A R T I C L E S
Why we need a Union
Stuart Waiton is a senior lecturer in sociology and criminology, an author and a journalist. He has a particular interest in the over-regulation and policing of everyday life.
Some have noticed the falling standards in education, while others have watched as the curriculum itself has changed and morphed into a form of indoctrination. Most recently, groups of concerned parents, grandparents and teachers and ex-teachers have raised the alert about the worrying trend within schools to ask children intrusive questions about their sex lives. They have pointed to the new sex education curriculum and noticed the increasingly inappropriate materials being used. If you think they may be overreacting, check out the Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) website and make up your own mind.
If you think the idea of education becoming a form of indoctrination is overly polemical and unjust, try reading The Standard for Headship document produced by the General Teaching Council for Scotland. Here, you’ll find little related to what most of us would think about as education, and an awful lot about the need for headteachers, teachers and schools themselves to become centres of ‘social justice’.
Part of this promotion of social justice, which starts in primary schools, is the belief in the need to make children aware of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘protected characteristics’, and the need to understand ‘the influence of gender’. Indeed, the Scottish Government and education authorities are now ensuring that embedding anti-racism and race equality into all aspects of school life is central to our children’s learning.
In the Education Scotland document Promoting and developing race equality and anti-racist education, we find the argument being made that, ‘As the child grows, they can see diversity for example in worked examples in mathematics, in literature and through interdisciplinary learning’.
As someone who first got involved in politics to stop racial inequality, even I find myself scratching my head trying to work out how and why ‘anti-racist’ maths lessons have become part of the curriculum. More worrying still in this new anti-racism is the divisive talk of ‘white privilege’, something that is not being raised as part of a debate but as a central and unquestioned dimension of the curriculum itself.
What a generation ago would have been discussed in adult politics is now being instructed to children as ‘education’, reflecting not only a confusion about what politics is and should be, but also a wider confusion about the difference between childhood and adulthood.
If this is not confusing enough, we have the Scottish Government promoting a form of transgender ideology in their schools’ guidance document Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools. Here we find the highly contested idea that sex and gender are interchangeable, and that sex, rather than being an immutable biological character, is something that children can choose as part of their personal identity.
Some may agree, others disagree, but the guidance document for Scottish educators assumes that it is a fact that sex is not fixed and that, even further, that this concept is a new form of moral good that must be accepted and even promoted to children. The same document explains that when a child as young as 12 says that they are a different sex, this should be of no concern for teachers. But if a parent questions this 12-year-old’s ‘sex change’, this is a concern. Moreover, if the child does not want the parent to know about this life-changing decision, schools and teachers are encouraged to hide this information from the parents or, ideally, to help re-educate them about the ‘true’ sex of their child.
So, if a 12-year-old girl approaches a teacher and says that she is now a boy, the school is being directed by government guidance to both endorse this ‘sex change’ and understand that any concerns raised by a parent should be treated as a potential danger to the child!
With these concerns in mind, the Scottish Union for Education has been set up to involve parents, grandparents, teachers and lecturers, and communities across Scotland, to have their say.
The education curriculum is something that the education authorities must decide, but when education starts to look like indoctrination, and to undermine parents, we believe members of the public have a right, and a duty, to have their say.
In this respect, SUE is for you. Much of the good work identifying the trends described above has been carried out by concerned Christians, but you do not have to be religious to recognise that there is a serious problem. I’m an atheist on the left of politics, but over the past few years I have worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds who recognise that something needs to be done. This Substack is the start of a process of involving as many people in Scotland as possible to help understand what is going on in schools. We will be inviting academics and experts to try to explain what school, and university education, should be all about.
We need parents, teachers and others on the ground who want to see change to step forward and help to create a real living, breathing union, one that the authorities and the politicians cannot ignore. If you want to report issues in your local area or to get actively involved, email us at info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
Sturgeon’s legacy: Undermining parents
Stuart Waiton is Chair of the Scottish Union for Education
When accounting for Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy, one aspect that should not be forgotten is that she was a pioneer in the criminalisation and monitoring of parents. Remember the Named Person scheme? It was a major plank of policy until it was blocked by the No To Named Persons (NO2NP) campaign in 2016, but many people know nothing about it.
