encourages a simplistic oppressor = bad / oppressed = good binary, stifles free speech and debate, expands notions of harm for assumed marginalised groups, and undermines the core purpose of the university: the pursuit of truth and the production of knowledge. I will not revisit those points here.

Instead, I want to address a related issue that troubled me throughout my academic career in a Scottish university: the accelerating, and increasingly unmanageable, pathologising of personality traits, eccentricities, and especially basic skills deficits as ‘disabilities’ requiring ‘adjustments’. This trend is intimately connected to critical social justice theory’s power-and-privilege model, and much of what is now going wrong can be traced back to it.

When I retired in September, around one-third of my students required adjustments, often for deficits in skills that are absolutely essential in the social work profession, my own field. For example, we were routinely asked to make adjustments for students with ‘auditory processing disorder’, meaning difficulty processing verbal information. Listening is a core social work skill and cannot realistically be ‘adjusted’ for, especially when practitioners must often listen to, and properly hear, distressed, emotional, or angry individuals.

Other adjustments concerned meeting deadlines, attendance, or basic organisation: competencies mandated by the Scottish Social Services Council. Yet disability services insist there are no circumstances in which an adjustment can be refused.

To put this in context, in 2010, 9%–10% of students declared a disability; however, by 2023, the figure had doubled to 19%, with social work students reporting at even higher rates. We may now be producing graduates who lack essential skills. This has consequences far beyond university corridors. When individuals who lack core competencies are nonetheless certified as fit to practise, the impact is borne not by institutions but by the public, service users, patients, and colleagues who must depend on them. In professions such as social work, nursing, medicine, or dentistry, inadequate listening, organisational skills, or emotional resilience are not abstract academic concerns; they translate directly into poorer decisions, increased risk, and avoidable harm. The drive to classify skill deficits as disabilities does not merely lower standards; it produces practitioners who struggle in roles where competence is a matter of real human wellbeing.

How did we get here?

To answer this question, we must examine three interconnected developments:

• the evolution of the social model of disability

• critical social justice theory, particularly the concept of ableism

• the rise of therapeutic education and increasingly fragile students

When I trained as a social worker in the early 1990s, the social model of disability was both humane and sensible. It recognised that disabled people are often disadvantaged because society is not designed around their needs; therefore, installing ramps, offering hearing loops, or providing accessible materials simply removed unfair barriers.

But the Equality Act 2010 and accompanying guidance expanded the umbrella of disability dramatically. Mental health conditions were to be treated the same as physical impairments, and universities, under the Public Sector Equality Duty, were instructed to proactively anticipate the needs of anyone with a long-term condition. Crucially, students may self‑declare conditions such as anxiety, low mood, auditory processing issues, or personality disorders without providing formal evidence, as long as they claim that these difficulties have a substantial impact on their daily life.

This created unintended consequences. People, both students and staff, who cannot meet the basic requirements of their roles can declare a disability and access extensive support. A real example: an academic unable to manage email who was granted a personal assistant to read and organise emails for them, at considerable expense to the university and taxpayer. If this failed, more support was added, although the real issue was competence: email is the default communication method of a university, and being able to manage it is a very basic work requirement.

Similarly, students who perform poorly often win appeal after appeal by invoking conditions that were ‘not properly adjusted for’. Universities, terrified of breaching the Equality Act, comply.

Secondly, critical social justice theory casts able-bodied individuals as oppressors and disabled individuals as oppressed. While genuine discrimination exists, the definition of disability has expanded so broadly that vast numbers of students now qualify. Universities, deeply invested in appearing anti-ableist, track termination rates and adjust practice to reduce any disparities.

The results are predictable:

• skills deficits become pathologised;

• pathologies become identities;

• and identities become protected statuses.

Students who declare conditions often perform poorly, leading institutions to lower standards, relax requirements, and permit repeated appeals, sometimes four or five times, pushing students through programmes for which they are ill equipped.

Finally, the cultural shift toward therapeutic education has made matters worse. Resilience is undervalued; vulnerability is valorised. Scotland now reports that 43% of schoolchildren have additional support needs, twice the rate of England and Wales due largely to an extraordinarily broad set of definitions. This mirrors what is happening in universities: definitions expand, expectations contract.

Students increasingly see themselves as fragile, at risk of psychological harm, and in need of protection, from ideas, from disagreement, and from the ordinary challenges of adult life. This aligns perfectly with the power-and-privilege hierarchy, where defining oneself as afflicted, oppressed, or ‘disabled’ confers moral status and institutional advantage.

Universities inadvertently reinforce this mindset by encouraging safe spaces, trigger warnings, hyper-sensitivity to ‘microaggressions’, and incentives to self-identify as disabled. Meanwhile, students with genuine, formally diagnosed disabilities experience diluted services and reduced support capacity.

Conclusion

The crisis in disability adjustments did not emerge from nowhere. It is the predictable outcome of three interacting forces: a well-intentioned but massively expanded social model of disability, a critical social justice worldview that equates deficit with oppression and competence with privilege, and an educational culture increasingly shaped by therapeutic narratives of fragility.

The result is a university sector that routinely confuses skills deficits with disabilities, treats ordinary challenges as pathologies, and lowers professional standards to avoid accusations of ableism. This serves neither students nor the public. It especially harms those with genuine, profound disabilities, whose needs are obscured amid a sea of self-declared conditions.

A humane and just university system should absolutely support students with real, evidenced disabilities. But it must also uphold professional standards, maintain academic integrity, and refuse to conflate normal variation and basic skill gaps with disability. Until universities regain the courage to draw these essential distinctions, we will continue producing graduates ill prepared for the real world while failing the very individuals the system was designed to help.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25957548.scottish-greens-pledge-end-homework-exams-schools/ Jamie Calder, Scottish Greens pledge to end homework and exams in schools. 22/03/26

Ben Appel’s Newsletter

Former GLAAD President: We Were Wrong to Medicalize Trans-Identified Children

On Friday, Longview’s Reflector podcast debuted Strange Bedfellows: When LGB met T, a three-part series about how the gay rights movement became the LGBTQ movement. Ben Kawaller, a cohost of the series and its lead reporter, interviewed me for it a number of months ago. The portion of our conversation included in the final product focuses largely on my …

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5 months ago · 376 likes · 94 comments · Ben Appel

Ben Appel, Former GLAAD President: We Were Wrong to Medicalize Trans-Identified Children. A new podcast series on tensions within the so-called LGBTQ movement delivers major revelations. 24/03/26

Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A Solid Education Starts With Facts

The argument: A free society depends on citizens grounded in shared factual knowledge, and schools must restore content mastery before skills if we want to preserve self-government…

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5 months ago · 177 likes · 39 comments · Jenna A. Robinson

Jenna A Robinson, A Solid Education Starts With Facts. The West won’t survive if citizens are taught how to argue before they are taught what is true. 24/03/26

Joanna Williams

The betrayal of white working-class boys

Five years on from the publication of the landmark report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, the lead author, Tony Sewell, is still angry. Successive governments have ignored his warnings that England’s schools are failing white working-class boys. This week, Lord Sewell will tell Keir Starmer that ‘boys from the poorest homes are still stuck at the bottom of the class’ and are…

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5 months ago · 15 likes · Joanna Williams

Joanna Williams, The betrayal of white working-class boys. Anyone who still believes in white, male privilege should take a look at England’s school system. 25/03/26

https://archive.ph/EswLs Anon, ‘Gentle parenting’ is wreaking havoc at nurseries like mine. Children don’t need complete freedom to make their own choices, they need to be taught the difference between right and wrong. 26/03/26

Joanna Williams

Education is a moral project

Today, I will speak at a conference in Belgrade, organised by Mathias Corvinus Collegium, on the theme of Reclaiming Classical Education. This is what I will say…

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5 months ago · 19 likes · Joanna Williams

Joanna Williams, Education is a moral project. We need to consider whether a classical approach to schooling might provide children with a new outlook on life. 27/03/26

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15679267/School-AI-purge-library-books-Orwell-1984-Twilight.html Eleanor Harding, School used AI to purge library of ‘inappropriate’ books including Orwell’s 1984 and Twilight, with librarian branded ‘safeguarding risk’. 25/03/26

https://archive.ph/bPFLG Daniel Sanderson, How the SNP spends billions. to buy loyalty from charities’ Grants ensure activists don’t criticise policies on gender, alcohol, drugs and sexual violence. 28/03/26

https://archive.ph/et3et Brendan O’Neill, Andrew Garfield would rather be on the right side of Hollywood than history. Celebrities are so obsessed with displaying their fantasy virtue that they can’t even enjoy culture any more. 29/03/26

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20260330/281500757793479 Dan Barker, Anger as coun­cil lets pupils change gender without par­ental con­sent. 30/03/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

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Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

Plato (427-347 B.C.E.), philosopher and founder of the Academy in ancient Athens

This week’s Substack is, I think, a little special. It is special in part because the main article is one that focuses on morality, and what it means to be a virtuous person. At a time when our moral language has all but disappeared, the attempt at moral clarity expressed here is an important step in the culture war. It is written by Professor Nigel Biggar and is adapted from his excellent new book The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars.

