Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No15
Newsletter Themes: censoring and indoctrination, how parents fight back, the need for boundaries.
This week Stuart Waiton discusses the values and ideas that are censored and those that are forced upon us. Kate Deeming explains some of the mechanisms that parents can use to have their voices heard. And Rachal Hobbs explains that boundaries are being broken down and why it is important to understand the need for these boundaries.
Censorship and indoctrination, two sides of the same coin
Stuart Waiton is an academic and Chairperson of SUE
I noted last week how trans activists and organisations are anti-educational and censorious, noting that part of the TQ+ ideology pushes for ever more ‘safe spaces’ where open discussion is clamped down on and represented as oppressive and not inclusive: thou shalt not dissent from the trans truth.
Last week we saw yet more of this ‘caring’ cancellation in action when Edinburgh comedy club The Stand axed a show at which MP Joanna Cherry was due to speak, because staff opposed her trans ideology–critical arguments. Having challenged Edinburgh University’s failure to enable screening of the film Adult Human Female, due to a blockade of the venue by trans activists, she herself was now cancelled because The Stand’s staff members think they have the right to prevent certain views from being heard.
It’s worth dwelling on this for a second.
Joanna Cherry is a democratically elected member of parliament who stood for election and was voted for by her constituents to represent them in the House of Commons, and she was prevented from speaking in public because some staff members of a comedy club don’t like what she has to say – and the management of the club thought this was acceptable!
Elsewhere, across Scottish universities, we find the inverse development taking place, this time around the issue of so-called anti-racism, where we see not the cancellation of ideas but the enforcement of them.
Backed by charities such as Advanced HE and supported by the Scottish Funding Council (which has £2 billion to spend), Call it racism: Developing an anti-racist approach to teaching is being rolled out as a new dogma that universities are adopting and imparting to staff.
The accompanying document from Call it racism fires out a few short sharp sentences that include ‘I just don’t see colour’ and ‘I don’t think of you as black’, and we are instructed to Call it racism.
I’ve never met a lecturer who thinks it is acceptable to discriminate against people of any racial minority. I have, however, met many who would think of themselves as colourblind anti-racists, that is, people who ‘just don’t see colour’ but see individual students and who judge them on their character and ability, not on the colour of their skin.
But these old-school anti-racists are now being re-educated, or indeed instructed, in the ‘correct’ way to relate to different students so as to avoid ‘microaggressions’ and to be ‘inclusive’: thou shalt adopt the new ‘anti-racist’ dogma.
As we noted in our first Substack newsletter, ‘inclusive’ education has also become a dogma within our schools, and the new, divisive and illiberal version of ‘anti-racism’ has become part of the curriculum itself and indeed part of a new belief system that is forced onto teachers and kids. This is not education, it is indoctrination.
Thankfully, there was better news, on the indoctrination front, from the Southside of Glasgow, where SUE held a lively private meeting of around 40 parents and teachers. Here it was noted that an activist teacher who had turned her classroom for seven-year-olds into a ‘trans shrine’ had at last, following a number of complaints from parents, been challenged by the headteacher for promoting sexualised material to children.
Just as there are many in Edinburgh who are appalled by the cancellations in their city, there are many academics who are opposed to the dogma developing in universities, and there are even more parents who want to challenge the activist nature of schools – and challenge it we must.
If you want to do something about the indoctrination taking place in Scottish education, get in touch at info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
Parents can fight back
Kate E. Deeming is a solo mother to a P5 child; she is also a dance artist, a child advocate and a community organiser. She has developed dance programmes with children in educational and community settings globally for three decades. Originally from Philadelphia, USA, she has been based in Glasgow for 23 years.
Last week I looked at some of the problems with the disaster education being forced on our children. This week I want to give some ideas about mechanisms we can use to challenge what is happening in schools.
Rights of parents
First, the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 Section 2, 1b, outlines the rights parents have in directing their children’s upbringing. You have a parental right to determine what is and what is not harmful or helpful in relation to your child’s education. You are the authority. That is the key to challenging this whole stramash, and it’s pivotal to how you move forward if you are challenging your child’s school or the wider Scottish educational system about what is being taught.
