Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No10
Newsletter Themes: Drop transgender lessons, the problems with RSHP and robust assessments
This week Stuart Waiton has penned a letter to primary school headteachers asking them to drop their relationships, sexual health and parenthood (RHSP) transgender lessons, before they do any more harm to young children. Teacher Colin Smith investigates the language of the RHSP curriculum while another teacher Stuart Baird looks at the proposed changes to assessment.
This coming week we have an event in Dundee on Wednesday 12th April, Are schools harming children by affirming their transgender ‘identity’? We have also uploaded a number of new videos onto the Substack. We’d like to draw your attention to the video/audio sent in by a supporter that captures the discussion she had at her child’s school. Check out the recording of Stuart Waiton in conversation with American novelist Lionel Shriver, discussing the abandonment of children that we are witnessing through the obsessive focus on the ‘identity’ of children. And also, watch the discussion with author Nancy McDermott, who explains the parents revolt in America.
A message to Primary Schools
Stuart Waiton is Chairperson of Scottish Union for Education (SUE)
Please visit our ‘Letter to Primary Schools Headteachers: Are you harming children by promoting a transgender ideology?’ in the new Substack ‘Campaigns’ tab. The letter outlines the concerns that many parents and teachers have about the promotion of a trans ideology to young children. Feel free to use this letter and send, or email, it to your local school. We will be doing likewise and will write to every primary school in Scotland about our concerns after Easter, raising such issues as:
Scottish Government guidance directs primary schools to teach young children a form of transgender ideology.
Primary schools are teaching ideas that are highly contentious and actively contested as if they were undisputed facts.
This teaching promotes gender stereotypes i.e. if you are not a girlie girl you are probably a trans boy. Or if you are a boy who likes soft toys and pastel colours you were born in the wrong body.
Highly influential institutions, organisations and individuals are putting primary and secondary school children under pressure to adapt to transgender ideology.
Schools are helping to create a fast-track system towards social and medical transitioning.
The rapid rise in the number of children identifying as trans is the outcome of pressure from powerful adults and activist organisations.
Transgender lessons are not statutory, and schools do not have to teach them; headteachers can, and should, drop the RSHP curriculum.
The Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Curriculum: Supplanting Parental Authority.
Colin Smith is Principal Teacher of English at an independent school in the West of Scotland. He is concerned about the methods and aims of the RHSP curriculum.
If you haven’t looked at the relationships, sexual health and parenthood (RSHP) materials that are being taught to children in early years, primary and secondary school settings in Scotland I would urge you to do so. I don’t think you’ll like what you find. I found it unpleasant to read and, being in work when I first read them, didn’t feel comfortable clicking on some of the video links, lest I fall foul of any internet policies – which may give you some indication of the content.
I am, to put it mildly, disturbed by what children as young as three are being exposed to and I’d like to review the materials and tell you why. Specifically, I’ll look at the Early Level resources (RHSP Early Level) which are designed to be taught to ‘children in the pre-school years and P1’ but I’ll reference other parts of the curriculum to show how it progresses.
I have a son who goes to nursery one day a week and it’s important to me, as a concerned parent, to know what children are being taught, how they are being taught, and for what purposes. Let me state my case baldly: I do not believe that the intentions of the RHSP curriculum are benign, and I consider that it has more to do with the supplanting of familial authority by the state.
The first thing I take issue with is the labelling of genitalia that small children are encouraged to take part in; the labels I dislike are ‘penis’, ‘testicles’, ‘scrotum’ and ’vulva’. I don’t dislike them for adults, who are free to use whatever phrasing they choose, though I’ve never in forty-four years used the word vulva in general conversation, as far as I can remember. But I disagree with tampering with a child’s lexicon in this way. The guidance for staff suggests that they should:
Ask the children if they use other words for vulva or penis – acknowledge them all. (Of course, there might be some giggles – as a key learning point is to learn and use agreed terms, do not worry about the laughter).
Agreed terms? Agreed by whom? The aim it seems isn’t to settle on language that the children are comfortable with; it doesn’t mean agree in that sense. No, the phrasing is already agreed, and this is simply a process of habituating children to it; or perhaps it’s more accurate to say indoctrinating them with it. What earthly difference does it make if a four-year-old calls it his willy or her flower, or any other of a hundred child-friendly terms that people use? Why would nursery or primary school staff correct him/her on it? It’s clear what’s being referred to, and people since time immemorial have managed to get along in these matters without state-approved descriptors.
There’s a reason why most adults don’t use medical terms with their little children: they understand that words like penis and vulva belong to the adult sphere, and we choose euphemisms that seek to soften the contours of our children’s lives to keep some realities at bay for as long as possible. The state oversteps when it claims the right to expose children to language and material that many parents would find objectionable. But herein, I believe, is the point.