Written in large part as an attempt to explain the immorality of those who threaten academic freedom and open debate in society, Biggar’s book argues that:

The ‘culture wars’ are in fact political and moral debates that cut to the very quick of some of the most substantial questions of our time, ranging from the welfare of children to the way we conceive and manage ethnic and cultural differences in diverse societies. The fact that these debates are so often characterised by bad faith, lack of scruple and mindless abuse exposes the rot at the heart of the intellectual culture of the West, most especially in universities. The authoritarian suppression and the smearing of isolated dissidents, combined with the intimidation of a conflict-averse majority of bystanders, are alarming symptoms of a dangerous reality: our hard-won and fragile liberal culture of rational truth-seeking and good faith civility is under serious threat. A new dark age looms.

Linking the attempts to cancel lecturers to the political brutality of activist academics and their abandonment of academic standards, Biggar is able to expose the immorality of our ‘caring’ institutions. He concludes with this:

In 1919, on the eve of civil war in Ireland, W. B. Yeats wrote in his poem, The Second Coming, that famous line, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’. If we are to avoid a New Dark Age of repression and naked power-struggle, university leaders, managers and professors need to recover liberal conviction and assert it, throwing off the intensely passionate, illiberal tyrants currently riding on the back of their acquiescence.

Scratch the surface of the ‘wise’ words of our time and we quickly find that being ‘kind’ is often a form of cruelty. Being ‘aware’, is often an enforced dogma. While the rights that are promoted today often act as a form of policing rather than a basis for freedom.

I’d strongly recommend this book to anyone who cares about education and indeed society.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

In 2026 SUE wants to focus our work on reading.

Alongside our campaigning work – organising local meetings and hustings – we hope to produce a Handbook and Manifesto on Scottish Education.

We are intending to initiate a campaign to get Scottish kids’ reading again. We want Scottish children to reach the standard they once occupied – world class. Sadly, this standard has been allowed to degenerate. We are failing our kids.

All this costs money. Please help our campaign. Upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIBER and/or DONATE. SUE needs you.

The New Dark Age: why liberals must win the culture wars

Nigel Biggar CBE is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, and author of the bestselling Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023, 2024) and, more recently, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (2025) and The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars (2026).

A suite of corrosive intellectual practices, often perpetrated by senior academics, have spread in some of the world’s most prestigious universities. These include smears by association, pulling of professional rank, careless misrepresentation, straw-manning, unjust bias, false assertion, axiomatic ideological abstraction, and evasive omission. As a result, moral vices like malice, arrogance, impatience, injustice, unfairness, dishonesty, and cowardice have become widespread.

Moreover, what is spread in the lecture hall or seminar room doesn’t stay there. It walks out into the streets. For, graduate bankers, businessmen, healthcare staff, military professionals, journalists, civil servants, politicians, and government ministers who, making decisions that are careless with the truth, arrogant, unteachable, impatient, unjust, uncharitable, and cowardly are bad decisions that cause real damage to institutions and to the human individuals who inhabit or depend upon them. For that reason, we cannot afford universities that are morally tongue-tied. We cannot afford them to be eloquent about transferable skills while speechless about transferable virtues.

These vices and the malpractices they generate impede the common pursuit and discovery of the truth, which is the specific vocation of universities. They permit the perpetrator to avoid listening to opposing views, from being challenged by them and provoked into thinking, lest they be provoked to rethink. They allow him to refuse contrary opinion the basic respect of letting it stand on its own terms and of engaging with it honestly, albeit critically. Thus, they corrupt academic dialogue by making its friction throw out heat rather than light.

Universities, therefore, face a choice. Either they appoint and promote professors who display and disseminate intellectual vices, or they reward those who exemplify and cultivate intellectual virtues.

First among those virtues should be temperance. In this context, that does not mean abjuring alcohol. Rather, more generally, it means the restraint of emotions or, more exactly, passions. Strictly speaking, a ‘passion’ is an emotion that is out of our control and has us at its beck and call. Sexual passion is its epitome. The word derives from the Latin verb, patior, which means ‘to suffer’ or, specifically, ‘to be subjected to’.

We live in a culture that vaunts passion and strong emotion as signs of authenticity and vitality. But emotions can lie. They do not lie about their own felt strength, of course. But they are based on perceptions, and perceptions can be untrue, embodying a lie about what is perceived. Nazis, for example, were subject to very strong, ‘authentic’ passions about Jews. But those passions lied.

Moreover, emotions that are out of our control – passions – blind and deafen us to things we ought to see and truths we ought to hear. Among those truths are the duties we owe other people. Passions can make it impossible for us to perform them.

So, if we are going to be able to see straight and listen carefully, and if we are going to be able to treat other people as they deserve, we need to cultivate temperance. And if we are going to foster temperate graduate citizens, voters, businessmen, lawyers, soldiers, journalists and politicians, then university professors are going to have to start modelling it.

Temperance or self-control is the necessary condition of a second virtue: respect. The duty of the virtue of respect is widely recognised and talked about – but not what is required to make it possible. If we cannot control or restrain ourselves – if we are ‘full of passionate intensity’ – we will not be able to stop ourselves trampling over the rights of others. We will not be able to respect what they deserve.

One thing that other people deserve, at least on first encounter, is the presumption that they are acting in good faith. So, when they speak or write, we should assume that they are expressing the truth as they see it. We should not cynically, presumptuously, arrogantly assume that they are simply rationalising some unjust interest or advantage.

Accordingly, we should begin by attending to what they say, rather than trying to discredit it by assaulting their person – whether by insinuating or smearing or damning by association. Of course, it may be that the more we attend, the more apparent it becomes that they are not acting in good faith. So be it. But our initial stance should be to give benefit of doubt and exercise the virtue of respect.

If we are going to show respect, we will also need to exercise a third virtue: carefulness. When reporting what someone has said or written, we should take care to be strictly accurate, not omitting inconvenient bits, distorting others, bending the whole into a straw man, the easier to knock down.

It may seem that accuracy in reportage is too elementary and prosaic a skill to merit adult attention. But many adults have never learned it, because their teachers never taught or rewarded the virtue of carefulness. Consequently, we have journalists, politicians and – as we saw in the previous chapter – decorated university professors who constantly misrepresent some people, thereby misleading many others.

Being careful with a person’s words, so as to hear and report them accurately is, indeed, elementary in the sense of basic. It is a basic form of doing them justice.

Involved in the virtue of carefulness is, fourth, that of patience. Careful listening often takes time. And if what someone is saying is unfamiliar or complex or ambiguous, careful listening will take a lot of time. So, in order to be careful, we will have to be patient. Sometimes, the meaning of what is said will not give itself up quickly and only becomes clear with careful attention, patiently sustained over time.

The word ‘patience’ derives from the same Latin root as ‘passion’, but in this case it means the opposite. Far from being a strong emotion that renders us its helpless playthings, patience is a species of emotional self-control – of temperance--that enables us to suffer frustration and discomfort in waiting. The virtue of patience is the ability to endure.

Sometimes, what others say or write is not only complicated; sometimes, it is uncertain, inconsistent or ambiguous. One possible response is to represent it in its weakest form. But that is mean and unkind, and possibly cowardly. The generous response is to give an ambiguous utterance the strongest possible construction, not the weakest. This brings us to our fifth virtue: charity.

‘Charity’ here does not mean what we usually take it to mean, namely, the voluntary giving of aid. It means, more broadly, a generous form of love.