The SNP has come to rely on the promotion of Scottish independence as a way to win elections with an electorate who, in my opinion, are often understandably disillusioned with politics. Once elected, however, it is back to business as usual, and members of the party that claims to be all about the people go back to their committee rooms and their professional friends to devise new laws and practices that demonstrate a deep distrust of this electorate in general and parents in particular.
The Named Person scheme was already on the statute books as part of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 when Sturgeon took over the leadership of the SNP. As part of the Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) framework, this new initiative was to create a Named Person or a state guardian for every child in Scotland. The Named Person was to be a key professional who dealt with children. Initially this would be a health visitor, then a nursery leader, then the headteacher of a school and so on, until adulthood.
What was key to this development was not only the Named Person but that every professional who had any dealings with children was to be trained as a safe guarder, a person who would watch out for any problems of childhood ‘wellbeing’, and to then record this concern on a database that other professionals could access.
The importance of this new policy cannot be underestimated, because it moved Scottish society away from an approach based on welfare, that focused on intervening in families only when there is a serious risk to a child, to one that opened the door to a more intensive state surveillance of households. Lynne Wrennal argued that ‘The term “Child at risk” used to mean, at risk of abuse or neglect, but it has now been redefined to mean, a child at risk of not meeting the government’s objectives for children’ (Wrennall, 2010 , p. 310).
Use of Named Persons was to be a systematic approach to gathering data on children and families, all to protect the ‘wellbeing’ of children. One problem with this was that the definition of wellbeing was so broad as to encompass almost anything – one leaflet produced at the time even suggested that not consulting with a child about the decoration of his or her bedroom could be considered a wellbeing concern.
The obvious danger was that rather than discovering the small number of children who needed serious help, the net was widened to such a degree as to incorporate almost every child and every parent in the framework of safeguarding. What this scheme did was to cement an approach to all families based on the prism of risk and abuse. Coupled with the modern belief that all children are profoundly vulnerable, this focus meant that the scope for professional intervention was extensive and extraordinary.
Thankfully, the NO2NP campaign (the Christian Institute funded a legal challenge to the scheme, and key individuals such as Maggie Mellon, Lesley Scott and Alison Preuss campaigned to highlight the dangers of the policy) stopped the data-sharing dimension of the initiative. However, the motivation behind the act and the spirit in which it was introduced remains to this day.
Supported by the Greens, the Scottish government’s next step was to criminalise parents who smack their children. Hard smacking was already illegal in Scotland, so this new law was created to stop the lightest of smacks. You don’t have to be a fan of smacking to think that arresting loving parents who lightly smack a child’s hand or bottom is wrong, and I joined the Be Reasonable campaign to prevent this law.
All sorts of reasons and justifications are given for laws such as this. The legal campaigners talk about evidence of trauma and abuse from receiving a smack, any smack, no matter how hard or soft or how frequent.
In the process, parents are represented as abusers of their own children. But when you argue with these campaigners there is something else going on: a type of moralising based on a distrust of – or even a contempt for – ordinary people, often by middle-class professionals who have become the new safety snobs of our time.
How many parents will be arrested under this new law is yet to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the authority and autonomy of families is being undermined and that we are creating a society where loving parents must look over their shoulders and may come to view professionals and teachers with suspicion and fear.
Nicola Sturgeon was a master at presenting herself as the woman of the people. She was also highly adept at presenting a ‘progressive’, caring image of modern politics. But make no mistake, this caring approach is part of a new brand of authoritarianism that aims to protect all from all, and to monitor parents in a manner that threatens family life. Indeed, part of the ruling against the Named Person in the UK Supreme Court stated that:
‘The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world’.
Whatever your view of independence, we should all be clear that when it comes to ordinary people who are attempting to raise their children as best as they can, for Sturgeon the idea of their being able to do so independently could not be countenanced. Trust in parents was replaced by a belief that an army of professionals was needed to watch over our children in a manner more suited to a totalitarian regime.
A two-tier university system
Carlton Brick is a sociology lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland
During her resignation speech, Nicola Sturgeon admitted that she had become a divisive figure in Scottish politics. Many commentators have pointed to a long legacy of policy and manifesto failures. The crisis in the NHS, growing economic inequality, and record numbers of drug deaths have all dogged Sturgeon’s tenure as First Minister. However, one ‘success’ she has been keen to trumpet is the SNP’s commitment to Scottish higher education, and in particular widening student participation and free tuition fees.