Lacking any compelling reason to make children talk about these things, and making them talk about it in a prescribed way (and I can’t for the life of me see a compelling reason), then we should consider that the RSHP curriculum is a stalking horse for something else; and that something else is to lay claim to authority over our children with regards to their biology. Why the need for such clinical detachment when naming body parts? Because detachment is the aim: detachment from the parental right to name, or not. The authority of the family to denote is usurped; family words are out, discarded by such learning activities as asking children what terms they use and then replacing them with prescribed ones, symbolically replacing familial argot with that of the state.
‘No children, these words are wrong and you must use only the correct terms’. And ever worried that the children might relapse into using the word their parents taught them, the staff guidance documents urge that ‘teachable moments’ can be used to reinforce teaching (read: inculcate the use of the state’s chosen terms). This from the documentation:
Going to the toilet or helping a child if they urinate/do the toilet on themselves, is an opportunity to talk about ‘private’ and use the words for genitals. ‘Let’s get you changed in here where it’s private…’ ‘Here is some tissue and you can wipe your vulva…’
Repetition works best when drilling things home, so children’s weak bladders provide many opportunities throughout the day to insist on the terminology. There may still be some confusion, however, but there is a handy ‘suggested text’ that can be referred to:
Vulva: Girls have a vulva. When a girl goes to the toilet to urinate (check which words children use here, for example pee/wee) it comes out of her vulva. Note: If a child uses the word vagina to describe this part, you can respond with: Sometimes people use the word vagina, but the vagina is actually just the bit inside the girl. So, if you are a girl, the bit you see between your legs when you look at your body is your vulva.
As an English teacher, I wish that staff were so fastidious in ensuring the correct naming of sentence parts. Why, I ask myself, must there be so exacting a distinction made between vagina and vulva? I don’t think we can be generous here and put it down to a scholarly desire for accuracy. I think, rather, it’s about establishing the state’s pedagogical authority in this area, to insist on specific terms. Here, for the state, is an opportunity to begin colonising young minds; and an essential element of colonisation is to ban ‘native’, which is to say parental, language and replace it with the language of the dominant party.
The more tightly controlled that language is, the less freedom people have to demur. In the My Body Belongs to Me teachers’ guidance, we see that children are to learn ‘to understand the notion of bodily autonomy’ and that ‘some parts of my body are private’ and that they should ‘understand about touching and what is appropriate and what isn’t’. Before, children’s parts were just for going to the toilet, now there is another aspect to them – a sexual aspect. A different world opens up for the children, a world in which they must learn ‘how to react if [they] feel uncomfortable with someone’, and who they ‘can talk to…if worried’. Your body is attractive, goes the message. There’s even a list of books, such as Miles is the Boss of His Body, described as follows:
On his 6th birthday, Miles’ excitement is dimmed when he finds himself being pinched, hugged too tight, picked up and tickled by his well-intentioned family and decides he’s had enough! When Miles decrees that he is the ‘Boss of his body’, his whole family expresses support and respect for his personal boundaries.
How better to weaken the bond between a child and its family than by creating anxiety and doubt in a child’s mind? Pathologising affection and intimacy is a great way to make children neurotic, and it also creates a lacuna which the state will be very happy to fill. Touch is important and children learn quite naturally what feels right for them without explicit teaching. What gives the state the right to interfere in the family dynamic in this way? The answer, I contend, is that they have no right, but they do unfortunately have the means.
French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture describes in detail how dominant hierarchies impose and reproduce their authority through education. One way is through buy-in. To put it plainly, if enough people accept the authority of a teacher to discourse on a subject, then that authority is established. Children don’t know any better than to accept what they are told as they aren’t developed enough to understand when/if something is ideological rather than strictly informational. So, when you transmit any content, in this case contentious content, to children, buy-in is guaranteed. Governments, of course, know this and therefore they target the children.
Governments also know that the monitoring and control of human sexuality and intimacy grants them power. The RSHP isn’t a value-neutral curriculum. How can it be when it claims the right to decide when children should be exposed to adult language, confusing messages, and sexual images? (Take a look at some images from the Level Two activities, suggested to be taught from primary five: Sex Organs Unlabelled.) Where there is contention and any possibility of ideological imposition, there must be parental consent. I’m not sure too many parents would consent to the creation of sexually-aware and affection-wary children.
If you have the stomach for it, visit the site and look at the later levels. Consider that what is taught in early years settings is but the precursor, the foundation for later exploration of topics such as masturbation. I could say much more about the aims that I think underpin this curriculum, aims that go beyond the desire for biopower and undue influence, but this is sufficient to put you on your guard. It’s not about education; it’s about wresting control of your children’s biology from you and giving it to the state. The process of alienating the child from the family begins as soon as the child is exposed to this curriculum. I’d much rather schools focussed on aspects of learning that really benefit children (reading and writing would be nice). However, observation tells me that these fundamentals are not a priority for the state.