It is said of Barack Obama that, as an attorney (barrister), he was wont to open his case by scrupulously summarising the position of his opponent, giving it the best possible construc­tion. Only then did he set about dismantling it.

Such charitable practice is not only kind, but rhetorically optimal. For, generous scrupulousness wins the trust of impartial observers. And it gives precision to the criticism that follows, making it all the more cogent.

Unless we intend to mistake ourselves for gods, we will be aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws. So, when we first encounter someone else’s speech or writing, we should do so with a sixth virtue, humility.

We should not stand upon our rank, looking down, but face the author as an equal, subjecting ourselves to the common rule of evidence and reason. We may have higher professional status and we may be much celebrated, but we should not take ourselves too seriously. We should acknowledge that authorities and professionals sometimes get it wrong – and, if they are arrogant, they almost certainly will. Moreover, temperate, careful, patient, charitable amateurs sometimes get it right. It is not uncommon for truth to speak from an unlikely quarter. Following closely on the heels of humility is, seventh, docility or teachableness. Aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws, we should be open to the possibility that we have things to learn and that we might be mistaken in what we think we know. We should always be ‘docile’, not in the modern sense of being blindly submissive, but in the original sense of being open to being taught and corrected.

Luke Conway observes that ‘one of the hallmarks of the modern left-wing authoritarian movement is its intellectual apathy [...] They dislike thoughtful reflection [...] They shun serious intellectual questions.’ Thinking is what the Tavistock Institute failed to do, as the title of Hannah Barnes’s book indicates: Time to Think. It is also what, I believe, the ‘antiracist’ critics of the Sewell report and the ‘progressive’ critics of my book on colonialism failed to do: engage thoughtfully, albeit sceptically, to find out what they might learn.

In contrast, if we exercise the virtues of temperance, carefulness, respect, patience, humility and docility, we will also exercise an eighth virtue: that of thoughtfulness. We will allow the difference between what we have assumed and what another says to provoke us to reflect, interrogate ourselves, perchance to think and rethink.

Finally, we should exercise the virtue of courage. To be respectful, careful, patient, charitable, humble, docile and thoughtful also makes us vulnerable. That is because, in allowing the voice of another person to ring out clearly and cogently – by not obscuring it with noisy abuse or distorting it into a straw man to be casually dismissed – we may find some of our most cherished convictions challenged, threatened or toppled. And bound up with those convictions may be a career’s worth of reputation, rewards and accumulated social status. It is brave, indeed, to give another person the freedom to speak clearly.

So, there are some of the virtues that university professors ought to teach. There is no neutral position available. If they do not teach these virtues, they will, in effect, teach their opposing vices: intemperance, disrespect, carelessness, impatience, meanness, arrogance, unteachableness, thoughtlessness and cowardice.

How should professors teach the virtues? Certainly, by giving voice to them and rewarding their exercise. Further, in the arts and humanities, by prescribing texts (or films) that illustrate them and provoke reflection and discussion about them. But, most of all, by modelling them in their own conduct. The best way to teach virtue is to be virtuous.

Ultimately, vice-chancellors, university managers and professors have a moral choice to make. Either they promote the virtues that make graduate citizens capable of being intellectually scrupulous and of behaving liberally, or they do not.

For sure, there is no universal consensus on what should count as a virtue and what should count as a vice. If we go with Confucius, we will view deference to political authority as a virtue, but not resistance to it. If we go with the ancient Hebrew prophets, we will view care for the weak and the poor as a virtue, but not if we go with Nietzsche or Ayn Rand. If we go with Jesus, we will view humility, compassion and forgiveness as virtues, but not if we go with Aristotle. As we saw in the case of the controversy in Cambridge in 2020, some people think that ‘respect’ should be promoted, while others do not, preferring ‘tolerance’. And I think myself that compassion and kindness are only virtues in certain circumstances. In others – where, for example, military commanders have to put their own troops in harm’s way, or surgeons have to perform amputations without anaesthetics, or university managers have to make colleagues redundant, or professors have to award marks that cause students to fail – a certain thick-skinned quality, or what we might call ‘callousedness’, is a virtue.

It would have served human welfare better, for example, if staff at the Tavistock’s GIDS clinic had, instead of avoiding their own emotional discomfort, steeled themselves to risk upsetting children by questioning their gender identification, rather than nodding them through to irreversible bodily changes that some have now come to regret.

So, we will not all agree about the choice of virtues or the meaning of them. There will always be room for a plurality of interpretations and further debate. Consensus is usually tense in this sense, not entirely settled and relaxed. That said, we should not exaggerate our moral differences. I cannot think of any former academic colleague who would actually recommend intemperance, disrespect, carelessness, arrogance, thoughtlessness or cowardice.

Regardless, universities cannot afford not to discuss the matter and reach whatever provisional consensus they can. For that to happen, however, its members need to wake up – become ‘woke’, we might say – to the importance of what is at stake: namely, whether or not we are to have a society run by people who are so devoted to the welfare of individuals and the common good that they care to find out the truth – about gender, race, colonial history, etc. – and who care sufficiently to find out the truth that they are willing to humble themselves so as to listen, perhaps learn, and even change course.

In 1919, on the eve of civil war in Ireland, W. B. Yeats wrote in his poem, The Second Coming, that famous line, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’. If we are to avoid a New Dark Age of repression and naked power-struggle, university leaders, managers and professors need to recover liberal conviction and assert it, throwing off the intensely passionate, illiberal tyrants currently riding on the back of their acquiescence.

This article was adapted from The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars by Nigel Biggar, 192 pages, Polity Books (February 2026).

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

Reality’s Last Stand

I’m a Furry. My Community Has a Violence Problem.

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5 months ago · 122 likes · 24 comments · Black Stag

Black Stag, I’m a Furry. My Community Has a Violence Problem. An insider’s account of how online fandom culture can spiral toward extremism. 16/03/36

https://archive.ph/dWpOZ George Chesterton, ‘I’ve given up writing children’s books after being vilified by trans activists’. Author Rachel Rooney made the mistake of speaking up for women and children’s rights in an industry dominated by rigid gender ideology. 16/03/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/16/theres-no-such-thing-as-the-autism-spectrum/ Cory Franklin, There’s no such thing as the autism ‘spectrum’. Medicine is being corrupted by activism and social pressure. 16/03/26

https://archive.ph/wppKt Sophie Winkleman and David James, Textbooks will always beat screens. 12/03/26

https://archive.ph/Vwaww Andrew Learmonth, Human rights watchdog concerns over trans prison policy. 19/03/26

https://archive.ph/ZpXfl Charles Hymas, We have failed white boys, Lord Sewell to tell Starmer. Tory peer says his 2021 report on inequality has been ignored by ‘woke Left and liberal Right’. 21/03/26

https://archive.ph/NuiYT Janet Murray, Girl Guides at war over trans ban. Hostilities within organisation after splinter group tries to reverse ban on biological boys from becoming members 22/03/26

https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/violent-incidents-scots-schools-more-33636764 Craig Meighan, Violent incidents in Scots schools have more than doubled in the past four years. Since 2021-22, the number of violent incidents recorded in secondary schools soared by 182 per cent from 2,413 to 6,809. 22/03/26

https://www.gbnews.com/news/trans-row-schoolchildren-as-young-as-10-told-to-read-activist-book-about-girl-whose-father-transitions-to-become-a-woman Ben McCaffrey, Schoolchildren as young as 10 told to read ‘activist’ book about girl whose father ‘transitions to become a woman’. 22/03/26

Restore Childhood’s Newsletter

We Live in an Age of Feelings

On Thursday I went to hear Robert P. George speak at the Manhattan Institute…

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5 months ago · 22 likes · Natalya Murakhver

Natalya Murakhver, We Live in an Age of Feeling. Princeton’s Robert P. George on truth, free speech, and the crisis in our schools. 22/03/26

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Neoclassical statue in Edinburgh of Henry Dundas (1742-1811), 1st Viscount Melville, Lord Advocate, First Lord of the Admiralty, Member of Parliament, Home Secretary (1792), and First Secretary of State for War (1796)'.

Last year Stirling University proudly announced that ‘History teachers go back to school as they reshape Scots’ role in the Empire’.

Part of this proud pronouncement explained that ‘This year’s National 5 and Higher history exams carried new wording relating to migration and empire after the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) changed the course specification from “contribution of Scots” in favour of “the impact” of Scots’.