Another key piece of legislation is the Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Act 2006:
‘The Act provides a framework giving all parents the opportunity to get the information they need to support their child and enabling them to express their views.’
‘Parents are the first and ongoing educators of their own children and know them best.’
Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) is also often referred to as the national approach to improving the wellbeing of children and young people.
So how do you raise concerns or make a complaint?
This is what I have pulled together as a parent who is going through the procedure currently. If you have anything to add, please get in touch.
Write a letter or send an email to the headteacher. You must create a paper trail. A verbal complaint is not sufficient. And if you have a meeting, make sure that it is minuted and that you take and retain notes. Two parents are ideal, when possible. If not possible (as in my case as a single mum), bring another member of the school community whom you trust, just to be another set of ears and eyes, or contact SUE.
If you are not confident about addressing the headteacher, you can take your concerns to the parent council. Although members of the parent council cannot deal with specific issues related to your individual child, they can follow up concerns you have about the school, educational content, policy, etc. They are by law required to represent the views of parents without bias or judgement. Ideally parent council members should communicate their openness to hearing and representing the perspectives of all those in the school community.
If you feel that your concerns are a larger issue and you don’t have confidence in relating them to either the headteacher or the parent council, you can email your local councillors, MP, or MSPs. It is at this level that educational policy is determined, so it is important for them to be aware of your concerns; this is part of their role as representatives for you, elected by you, and paid for by your taxes. As with members of the parent council, they are duty-bound to represent you.
If, after receiving a response from the headteacher, you feel that your problem has not been addressed or resolved, it can be escalated to a stage 2 complaint. To do this, respond in writing to the headteacher to inform him or her that ‘you are not satisfied with the response and would like to escalate the complaint’. A quality improvement officer (QIO) (example job profile here) will then address your claim first in a meeting, then in writing. The QIO has four weeks to meet you and respond to your concerns. (If you take your complaint to your elected representatives, they are likely to pass it directly to your QIO.)
If you are not satisfied with the response from the QIO, you can further escalate your complaint by taking it to the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO). The SPSO is the final stage for complaints about public services in Scotland. There is currently a five-month delay in handling any complaint, but it is important to get it registered within the 12-month window starting from the time of your initial complaint to the school.
Become a member of the Scottish Union for Education. We can also represent you, write to your school’s headteacher, the local authority, and MSPs, and help you represent your claim.
We, as parents, do not have the luxury to be timid. It is our families, our communities and our lives that will be impacted by the actions we do or do not take. Let us be bold, let us embolden others, and together we can ensure that our children are given what they need to thrive.
On that note, when I met my friend and fellow mum who told me about her child missing meals in school, I said to her, ‘Are you kidding? Let me be angry for you. This is not right. You write to the school, you say, “I will be collecting my son at lunch every day and returning him for lessons. You do not ask permission”. And you know what, she did.
Be compassionate but be bold for yourself, for your child and for others.
Why children need boundaries
Rachel Hobbs is a teaching assistant in England.
Where children are involved, it’s increasingly difficult to enforce boundaries, particularly, in my experience, with girls. Rather than holding fast, we are told that we need to ‘be kind’; however, this seemingly benign phrase weakens our ability to protect ourselves or mark a line in the sand.
But when boundaries are up for grabs, ridiculous things start to happen. The wolf is no longer kept outside the door and the world stops making sense.
The new pathology of ‘breaking boundaries’, which used to mean representing minorities, is now proclaimed only when fringe groups hold us to ransom under the guise of inclusion.
Nowhere is this played out more than with the transactivist movement, which, rather than fight for equal rights (long achieved), attempts to obliterate everybody else’s rights through denial of our basic boundaries; biological sex, the essential separations between men and women; adult and child; reality and feelings.
It is within the stretched-beyond-meaning mantra of ‘inclusivity’ that the transactivist movement attaches itself, although it is really the ultimate Trojan horse of our times.