The Hayward Review of Qualifications and Assessment
Stuart Baird is a secondary school teacher who has worked in the state sector in Scotland for over 25 years.
We have a new education secretary, Jenny Gilruth, who finds herself within a whirlwind of reform. Progress with the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment has followed a familiar route with current proposals, seen in the Interim report Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment: Phase 3 Briefing Paper, following the ‘new curriculum’ model promoting projects, skills, and a mix of economic and social instrumentalism. With the outcome already set there has been little need to involve the teaching profession, who may have different views of qualifications and assessment. Are we seeing a short, sharp reminder of the design of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE)?
The Interim Report of the Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment, led by Professor Louise Hayward, was published at the beginning of March. The review was established as a response to the growing criticism of Curriculum for Excellence along with a desire to reshape the senior phase qualifications to mimic the disparate goals of the broad general phase (S1 to S3). This goal was given the blessing by the OECD report Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence – Into the Future (2021). The OECD are familiar favourites of the Scottish Government. They have been asked before to review the progress of CfE, an educational system that they consider to be an ‘inspiring experience’.
A key feature of the review process to date has been the mix of determined avoidance of classroom teachers or the dilution of their voices. As Hayward makes clear, the first discussion was with children and young people and from here a vision statement was developed. The Independent Review Group has no classroom teachers on it and it appears that only one of the seventeen Collaborative Community or Discussion Groups has a teacher focus. The reform process was organised after schools finalised their working agreements and calendars with staff so that few schools, if any, had allocated time for staff to understand or participate in the process in any meaningful way. While listening to all those involved in the educational process is important, more important is having the experts front and centre of any review and those experts are Scotland’s classroom teachers.
There is the current survey which is seeking responses to the new model outlined below. Published at a time when teachers are wholly engaged encouraging pupils with folio work or helping them prepare pupils for their final exams, the survey is only open for a short period of time and is due to close on 7 April. Few could say its timing is designed to encourage teacher participation.
Flawed process aside, we now have the Interim Report, a document described by Professor Lindsay Paterson as ‘bereft of systematic evidence’ and which ‘offers no analysis of the current circumstance, and contains no reasoned arguments in support of its provisional proposals’. The document does, though, have the confidence to propose a model for a new senior phase qualification called the Scottish Diploma of Achievement with three areas where evidence will be drawn: a study in subjects, programmes or curricular areas, learning in context and a personal pathway.
When the review began, there was a willingness among teaching colleagues to consider changes to the exam system and assessment. There are those who believe that a single final exam may not credit a pupil who has a ‘bad day’, but continual assessment or coursework could be open to unfair tutor or teacher input and can mean that pupils have many assessments over the school year. A discussion of where the balance is, what role new technology can play, and the need for external marking and moderation should be a central part of the review. Since the beginning of the process there has been little systematic discussion with teachers on these issues, however the proposed model puts forward that ‘learners would only be presented for external examinations when they exit a subject’. For ‘many’ learners progress would be over two years and continual assessment and achievements will lead to course credits. A scheme is being put in place that appears to expect teachers to fill in the details, but only after they have been told what to do.
Those familiar with CfE will recognise the two other areas of achievement, ‘learning in context’ and ‘a personal pathway’. ‘Learning in context’ is described as ‘an interdisciplinary project-based approach where evidence is gathered on learners’ achievements across knowledge, skills and competences in action’. CfE has had a difficult relationship with interdisciplinary learning (IDL). Embedded in CfE as ‘context for learning’, IDL has not been given the investment in teaching resources needed, for over a decade, to make a meaningful impact on the curriculum in many schools. Attempts have been made to build on the subjects and develop IDL, though these have had mixed success. The ongoing promotion of IDL, without support or a successful evidence base, better fits what Rob Moore has described as hyperinterdisciplinarity (HI) with its use of ‘rhetorical inflation’, ‘hyperbole’, and a belief in a ‘radical break’ with the past (Making the Break: Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity’, Rob Moore in Disciplinarity: Functional Linguistics and Sociological Perspectives ed Francis Christie and Karl Maton, 2012).
This hyperinterdisciplinarity has little to do with routine interdisciplinary work and better describes an educational movement attempting to draw a decisive line between the past and the future. The Interim Report and the accompanying briefing paper exemplify HI. The report draws on futurologists to set the scene to emphasise the break with the past: ‘society, both in Scotland and internationally, is changing and the pace of that change is ever increasing’. IDL is promoted as the path to the necessary skills development: ‘employers and universities argue that key skills (or meta-skills) are crucial to a learner’s future success in society and the workplace’. Finally, the idea that our current subjects and approaches are out of date and cannot be improved, in and of themselves, prevails.