If it’s not already obvious what this means, focus on the word ‘impact’.

Today the word impact, or human impact, is used as a pejorative term, as in the ‘impact’ on the environment, for example.

The significance of this is that until recently, humanity acting in and on the world was understood in precisely the opposite way, as part and parcel of human progress.

For centuries, humanity’s relationship with nature was one of suffering, but over time, our capacity to intervene, to understand and control nature, led to a modern world where our health and wealth is at levels that would have been unimaginable to past generations.

In our current and deeply cynical times, however, human activity and its progressive potential has been turned on its head, and we are left with this idea of inherently negative human ‘impact’.

This outlook appears to now be part and parcel of how we understand human history and as a result, rather than focus on ‘Scots as successful pioneers and traders’, the new history being given to our teachers will focus on ‘the effect they had on indigenous people, or to the voices of those who were displaced, exploited or marginalised’. All helped by Stirling’s ‘experts’, these ‘upskilling educators’ will give our history teachers ‘a deeper understanding of Scots’ impact in Canada, Australia and New Zealand’.

Explaining these changes, Dr Joe Smith explained that: ‘It is imperative that Scottish settler history is taught with accuracy, sensitivity and depth, and that teachers have the expertise to answer questions pupils increasingly have about colonial history, systemic racism or historical social justice.’

Will the children’s questions about social justice include some discussion about social justice being a modern ideology, I wonder? Or will it be pointed out that the idea of ‘systemic racism’ is a foundational pillar of the highly contested and political outlook of critical race theory (CRT)? One suspects not.

Once again, rather than a balanced understanding of the past, – a warts-and-all approach – we are likely to see the ever-growing hyperfocus on the warts, be they real or imagined.

And so our children, rather than being educated about the impressive and disproportionate role that Scots had in developing modern societies around the world, will become ‘sensitive’ to the ‘impact’ that we had.

Perhaps Dr Smith and his ‘upskilling’ comrades need to be reminded that until modern Western nations developed our civilisation, the very idea of being sensitive to other peoples, of abolishing slavery, or of treating human beings as having universal rights, simply did not exist.

There are plenty of warts to consider in the development of civilisation, but let us not forget that life in the pre-modern world, as Thomas Hobbes explained back in 1651 was ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

On that note, it is good to see that elsewhere, our CRT friends have taken a bit of a knocking, and what was to be a nasty, brutish and short career for the professor emeritus Dr John Harris has been extended.

Dr Harris was seemingly not ‘sensitive’ enough when he dared to critique CRT, noting that it ‘tends to find prejudice and things like microaggressions everywhere’. As a result, the Plymouth Marjon University removed his academic title because his research did not fit with its ‘values’.

Perhaps now that he has been reinstated, Stirling could get him up as a quest speaker for next year’s cohort of history teachers to give a little balance to Scotland’s re-education camp.

Below, poet and novelist Donald S. Murray has written an article for SUE that raises some interesting questions about transparency in our education system. In particular, Murray raises the question about safety in relation to both real and false allegations that are made regarding children and also teachers. His suggested solution to these problems is the creation of an Independent National Whistleblowing Officer.

I would be interested to know what people think about this, not least of all because there does appear to be a lack of transparency when it comes to education: info@sue.scot

Here, for example, Annemarie Ward has written an excellent article explaining how Glasgow City Council’s education cuts, including a reduction in teacher numbers, end up being lost to the public through the Kafkaesque committee processes and language used. As she notes:

This creates one of the stranger features of modern governance. Public institutions have never published so much information. Reports multiply, assessments expand, consultations flourish – transparency exists in extraordinary volume. And yet clarity feels harder to find. Understanding what is actually being decided increasingly requires the interpretive skills of a medieval theologian reading footnotes for hidden meaning.

On a wider note, regarding transparency, it has become clear to SUE over the last two years that getting teachers to speak out about problems in schools is very difficult, not least because they fear that they will get into trouble.

This reminds me of the time that SUE member Simon Knight wrote a critical newspaper article entitled, ‘This rotten named person scheme is an accident waiting to happen’. As a result, the council he worked for called him in for a disciplinary meeting for daring to question a council policy.

Across the board today, it feels like almost anyone working for councils, including teachers, face serious repercussions for simply raising questions about the impact of certain policies.

What should be done about this is a question worth asking. Do we need whistleblower frameworks to be set? I’m not sure. What I am sure about is that a healthy public spirit is created not by hiding what is going on in councils and schools but by encouraging debate and discussion about it. One first step would be to increase the real involvement (and power) of parents within schools.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

In 2026 SUE wants to focus our work on reading.

Alongside our campaigning work – organising local meetings and hustings – we hope to produce a Handbook and Manifesto on Scottish Education.

We are intending to initiate a campaign to get Scottish kids’ reading again. We want Scottish children to reach the standard they once occupied – world class. Sadly, this standard has been allowed to degenerate. We are failing our kids.

All this costs money. Please help our campaign. Upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIBER and/or DONATE. SUE needs you.

The case for an Independent National Whistleblowing Officer

Donald S. Murray is from the Isle of Lewis but now lives in Shetland. A teacher for 30 years, his poetry collection Achanalt won the Callum MacDonald award, and his novel As the Women Lay Dreaming (Saraband) received the Paul Torday Award. His play Sequamur has been chosen as a Higher English text by the SQA. His new novel, The Loch of the Bees, was published this month.

As someone who was involved in teaching for many years, I have come to a few unfortunate conclusions in recent times. They include the judgement that our current safeguarding systems for both education and children’s services are neither safe nor consistent, not fully protecting either youngsters, teaching or support staff. Procedures are all too sadly all over the place, varying from one local council to the next. Consistency and reliability are – unfortunately – rarely to be found across Scotland as a whole in terms of the handling of these matters.

Sadly, I am not alone in coming to this conclusion. This week, Petition 1979 was discussed within the Scottish parliament. Having obtained over 2000 signatures, it has been raised by a group of individuals – many of whom, like me, have teaching experience. They include Alison Dickie, who was also a former Edinburgh councillor, like another of the main motivators, Bill Cook, Christine Scott, who worked as the Community Programme Manager at Castlebrae High School, and finally, Neil Maclennan, an independent councillor and teacher who was formerly a Director of the Scottish Colleges for educational leadership.

There is little doubt that their argument has validity. As Alison Dickie argued in her recent article in the Scotsman, there is little dispute that there is a need for an independent whistleblowers office within Scotland, and for politicians, too, to avoid turning their gaze away from the all-too-frequent mishandling of cases that involve children being groomed, trafficked and sexually exploited. Clearly none of this is acceptable in terms of morality and decency.

The leaflet they provide to support their petition also gives their reasons for their actions. One of the saddest and most dramatic is the story of Lindsay McNicholas, who was employed at a nursery in the Highlands. She raised her concerns about the treatment of an autistic child in that establishment. This resulted in a forced resignation, her dismissal, and referral to the General Teaching Council – all penalties for performing a justifiable act. After years of suffering and suspension, she was eventually cleared of her so-called offence and received sizeable compensation – nearly £400,000 – for all that she had gone through.

Yet even despite this sizeable compensation, Lindsay did not feel fully comforted. Recalling everything she had gone through and the length of time she had experienced this, she declared that ‘it was the most degrading thing she could ever imagine happening to someone’.

Unfortunately, however, she is not unique. Over the past few years, I have spoken to teachers who have undergone similar lengthy periods of suffering. Sometimes, allegations have been made by pupils which have resulted in teachers ending up in court, only for the case to be dismissed moments after the trial had started, with the youngsters withdrawing their spurious claims – a pattern I have become aware of happening in several locations over the years.

There is another story of which I am acutely aware. A young teacher informed me that he had experienced a situation several years ago in which a pupil who was sent to prison for his behaviour a short time after leaving school had labelled him a ‘paedophile’, passing on this allegation to the younger schoolchildren by use of his mobile phone. Spreading this malicious allegation clearly made it impossible for him to continue teaching in his particular workplace.

The young teacher also questioned his local council’s response to this dilemma, noting how ‘catastrophic’ the situation had been for him. ‘Does it have to be?’ he asked. ‘You’re part of a system, right. This must have happened before. Surely there are effective procedures. What if, post allegation when you reach out and ask for help, the institution instinctively chooses to protect itself? What becomes clear, the only thing that is clear, is that the institution matters more than you.’