Within the true dogma and tyranny of the movement is a worryingly organised silencing of debate; at times a seething, not-well-hidden hatred of women; and a demand for the magical elimination of biological sex and, by extension, most other boundaries.
Thanks to vested interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the adoption of TQ+ agendas by previously trusted LGBT organisations such as Stonewall, which now no longer represent the LGB at all (or old school transsexuals), a marginal ideology based in fantasy has taken centre stage.
No truer the adage about what happens when good people do nothing across all institutions of the state: the workplace, medicine, social care, education. Safeguards are eroded at every stage of critical intervention for children most at risk.
Aside from heckling, the lobbyists spent a lot of time quietly pushing for legislative changes (a tactic that avoids the need for public consent) and helped to produce the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010, all done while promoting the idea that this was all about the ‘grassroots’. As a result, institutions of the state have already mindlessly adopted a madness over sex and gender, developments that are presented as a promotion of equality but are, in essence, part of the process of breaking down boundaries.
Denouncing boundaries is now the solution to getting what you want and, of course, ‘being kind’ – for which we should read, ‘what’s yours is mine’.
As a result, grown adults are regressing back to a state more akin to that of a toddler, a form of narcissism, of nothing being more important than ‘ME’ and ‘MY RIGHTS’. And so the infantile monster grows and grows.
The womb of ‘safe spaces’, particularly at our universities, ultimately means the blocking of maturation into adulthood. Hence a new ‘correct’ boundary is built around these adult-escents who find it incomprehensible to find themselves in a world where OTHER PEOPLE are allowed to express opinions contrary to ‘ME AND MY RIGHTS’.
So, with the transgender demands, we have not understood the danger of constantly saying yes to an infantilised mob. Inclusivity has become a fallacy and has caused an unforgivable blind spot when it comes to safeguarding of children.
Old boundaries are demolished, helped by the most insidious targeting of children by the trans lobby. Children’s need for education free from its ideology have already been trampled on via the sheer ineptitude of government and school leaders, who have failed to scrutinise who is giving curriculum ‘advice’.
It has only now come to light that ‘safeguarding’ in schools received a quiet update from Stonewall some time ago. Children swept along by trans theory as a solution to complex problems can deem themselves ‘born in the wrong body’, reincarnated overnight; schools do not need to inform parents of this; parental concern is deemed a safeguarding issue; and any suggestion of genuine parental concern is rebranded as ‘conversion therapy’.
If the government in England (and across the UK) refuse to recognise parents’ concerns and wishes, be prepared for mass protests and claims of the wronged ‘trans child’. And bear in mind, back in the real world, there is no such thing as a trans child, just as there is no such thing as a ‘cis woman’.
The self-serving nihilism within transactivism targets children to encourage them to think that all boundaries, even the body, can be deconstructed, and that everything is conveniently ‘fluid’. This is deeply harmful to a child, who needs affirmation of boundaries, of fact, and of the reality of her or his own body.
The idea of being ‘non-binary’ is cleverly associated with challenging sexism, something that can encourage young girls to the cause of personal ‘liberation’; this has been a masterstroke by transactivism’s leaders. But the failure of keeping education free from what is simply a loaded ideology, and of incorporating it and concealing it in sex education, reflects, in reality, a shocking abandonment of children.
In turn, we find a further trashing of safeguards along the trans track via ‘gender affirmation’, another malignant concept that effectively excludes any reality-affirming intervention by professionals. But, thankfully, some therapeutic and medical professionals are now blowing the whistle on the pressure to only validate rather than to explore what a child believes when it comes to gender confusion.
Feelings about ourselves – for adults, but also especially for teens – are not fixed; they change, sometimes rapidly, but are captured by activists who address and redefine them through the imagined prism of gender fluidity, something that is itself repackaged and relabelled as newly set-in-stone ‘identities’ relying on new boundaries that must not be questioned.
So the transitory beliefs of a child, influenced by the swarm of interest groups, result in the anointing of new labels, labels that experienced mature adults shamefully bow down to lest they are seen to harm the ‘mental wellbeing’ of the ‘trans child’. And once again we see the boundary of adult authority over the child being inverted.