Since 2008 the Scottish government has provided free tuition for Scottish-domiciled and EU students attending Scottish universities. However, despite being a celebrated cornerstone of government policy, Scotland’s higher education sector is in crisis and faces an unprecedented financial meltdown. Scottish students pay the heaviest price of all.
The current Scottish government has overseen a period of marked underfunding in the higher education sector. Far from widening participation, the Scottish government’s no tuition fees policy, together with continual disinvestment, has created a two-tier system of provision which treats Scottish students as second-class citizens and actively penalises Scottish universities for recruiting them. Under the SNP’s watch, the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) has reduced its grant to the sector by 7% between 2014–15 and 2017–18, a whopping £91 million. Audit Scotland suggests that when considering reductions over the past seven years, in real terms Government funding to the Scottish university sector has been reduced by 12%. Even these figures do not take into account the fact that government strategic funding has also been cut by 46% in real terms between 2014–15 and 2017–18, representing an additional cut of £32 million within the sector.
These cuts have been exacerbated by government limits on ‘free’ places via the imposition of a ‘cap’ to prevent universities relying on government funding under the ‘no fees’ regime. This cap requires Scottish universities to limit the number of Scottish students that they can recruit to their undergraduate degrees and was introduced to keep government funding of free places to a minimum. The government imposes financial penalties on those universities that do not adhere to the cap.
As a result, more than half of Scottish universities are now in financial deficit. There are, of course, some notable exceptions; financial surpluses are disproportionately concentrated in three of Scotland’s elite universities (Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews). Those in deficit, such as the University of the West of Scotland (UWS), are the very institutions now dependent on recruiting Scottish students. For the academic year 2017–18, UWS had an operating deficit of £3.3 million, a 3% increase on its deficit for the previous academic year. Eighty per cent of full-time UWS undergraduates are drawn from some of Scotland’s most deprived areas.
Government funding accounts for 56% of Scotland’s non-elite universities’ income – the most significant proportion of this being the SFC ‘funding’ of Scottish residents and EU places.
In 2015 Audit Scotland reported that only one-fifth of applicants who attended the elite Edinburgh and St Andrews universities came from Scotland. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service reports that for 2018–19 the number of Scottish students attending Scottish universities has declined by 4% compared with 2017–18. This has been a protracted trend. Since 2010 the proportion of offers to Scottish students from Scottish universities has fallen. Apparently one in five Scottish students did not receive an offer from a Scottish university in 2015. In contrast, offer rates to the rest of the UK (RUK) and international students have increased on average by 11% between 2010 and 2015.
Under the current funding regime, Scottish universities are forced to increase income by targeting RUK and international students. It will come as no surprise that the income from RUK students has increased by £68 million (66%) since 2014–15. Over the same period, income from international students has increased by £148 million (31%) since 2014–15. The elite Scottish universities have benefited most from this market, accounting for 66% of the overall increase in fee income across the whole sector from the same undergraduate market.
So many Scottish students end up either in clearing or at those very universities whose lack of access to RUK and international markets exacerbates the already widening inequalities caused by government policy. It is testament to the faux nature of the SNP’s apparent egalitarianism that those universities most affected by the funding gap are those same institutions trying to widen participation within Scotland. UWS is the sector leader in widening participation in Scotland, with 80% of its Scottish undergraduate full-time intake drawn from Scotland’s most economically deprived areas. This is not that surprising given that its campuses are situated in some of the poorest areas in Scotland; its Paisley campus is a stone’s throw from Ferguslie Park, one of the most deprived regions in Europe. Sixty per cent of UWS income is generated through SFC grants for student places – the second highest in Scotland. Only 18% of Edinburgh income, and 15% of St Andrews income, comes from SFC grants.
Government-funded places have become the single largest source of income for most Scottish universities. Scottish government–funded fees for Scottish and EU students are notoriously inadequate. At £1820 per academic year, they pale in comparison with the average fees Scottish universities can now charge undergraduates from RUK (£9250) and international students (£10,000 to £26,000) per year. The recruitment cap and the enormous income discrepancy between fees implicitly discriminates against those Scottish students the policy purports to be helping, because it both limits the numbers who can get into university and effectively limits the universities they can attend.