He notes, too, issues that undoubtedly also have their effect on individuals in situations like these when they seek to confront institutions – like his local council – whose responses have had an effect on his life. ‘If instead of understanding and compassion, you are met with coercive control. Where do you go?’ he questions. ‘If systems are free from consequence or accountability, what do you do? An employee–employer relationship is one where the power dynamic lies with a system which it is supposed to protect.’

‘Yet what happens when institutions running their own investigations, grievances or disciplinaries are open to abuse, cover-ups or corruptions? We need to change. Break this cycle. Support survivors. Altering the system requires open, honest communication with victims.’

It is a conclusion with which I unfortunately agree. One of the negative effects of Michael Forsyth’s creation of smaller local authorities is that too many in charge of such bodies lack the depth and range of experience necessary to handle matters like these in a genuine and consistent manner. Though sometimes these changes were necessary, they have occasionally led to individuals, such as teachers, pupils, support staff and janitors, enduring unnecessary suffering and other grim experiences.

There also have been occasions when the opposite has had its effect on those with personal and – indeed – political connections to either their local authority or elsewhere, when those guilty of offences have escaped without the proper repercussions for their actions.

Neil McLennan sums up his important perspective by declaring: ‘In the NHS, we saw cover-ups and whistleblowing required to protect people from wrongdoing, abuses of power and safeguarding concerns. Now the NHS has a whistleblowing watchdog via the Independent National Whistleblowing. It seems that a similar body is required across all education and children’s services in Scotland.’

‘This needs to happen urgently, especially given what we have seen from historic and ongoing mishandling of safeguarding and other cases. There needs to be established mechanisms for people to speak out and an assurance of independence in the bodies receiving such claims.’

‘It is the only way for people to have confidence that their voice will be heard and taken seriously by a body autonomous from the “cosy consensus” who are so often cited as the issue with Scottish public life and in the many scandals that are emerging. The case for an Independent National Whistleblowing Officer has been well made. Scottish government must now act to protect all. To not act prolongs the well-known injustices.’

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/10/ofsted-is-pushing-the-bigotry-of-low-expectations/ Neil Davenport, Ofsted is pushing the bigotry of low expectations. ‘Inclusive’ policies in schools are a recipe for cementing inequality. 10/03/26

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/07bca7d0513a4a7f Joanna Williams, There’s money to be made in giving children trans hormones. Private clinics can still prescribe cross-sex hormones, and narcissistic parents are paying for their services. 11/03/26

https://archive.ph/2026.03.11-093253/https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/25925512.msps-told-address-important-gap-school-curriculum/ Rebecca McCurdy, MSPs told to address ‘important gap’ in school curriculum. The next Scottish Government must take ‘urgent action’ to address the ‘important gap’ of sleep in the education curriculum, experts have said. 11/03/26

https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-neurodiversity-movement-has-become-harmful Moheb Costandi, Against neurodiversity. The movement has good intentions, but it favours the high-functioning and overlooks those who struggle with severe autism. 12/09/19

https://archive.ph/cfhUu Gwyneth Rees, How a generation forgot what it is to be resilient. A new study finds that poor mental health among the young is damaging the economy. Does ‘generation sicknote’ just need to toughen up? 27/02/26

Joanna Williams

No More Heroes Any More

The Bank of England has announced plans to redesign cash. In years to come, banknotes will feature wildlife rather than historical figures. Out goes Churchill, in comes otters and hedgehogs. One justification for the change is that images of animals and birds are, apparently, more difficult to counterfeit than pictur…

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5 months ago · 22 likes · 3 comments · Joanna Williams

Joanna Williams, No More Heroes Any More. Why it matters that historical figures will be replaced by wildlife on banknotes 13/03/26

Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

TWAA: Why the Fight for Western Civilization Matters

On March 4, the team at the AHA Foundation launched Restoring the West, which you are now reading. It’s a new Substack with old-yet-urgent underpinnings: that of defending and renewing the principles of Western civilization. The launch of RTW was a long-brewing dream that finally percolated to culmination, and it’s a reminder of why I still fight…

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5 months ago · 240 likes · 6 comments · Restoring the West by Ayaan

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, TWAA: Why the Fight for Western Civilization Matters 14/03/26

Restore Childhood’s Newsletter

Does your child know who Churchill was? I’m asking seriously

Ask your child tonight. Not about dates. Not about battles. Just: who was Winston Churchill, why did he matter, and what would have happened if he hadn’t…

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5 months ago · 12 likes · Natalya Murakhver

Natalya Murakhver, Does your child know who Churchill was? I’m asking seriously. We are raising the first generation of Americans who cannot place themselves in history. 16/03/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/03/11/labour-is-taking-inspiration-from-the-taliban/ Hugo Timms, Labour is taking inspiration from the Taliban. Schools in northern England have been advised against allowing art, music or dancing that Muslims deem ‘idolatrous’. 11/03/26

https://archive.ph/c0fUe Tony Sewell, I tried to warn Britain about the curse of identity politics. Five years on, I’ve been proved right. Racial disparity is not the same as racism. Conflating them is devastating for public policy. 15/03/26

Thanks for reading the SUE Newsletter.

Please visit our Substack

Please join the union and get in touch with our organisers.

Email us at info@sue.scot

Contact SUEs Parents and Supporters Group at psg@sue.scot

Follow SUE on X (FKA Twitter)

Please pass this newsletter on to your friends, family and workmates.

The education research group Enlighten have published an ‘Education Manifesto’ that argues the current Curriculum for Excellence framework in schools is ‘harming the long-term prospects of a generation of children’ because knowledge is being ‘devalued’ in the current curriculum.

The government confusingly asserts that the ‘curriculum is already knowledge-rich’ while also appearing to recognise the need for further enrichment.

Elsewhere, Suella Braverman, Reform UK’s Shadow Education Secretary, has argued the need for a ‘patriotic and balanced curriculum’ in England. But as the Daily Sceptic notes, a survey in 2008 found that three-quarters of the 300 teachers asked agreed with the statement that it was their responsibility to warn pupils not to feel good about their country.

Perhaps given the level of cynicism today, we could at least recognise that to start with we actually need a curriculum based on the best knowledge humanity has produced, whether that is ‘patriotic’ or not. At least then we could have a discussion about what is the best.

What books we read in English, because they are the best, would be a valuable discussion to have. I’ve been in a book club for over 25 years, and while there are great novels from around the world, at the same time, it is hard to beat Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Orwell, Greene or Kafka. But then I guess that may be my unconscious colonial mindset speaking ... or something.

When picking things to read in school there appears to be a preoccupation with making sure the books are ‘relevant’ for the kids and that they relate to their own ‘lived experience’. Ironically, however, when it comes to the lived experience of living in Britain and Scotland, at times, this idea of relevance appears to disappear. Lived experience, it turns out, struggles to get past identities or the multi-cultural police to embrace national gems.

Teaching history is another hot potato, but I don’t think you need to be one-eyed to recognise that Britain has been one of the most influential countries in human history. Not to be overly patriotic, but especially when so many middle class professionals appear to have such a jaded view of our past it does feel like we need to have a proper discussion in society about things like freedom and democracy, and indeed, for example, the British parliamentary system of government that – despite its flaws – has been one of the most successful and influential across the world.

I’d be more than happy to have an education system that attempts to engage with these subjects, warts and all. But today, for many, it appears that all that we see are the warts.

On that note, it is good to see that Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar has a new book out called The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars. We will be publishing a section of this book soon, and if anyone wants to review it for us, get in touch: info@sue.scot

The book is important because it raises the argument about why a liberal culture is vital for civilisation. From his own experience of students and academics trying to cancel him, Biggar knows all too well that whatever you say about liberal ideals, at least they allow you to express your opinion.

This is, of course, one of the other ironies about the inconsistent ideas of those who denounce ‘British values’, which is that they see themselves as the open-minded people, when in reality they are constantly trying to close the book on anything that does not fit their cynical grievance mindset.

We’re keen to develop our work on the importance of history in schools, and in particular we would love to hear from history teachers in Scotland who can help us understand what is and is not being taught today, so please get in touch: info@sue.scot

Finally, I would like to thank Dr Jenny Cunningham, who has written (below) perhaps the most comprehensive explanation for why puberty blocker trials are fundamentally flawed.