The boundary between the real and the imagined is no longer safe, and the affirmation of something false is enforced through thought and speech control, and as if by magic, the boundary of separate spaces for women and girls disappears.
The truth no longer sets you free. Language is big terrain for the trans cult, as it cannot exist within what is real; therefore, it becomes a weapon used to frame fantasy as reality, and a new truth is invented.
Because we want to be kind, facts vanish into the realm of feelings, and we begin to stumble over the most basic of words. But in the process reason is lost, as is fairness, and girls suddenly find they must compete with boys, boys who feel they were born in the wrong body.
As Frank Furedi outlines, we have become afraid of making value judgements, and this is how important boundaries are eroded. When this happens, we are no longer able to ascertain right and wrong when long established values, long fought for and built through common human experience, have been overtaken by the abstract and the notion of the feeling – self above all else.
I would love it if society recognised this movement as nothing more than a product of hyper capitalism rather than anything left wing or virtuous, as it would have us believe. The ultimate pursuit of the self, funded by corporations and social media, where true inequality is ever superseded or subverted into pseudo rights groups – often privileged ones: if the ‘woke’ could only see the irony.
The wider crisis from this is a failure to look outside oneself, where the self-absorption of ‘identity’ blocks participation in, and respect for, the collective, for your community and your society.
We are so indulged with the cry of equality; it is now a trap laid by unsavoury groups. Along with a pathological focus on mental health (in itself harming our children), our focus remains inwards.
Boundaries are the very things that define us, enable us, organise us, empower us and allow for meaningful understanding of society and the world at large. In there absence there is no beginning and no end, just a world lived in our head, resulting in a regressive refusal to enter the world.
There is a failure to understand that boundaries are not arbitrary constructions. Without them, we eliminate common values and important distinctions and there is no collective lens with which to frame experience, lest a judgement is made, and so something as fallible as ‘identity’ takes over. It is a refusal to take root. It is no surprise that anxiety is so rife among the young. We are truly failing them.
To be ungrounded and have everything free floating is to create angst. We instinctively need roots to grow, to stay mentally well, and in particular to stay real and psychologically anchored; they provide us with the real safe space with which to engage with the world.
News Round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/08/trans-pupils-put-school-policies-test-heated-debate-england Sally Weale, Trans pupils put school policies to test amid heated debate in England. Headteachers want help on dealing with gender dysphoria but fear government guidance will be too rigid. 08/05/23
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-education-group-says-sorry-for-fetish-web-links-d2lhgk7fg Sex education group regrets web links to fetish material. 03/05/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12061533/Joanna-Cherry-gives-Fringe-venue-seven-day-ultimatum-cancelled-amid-gender-row.html Tom Eden, ‘Back down and say you’re sorry or I'll see you in court’: Joanna Cherry gives Fringe venue seven-day ultimatum after being cancelled amid gender row. 09/05/23
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/26be6c2e-eab0-11ed-8b19-8262c49fff39?shareToken=a6f57a6516388ab463440f0a7cfa3f52 Lucy Bannermn, Sex lesson provider urges children to become ‘activists’. Charity in row with parent also claims that virginity doesn’t exist. 04/05/23
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/04/gender-affirming-care-debate-europe-dutch-protocol/673890/?utm_source=pocket_saves Frieda Klotz, A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe: Doubts have now come to the Netherlands, where the most-contested interventions for children and adolescents were developed. 28/04/23
https://archive.ph/2023.04.29-183109/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/29/the-fear-to-speak-freely-still-haunts-university-campuses/ Inaya Foların Iman, The fear to speak freely still haunts university campuses: Politicians have failed to provide adequate safeguards, leaving the task of resisting censorious activists to brave academics. 29/04/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-the-gender-debate-shaped-the-new-face-of-moralism/ Stephen Daisley, How the gender debate shaped the new face of moralism. 01/05/23
https://safeschoolsallianceuk.net/2023/04/29/unesco-who-sexuality-education/ An independent review of two standards documents produced by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). These standards underpin the global initiative for Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), currently promoted by UNESCO. 29/04/23
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