It is difficult to find strong support for subjects within the Interim Report or supporting documents. Historically, the organisation of schools around subjects has been a liberating force for young people, an opportunity to see beyond the confines of their communities and look out across the world through the eyes of an artist, mathematician, or historian. The uninspiring or static depiction of subjects as shown by the Hayward review are a falsehood akin to the occasional use of Dickens’s notorious character Mr. M’Choakumchild to describe contemporary teachers.
The third area from the proposed model, personal pathway, looks to record the achievements and experience of young people out of school. We all want our young people to have success and positive experiences, however the desire to formalise these activities under the direction of a teacher and include them in the award is concerning. There is also the issue of equity, as not all young people have the same opportunities outside of school. Finally, the personal pathway is reminiscent of the failed personal profile, or even record of achievement, that schools have tried before.
Hayward acknowledges that, ‘Further work will have to be undertaken before a model like this could become practice and there would be a range of issues to consider before considering implementation’, which echoes the original CfE proposals. The many-paged CfE documents were handed down from officials and left for teachers to decipher, while the education of young people suffered.
Commenting on the current educational reform process in general, Professor Walter Humes has written that, ‘some responses are expressing scepticism about whether the exercise will address the deep issues of confidence and trust which have been a feature of recent years’. So far, the Hayward Review has offered little to overcome that lack of trust or make up for past mistakes. In side-lining teachers and stacking the deck to reach a predetermined outcome for the ‘new model’ curriculum, it will exacerbate the issues. It’s time to give the task of curriculum making to teachers and trust them to come up with the necessary changes.
News Round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks.
https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-bbcs-phoney-war-on-disinformation/ Kathleen Stock, The BBC’s phoney war on disinformation: a bit of self-awareness wouldn’t go amiss 24/03/23
Frank Furedi, What is woke - and what it isn’t? Demystifying a power that refuses to give itself a name 27/03/23
https://thespectator.com/topic/childhood-died-again-velma-winnie-pooh/?fbclid=IwAR3Uz15fVU-cxmZpZ8YDFwHKz-xgihy2VxH1yZH7r5g1YmVKsXufiUU2SKg Matt Purple, Yawn: your childhood just died again: when the transgressive becomes normal, the normal will become transgressive 24/03/23
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/01/18/letting-gender-confused-children-socially-transition-could-harmful/ Camilla Turner, Letting gender-confused children ‘socially transition’ could be harmful, teachers to be warned. Schools will receive guidance on pupils who take on new names and pronouns, sometimes without their parents' knowledge. 18/03/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-the-cult-of-victimhood-turning-violent/ Brendan O’Neill, Is the cult of victimhood turning violent? 29/03/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11928467/A-schools-casual-phone-call-mother-shopping-Waterstones-left-turmoil.html Sanchez Manning, ‘Hi, your daughter is now a boy... just letting you know’: A school’s casual phone call to a mother shopping in Waterstones that left her in turmoil – and is a warning to every parent. 01/04/23
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/schools-let-pupils-switch-gender-without-informing-parents-pppbphkgq Steven Swinford & Nicola Woolcock, Schools ‘let pupils switch gender without informing parents’. 30/03/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-trans-ideology-took-over-our-schools/ Joanna Williams, How trans ideology took over our schools. 30/03/23
https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/asleep-at-the-wheel/ Lottie Moore, Asleep at the Wheel: An Examination of Gender and Safeguarding in Schools. 30/03/23
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/harmful-podcast-on-trans-child-3-is-pitched-at-scottish-schools-khl592vwn Mike Wade, ‘Harmful’ podcast on trans child, 3, is pitched at Scottish schools, 30/03/23
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In terms of accrediting out of school, informal and other sometimes formal learning / accreditation eg piano and dance lesson gradings, Duke of Edinburgh’s Award or youth work, I am highly sceptical.
I used to manage youth work teams and there was a constant push to ‘take our education seriously’. I strived against this emotion, not because I didn’t think what we did was important or useful. It certainly was. But for the reason that children deserve a private life, where they can tell their teachers about their other achievements if they want to but also keep them to themselves if they want to.
Additionally, we were under constant pressure to prove our impact. To show how informal learning benefitted children. And to this end we were forced to seek accreditations for what we did. To ‘formalise’ our informal learning. Can anyone spot the problem here?
If, as I often said, youth work was the Heineken of education: we reached the parts that other educators couldn’t reach, then measuring it in the same way made no sense and in fact reduced or eliminated our impact.
Rant over.