What is so useful about this piece of work is that Cunningham engages with both the science and the social science when addressing the ‘trans’ question.

The point, for me, that I think needs further work, is to understand that when a scientist like Hilary Cass vacillates on the question of puberty blocker trials for kids, this is not because of science. It is because of empathy.

Time and again, in my work as an academic, I come back to this issue, and I think understanding the emotional correctness involved in the discussion of transgenderism is vital to understanding how it comes to be so confused.

The point about this is that when Cass and others open the door to clinical trials on children, they are doing this not because of science but because of the cultural weight of politically correct empathy.

Empathising with diversity, divergence, the excluded, and so on is a new moral must for the correct-thinking (and -feeling) professional classes. When faced with a child stating that they are a different gender, the correct class respond by saying, ‘I feel your pain’.

By so doing, they are expressing their ‘awareness’. Who are they, after all, to determine ‘who you really are’. This is a personal matter for every individual, and being aware of the pain, hurt, harm, of not ‘recognising you for who you are’ demonstrates to the world that you are indeed a good person.

It is not evidence that leads professionals to experiment on children in a way that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. It is the rise of the ethic of enlightened empathy as a central plank in our relativistic elites’ moral outlook. This is why logic, reason, and even scientific evidence often seem not to matter to these people, because it is not what they know that is key, it is how they feel.

Thankfully, the reasoned arguments – and indeed the political pressure – that have grown over the years to highlight the dangers of transgender ideology are forcing those in authority to backtrack. In Scotland, however, the aware elites continue to run the show, and it is up to all of us to increase the pressure on them.

One final point on this matter is to note the substantial amount of work that has already been done that raises serious questions about the role of empathy in society. For one of these pieces of work, Fritz Breithaupt’s book The Dark Sides of Empathy, we find the following summary:

Many consider empathy to be the basis of moral action. However, the ability to empathise with others is also a prerequisite for deliberate acts of humiliation and cruelty. In The Dark Sides of Empathy, Fritz Breithaupt contends that people often commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of over-identification and a desire to increase empathy. Even well-meaning compassion can have many unintended consequences, such as intensifying conflicts or exploiting others.

Furthermore, it is noted that

Empathy plays a central part in a variety of highly problematic behaviours. From mere callousness to terrorism, exploitation to sadism, and emotional vampirism to stalking, empathy all too often motivates and promotes malicious acts.

It’s time to expose the cruelty of the empathy trap and the harm that this emotional vampirism is causing to the children of Scotland.

Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE

In 2026 SUE wants to focus our work on reading.

Alongside our campaigning work – organising local meetings and hustings – we hope to produce a Handbook and Manifesto on Scottish Education.

We are intending to initiate a campaign to get Scottish kids’ reading again. We want Scottish children to reach the standard they once occupied – world class. Sadly, this standard has been allowed to degenerate. We are failing our kids.

All this costs money. Please help our campaign. Upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIBER and/or DONATE. SUE needs you.

Pernicious puberty blocker trial: paediatric medical transition should be stopped, not researched

Dr Jenny Cunningham is a retired paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for 30 years.

In December 2025, James Esses, former barrister and campaigner against paediatric medical transition (PMT), launched the following petition online:

Cancel the clinical trial into puberty blockers & safeguard vulnerable children. The government is aware of the potential irreversible impact (physical and emotional) of puberty blockers, having acknowledged an ‘unacceptable safety risk’ following the Cass Review. Yet, hundreds of children are about to be given puberty blockers under a government-sanctioned trial. We want the trial to be cancelled.

By 29 January 2026, 139,418 signatures had been submitted to the UK Parliamentary Petitions Committee. The government responds to all petitions that get more than 10,000 signatures. When a petition has over 100,000 signatures, it is considered for a debate in Parliament. The Department for Health and Social Care responded to the petition on behalf of the government, on 2 February 2026. On 7 February, with signatures at 140,750, the date for a parliamentary debate was announced for 9 March.[1]

The trial, led by King’s College London, plans to recruit 226 children and adolescents, below the age of 15 years, who have ‘gender incongruence’, with the aim of measuring the effects of puberty blockers [PBs] on their quality of life, emotional wellbeing and physical development – including brain and bone development.[2] PBs halt the significant changes that normally occur during puberty, interfering with the development of secondary sexual characteristics and sex cells (eggs and sperm), bone development, and emergent cognitive capacities.

In its response to the petition, the Department of Health and Social Care stressed that:

We are following the expert advice of the Cass Review to establish a clinical trial to determine the relative benefits and harms of puberty suppression in young people with gender incongruence. [...] The Independent Cass Review concluded [...] that there is not enough clinical evidence for the safe and effective routine use of puberty suppressing hormones to treat gender incongruence in under-18s. For that reason, the Government supported and extended indefinitely the ban on their use outside of research.[1]

The government response went on to state that the ‘bar for a UK clinical trial to be approved is extremely high, with the PATHWAYS trial going through rigorous rounds of scientific, clinical, ethical and regulatory review’. The supposedly rigorous approval process included oversight by the National Institute for Health and Care Research funding committee, the Health Research Authority, an independent Research Ethics Committee and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

The trial was due to begin this April. However, MHRA has now written to the King’s College London team, advising that the trial will be paused pending further discussions, because of several new concerns:

The safety and wellbeing of the participants to be recruited to the PATHWAYS clinical trial is paramount, particularly in view of the age of the children and young people who may be involved. For this reason, MHRA is applying the highest scrutiny and taking a cautious and measured approached.[3]

One suspects that rather than being part of a routine process, the pause has been precipitated by an unprecedented amount of opposition to the trial – on clinical, scientific and ethical grounds – from a number of professional organisations and many critics of PMT.[4, 5, 6]

MHRA recommends that the minimum age for participation in the trial should be 14 years. If a 14-year old intends to go on to take cross-sex hormones (an ‘option’ at the end of the trial), they will only have been on PBs for 2 years before accessing cross-sex hormones at 16 years (assuming the ban on PBs before 18 years does not apply to trial participants). Below 14 years, participants would have a longer ‘bridging’ period on blockers and be at greater risk of ‘potentially significant, and as-yet-unquantified risk of long-term biological harms’[3] to participants. MHRA is also concerned about younger participants because of the risk of infertility, as neither sperm nor ova will have matured if PBs are given at the start of puberty. (Of course, infertility is more or less assured if PBs are followed by cross-sex hormones.)

A very serious concern raised by MHRA (and by many critics) is that the trial has ill-defined or no criteria for withdrawal of participants from the trial if there is evidence of compromised bone development after 12 months, or less, on PBs. Similarly, if changes to MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) scans suggest compromised cognitive pathways, MHRA recommends that advice be sought from ‘experts in neuroimaging’ to clarify what changes would warrant withdrawal of participants from the trial.

Opponents of the trial want it stopped, not just made a little more ‘rigorous’. Hilary Cass’s influential review was an important step in discrediting every aspect of ‘affirmative gender care’, including the use of PBs in peri-pubertal children and adolescents, by demonstrating ‘remarkably weak evidence’ for their use.[7, p. 13]

There are reports that PBs are beneficial in reducing mental distress and improving the wellbeing of children and young people with gender dysphoria, but as demonstrated by the systematic review, the quality of these studies is poor.[7, p. 179]

What really jarred with this was her recommendation that PBs be used in a clinical trial context. Cass has welcomed the PATHWAYS trial, accepting the argument of study leader Professor Emily Simonoff that the study will explore ‘the balance between, possibly, benefits for mental health and quality of life, and any possible risks or harms’, adding that it would include monitoring people’s health, and would be the first ever study looking at the impact on brain development.[8] Cass said in the same BBC News interview that:

My review uncovered a very weak evidence base for benefits from the use of puberty blockers for children and young people with gender dysphoria. In fact, some children had more negative than positive effects. However, given that there are clinicians, children and families who believe passionately in the beneficial effects, a trial was the only way forward to make sense of this.[8]

Elsewhere, she has argued that desperate families continue to get the drugs from unregulated providers and foreign sources. She believes that if evidence is found that they do not help children it would stem demand.[9] These arguments sound more like wishful thinking than reasoned and ethically sound positions.

Neither Professor Simonoff nor Hilary Cass appear to have taken cognizance of the major American study by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices, published in November 2025.[10] In many ways, it supersedes the Cass Review and it surpasses it in several important respects. Firstly, it is an umbrella review – it is a systematic review of all the international systematic reviews.

The umbrella review found the overall quality of evidence concerning the effects of any intervention on psychological outcomes, quality of life, regret or long-term health is very low. This indicates that the beneficial effects reported in the literature are likely to differ substantially from the true effects of the interventions.[10, p. 13]

Secondly, the HHS Review surpasses the Cass Review by including two pertinent chapters – one on terminology, the other on ethics.

Terminology

The Cass Review is agnostic about the terminology and concepts employed in paediatric gender medicine. The Foreword begins: ‘This Review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities.’[7, p. 12] Cass never interrogates the terminology explored in the HHS Review, often using some of it uncritically.

At the start, the HHS Review gives an important clarification about the diagnosis of gender dysphoria:

Gender dysphoria is based entirely on subjective self-reports and behavioral observations, without any objective physical, imaging, or laboratory markers. The diagnosis centers on attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that are known to fluctuate during adolescence. Additionally, the natural history of pediatric gender dysphoria is poorly understood, though existing research suggests it will remit without intervention in most cases.[10, p. 10]

The term gender identity is ‘an especially important example of how words can sow confusion’. When first used in the 1960s, it meant ‘the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness “I am a male” or “I am a female”.’ In this sense, ‘everyone has a gender identity congruent with their sex’. Today, ‘gender identity is used in a significantly different way’. The example is given of gender identity in the glossary of WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), where it is defined as ‘a person’s deeply felt internal sense of their own gender’. So what does gender mean? One meaning given in the glossary is that gender can mean ‘gender identity’. But gender cannot mean gender identity, otherwise the WPATH’s definition would be that gender identity is a person’s deeply felt internal sense of their gender identity! Another meaning of gender given is ‘gender expression’, but ‘this also leads to circularity because gender expression is itself defined in the glossary in terms of gender’.[10, pp. 34–35] The HHS Review makes the point that ‘no tolerably clear definition of “gender identity” has been offered [...] This is a serious problem, because the term figures centrally in the justification for medical intervention. The term “transgender” is typically used in terms of gender identity. Transgender people are those whose gender identities do not “align with” or “match” their sex (or “sex assigned at birth”)’. The point is made that ‘transgender’ is ‘not a clinical term and does not correspond to a medical diagnosis’. ‘Dysphoric children and socially transitioned children are routinely referred to as “transgender children”.’[10, pp. 36–38]

Terminology in the HHS Review attempts to avoid ‘unclarity and ambiguity’; therefore, the terms gender, gender identity and transgender child are avoided. Gender dysphoria is in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so, despite problems with gender, it is used in the absence of another term. ‘Gender nonconformity’ is ‘a familiar and well understood phrase’ and is used (some prefer ‘sex stereotype nonconformity’). ‘Pediatric Gender Medicine’ and ‘Pediatric Medical Transition’ are used instead of ‘gender-affirming care’. The term ‘cross-sex hormones’ is ‘more neutral and informative’ than ‘gender-affirming hormone therapy’. Surgeries to alter sex characteristics are given ‘medically standard, clinical descriptions, such as “mastectomy” rather than “gender affirming chest surgery” or “top surgery”’.[10, p. 40]

Ethics

The HHS Review devotes a whole chapter to different aspects of ethical issues and to ‘Research Ethics’ in particular. ‘A natural response among researchers to the absence of higher quality evidence is to conduct more and better research. Whether and how such research should be conducted however, is a matter of significant ethical controversy.’[10, p. 242] It is critical of the UK’s planned PB trial and points out that critics of PMT have raised concerns about it.

They worry about prescribing PBs, even in research settings, given the ‘recognized inability of clinicians to distinguish between patients whose gender dysphoria will persist into adulthood from those whose gender dysphoria will resolve on its own and the high likelihood that any patient who begins PBs will go on to cross-sex hormones and possibly surgery [...] It is unclear whether PBs are a stand-alone treatment and should be studied as such.’[10, p. 244]

‘There are other important ethical problems to consider. The Nuremberg Code is a foundational and international accepted statement of norms guiding human subject research.’ It stipulates that the design of an experiment should be ‘based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study’. In other words, animal studies should be carried out before PMT treatments are tested on humans, to understand how these affect fertility, brain development and bone development, and whether fertility can be recovered after puberty suppression.[10, pp. 244–245] Sally Baxendale’s literature review of the impact of puberty suppression on neurophysiological function (which included 11 animal studies) indicated that cognitive effects were not fully recovered after discontinuation of PBs.[11]

The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, another ‘internationally accepted statement of guidance for human subject research’, requires that:

All medical research involving human participants must be preceded by careful assessment of predictable risks and burdens to the individuals and groups involved in the research in comparison with foreseeable benefits [...] researchers may not engage in research involving human participants unless they are confident that the risks and burdens have been adequately assessed and can be satisfactorily managed.

The HHS Review concludes that ‘the state of the science does not support a favorable risk/benefit profile, nor does it give researchers a basis for confidence that the risks of PMT can be satisfactorily managed’.[10, p. 245] It may be on the basis of some of these grounds that the MHRA has paused the King’s College London PATHWAYS trial.

In an interview for the BMJ, Hiliary Cass argued that:

Based on existing literature, I cannot say with certainty that there aren’t children who could benefit from puberty blockers, though I believe the numbers are likely to be very small [...] While we don’t understand the cause – it’s not simply about ‘being in the wrong body’ – these children have always existed, and we need to figure out the best ways to support them.[12]

Aside from the transgender activist trope about ‘being born in the wrong body’, it is not true that these children have always existed in the sense Cass implies. Her own Review meticulously documented that the cohort of children and adolescents presenting to gender identity services in the UK and internationally from 2014 to 2015 were uniquely different from the small numbers, of mainly boys, who had gender dysphoria from early childhood which generally resolved at puberty. For example, in the 10 years from 1989, when the predecessor of the Tavistock Gender Development Service (GIDS) started, to 2000, there was a total of 160 referrals.[13] According to Cass, from 2014 ‘referrals to the Tavistock GIDS began to increase at an exponential rate, with the majority of referrals (over 70%) being birth registered females presenting in early teenage years’. GIDS received approximately 5000 referrals in 2021–2022 alone.[7, p. 85] Cass characterised this new cohort as ‘complex. Many had co-occurring conditions: mental health diagnoses (including eating disorders, depression, anxiety and body dysmorphic disorder), neurodevelopmental disorders (especially autism spectrum disorders), experience in the care system and previous trauma, (such as sexual and physical abuse). Many were same sex attracted.’[7, pp. 90–94]

Cass, in her desire to justify her belief that a small number of children and adolescents may benefit from PBs or medical transition, tried to fit ‘gender incongruence’ into a medical framework. (In the Review’s glossary, ‘gender incongruence is characterised by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and their assigned sex’[7, p. 243]).

For some children and young people with gender incongruence, ‘innate’ or biological factors may play a part in some individuals, in ways that are not yet understood, and in others psychosocial factors, including life experiences, and societal and cultural influences, may be more important. However, she has to concede that ‘since biological factors have not changed in the last ten years it is necessary to look at other possible reasons for the increase in referrals and the disproportionate representation of birth-registered females.’[7, p. 117]

Cass agrees that peer influence during adolescence is ‘very powerful’, as is the influence of social media. ‘The Review has heard accounts of female students forming intense friendships with other gender-questioning or transgender students in school, and then identifying as trans themselves.’[7, p. 122] Nevertheless, when considering the possibility that these peer influences might suggest the phenomenon of social contagion, she argues that ‘this is potentially the most contested explanation, with the term “social contagion” causing distress to some in the trans community’.[7, p. 117] Contested it certainly is, with transgender activists internationally reacting vehemently against this characterisation of the explosive increase in the numbers of mainly adolescent girls expressing transgender identities. It challenges the whole basis of gender ideology – that individuals have an innate, deeply felt gender identity in conflict with their natal sex.

The HHS Review argues that ‘social influence is a likely factor’ in the epidemiological changes that international systematic reviews of paediatric gender medicine have all identified. It does not mention social contagion specifically but references the study in 2018 by ‘physician and researcher, Lisa Littman’, who ‘popularized the phrase “rapid onset gender dysphoria” or ROGD, in the peer reviewed literature’.[10, p. 69) This described adolescents and young adults, predominantly female, in whom gender dysphoria began during or after puberty and was not reported to have been experienced in childhood. Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian psychoanalyst, also mentioned in the HHS Review, had used the term ROGD in a paper in 2017, to describe a new presentation of teens ‘coming out as trans in peer clusters, as we have seen happen before with suicide and eating disorder contagion’.

My fear – and I am hardly alone in this – is that adopting a transgender identity has become the newest way for teen girls to express feelings of discomfort with their bodies – an issue adolescent girls typically experience. The problem here is that many young women are seeking transition after coming to identify as transgender, and transition can have extreme consequences.[14]

Littman too had surmised that transgender identification among female friendship groups was very like other social contagions, such as anorexia nervosa and self-harming. She developed a parent survey consisting of 90 open-ended questions. Data was collected anonymously from 256 parents, whose adolescent or young adult children had suddenly identified as transgender in adolescence. Over 80% were natal females; 41% had a preceding homosexual or bisexual orientation; nearly two-thirds had had a diagnosis of a mental health disorder or neurodevelopmental disability prior to the onset of gender dysphoria. 86.7% of parents reported that, ‘along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, their child either had an increase in social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar timeframe, or both’. Littman hypothesised that the belief that ‘non-specific symptoms’, associated with trauma, psychiatric problems and those that are part of normal puberty, ‘can be perceived as proof of being transgender’; the belief that ‘the only path to happiness is transition’; and the belief that ‘anyone who disagrees with the self-assessment of being transgender or opposes the plan to transition is transphobic and should be cut out of one’s life’ are pathognomonic of social contagion.[15]

Littman’s study provoked a transgender activist outcry, and its publisher responded by promising a review and ‘corrections’. Seven months after the initial publication, PLOS One issued a ‘correction’ – but none of the results had changed.[16] Littman was not the only one vilified for suggesting that a social contagion had swept up the cohort of adolescents presenting to gender identity clinics. When Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare confirmed a 1500% rise in gender dysphoria diagnosis among female 13- to 17-year-olds, between 2008 and 2018, Colin Wright, the evolutionary biologist and writer on evidence-based science, tweeted ‘two words – social contagion’. His colleagues denounced him as a transphobic bigot, activists emailed universities ‘to poison my job prospects’ and a professional jobs board warned against hiring him – ‘My academic career never recovered.’[17]

In a section of the HHS Review examining these epidemiological shifts, it notes that ‘nonbinary identities now feature prominently in contemporary clinical settings and research populations’. For example, one research project in 2020 found that of 11,914 survey respondents identifying as transgender or nonbinary, almost two-thirds identified as nonbinary; ‘This creates a new set of ethical challenges as these patients seek Paediatric Gender Medicine interventions.’[10, p. 69] A study by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, using data from the National College Health Assessment, with around 57,000 respondents among US undergraduates (average age 20, and 70% female), found almost 1 in 20 self-reporting a transgender identity in 2025. The number of students identifying as ‘nonbinary/other’ far outnumbered those identifying as ‘trans woman’ or ‘trans man’. Nonbinary type identities included ‘gender queer’, ‘gender fluid’ and ‘agender’.[18] Wright points out that this ‘nonbinary’ category adopts identities ‘which are said to be neither, both, or somewhere between male and female’.

These include labels like ‘demiboy’, ‘genderfluid’ or ‘two-spirit’. These are social identities, not biological ones [...] ‘nonbinary’ identities have no anatomical or physiological referent. They are conceptual, political and responsive to cultural trends – hallmarks of social contagion.[17]

Social contagion is a compelling framework for understanding today’s transgender identification, and – as the writers, clinicians and researchers quoted stress – it has such dangerous implications for the adolescents caught up in it – for as long these ‘conceptual, political and cultural trends’ are not confronted and changed. It makes it imperative that both the PB trial and PMT are stopped.

References

1. UK government. 2 February 2026. Response to Petition: Cancel the clinical trial into puberty blockers & safeguard vulnerable children. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/751839

2. Kings College London. November 2025. Puberty suppression And Transitional Healthcare With Adaptive Youth Services (PATHWAYS). https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/assets/pathways/trial/pathways-trial-protocol.pdf

3. MHRA statement on the Pathways puberty blocker trial. 20 February 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mhra-statement-on-the-pathways-puberty-blocker-trial

4. Bell D, Helyar S. 2024. Would a Puberty Blocker trial be ethical? Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender. https://can-sg.org/2025/01/27/would-a-puberty-blocker-trial-be-ethical/

5. Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender. 18 December 2025. Open Letter from clinicians to Wes Streeting on the PATHWAYS Puberty Blocker Trial. https://can-sg.org/2025/12/18/open-letter-to-wes-streeting-on-the-pathways-puberty-blockers-trial/

6. Waters A. 2026. Puberty blockers: growing calls to pause controversial trial from medics, lawyers, and public. BMJ. 392:s134. https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s134/rapid-responses

7. Cass H. April 2024. The Cass Review: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people: Final report. https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20240410134732/https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

8. Roxby P, Holt A. 22 November 2025. New puberty blockers trial to begin after UK ban. BBC News. https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k4jg0wkj4o

9. Spencer B. 30 November 2025. Puberty blocker trial ‘vital’ after clinic buried study, says Cass. The Times. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/cass-backs-puberty-blocker-trial-because-tavistock-buried-its-own-7qvm6n0dj

10. US Department of Health and Human Services. November 2025. Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices. https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/gender-dysphoria-report.pdf

11. Baxendale S. 2024. The impact of suppressing puberty on neuropsychological function: a review. Acta Paediatrica. 113(6):1156–1167. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.17150

12. Cohen D. 18 December 2025. ‘This is why the trial is necessary’: experts behind the puberty blockers study respond to mounting opposition. BMJ. https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2660

13. Barnes H. 2023. Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Swift Press.

14. Marchiano L. 2017. Outbreak: on transgender teens and psychic epidemics. Psychological Perspectives. 60(3):345–366. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00332925.2017.1350804

15. Littman L. 2018. Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLOS One. 13(8):e0202330. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330

16. Shrier A. 2021. Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze. Swift Press.

17. Wright C. Reality’s Last Stand. 3 December 2025. Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis’.

Reality’s Last Stand

Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis

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9 months ago · 245 likes · 18 comments · Colin Wright

18. Society for Evidence-Based Medicine. October 2025. Transgender identification in college youth is at an all-time high but may be reaching a plateau. https://segm.org/transgender-identification-college-youth

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/Jn5PI Catriona Stewart, Scottish government accused of ‘educational safeguarding scandal’ over transgender guidance. The Scottish government’s transgender schools guidance has been criticised as campaigners keep pushing for a meeting with Jenny Gilruth. 05/03/26

https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2025/08/history-teachers-go-back-to-school-as-they-reshape-scots-role-in-the-empire/ U of S, History teachers go back to school as they reshape Scots’ role in the Empire. University of Stirling specialists are teaching the teachers how to share a new version of Scots emigrant history. August 2025

https://archive.ph/xIOEf Michael Searles, Four-year-olds suffered most enduring damage from Covid lockdowns. Children starting reception class in 2020 missed out on crucial stage of development, study reveals. 04/03/26

https://archive.ph/7BJiv Tom Bennett, MrBeast needs an education in schooling. 07/03/26

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2026/02/inside-the-decision-to-pause-the-puberty-blocker-trial Hannah Barnes, Inside the decision to pause the puberty blocker trial. The MHRA’s U-turn raises questions over regulatory process. 26/02/26

Malcolm Clark, Cathy Newman and the Bullying Science Stasi. Cathy Newman got a medical regulator ‘cancelled’ for the crime of believing in biology. This has eerie parallels to how dissident scientists were silenced under Communist regimes. 06/03/26

https://archive.ph/XSfHe Chris Deerin, Scotland’s teaching unions must be broken. The country’s education system needs radical reform. 06/03/26

https://archive.ph/rjlYr Jenny Lindsay, Scotland’s literary culture should stay out of the gutter in the ‘gender wars’. 09/03/26

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As part of SUE’s intervention into the upcoming election in May, we are looking into what and how history is being taught in schools in Scotland. To that end, it would be really helpful if any of our supporters, who are history teachers, could help us. We are particularly interested in understanding the history curriculum. What has changed and what instruction, if any, has been suggested in how to teach.

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