Recent developments suggest things are only going to get worse for the majority of those in non-compulsory education in Scotland. The move to wholesale online delivery during the COVID pandemic and the sectors reluctance to engage positively with the consequences of Brexit are impacting negatively across the sector.
Owing to the fragile character of the international student market, Scotland’s elite universities are now turning their attention to a pool of Scottish students they would otherwise largely ignore. Institutions such as Glasgow University are now recruiting Scottish students using ‘widening participation’ criteria. This academic year, Edinburgh University chose to only accept students from deprived backgrounds onto its law course.
This shift has also seen a notable redefinition of the concept social mobility. Increasingly, the sectors definition of ‘widening participation’ has become less about students from economic and socially deprived backgrounds and much more about students who take ‘non-traditional’ pathways into university education, i.e. via further education colleges rather than straight from school.
Speaking to colleagues in further education, they tell of real recruitment problems as intake numbers have decreased dramatically this year. Similarly, the programmes I teach at UWS have taken a significant hit. As institutions such as Glasgow University reintegrate themselves within the ‘domestic’ Scottish student market, this will only serve to deepen the crisis across the sector.
The Scottish government’s commitment to free tuition requires urgent review because university teaching and research have become subordinate to chasing income from markets that the vast majority of Scottish universities cannot access. Scotland higher education leaders need to step up to the plate; although many university chancellors, vice-chancellors and principals will privately acknowledge the gravity of problem, they seem less inclined to do so in public, instead pointing the finger at Brexit and the COVID pandemic. Such arguments are little more than an apology for SNP policy. Universities Scotland, the representative body of Scotland’s 19 universities, has openly acknowledged that the current funding arrangements are woefully inadequate yet do little to oppose the SNP’s policies on fees and funding.
Scottish universities should be allowed to compete for students as equals with other UK universities, and Scottish-domiciled students should no longer be considered the second-class citizens in the two-tier system of education that government has created. Scottish policy punishes its own young people, and especially those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Far from the success she claims it to be, Sturgeon’s legacy in this area has been an unmitigated disaster and will have long-term consequences.
Parent Power in the USA
Nancy McDermott is author of The Problem with Parenting: how raising children is changing across America (Praeger, 2020)
When in August 2019 The New York Times, launched the 1619 Project, an attempt to reimagine the history of the United States as a cynical exercise in the perpetuation of slavery and white power, many Americans were aghast. It was not just the arrogance of the paper that was disturbing but the fact that the project’s centerpiece was a slickly produced curriculum for K-12 schools (kindergarten to 12th grade schooling). This was probably the first time that parents began to suspect that something was going on in their children’s schools. Until then most Americans believed that social justice activism and critical race theory (CRT) was an issue in colleges, not at the local elementary school. Teaching impressionable children that the colour of their skin is more important than the content of their character is contrary to many Americans’ core beliefs. No doubt many parents breathed a sigh of relief when their local schools declined to adopt the 1619 curriculum. What they discovered when the COVID pandemic kept their children at home, was that CRT was already taught in the classroom and it had been for decades. Over the next two years, parents increasingly found themselves as odds with their children’s schools and with state and national authorities.
First, the pandemic left families scrambling to adjust to working from home while trying to keep their children engaged in remote learning. Then the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 marked another turning point. What began as universal horror at a brutal murder by Minneapolis police soon turned into something else; Americans watched in bewilderment as a vast array of institution from state legislatures to the Boy Scouts of America used Floyd’s murder as a prompt to focus their attention on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Corporations donated millions to Black Lives Matter and vowed to atone for their real or imagined complicity in white supremacy.
Cities such as New York and Chicago, which had been strictly enforcing COVID closures and social distancing, turned a blind eye to large demonstrations. Police stood by as rioters looted and burned shops and businesses. Perhaps the most shocking thing for parents was the response of their children’s schools, who dedicated themselves to making children ‘do the work’.
Students were forced to engage in CRT exercises that separated students into oppressors or the oppressed based on their skin colour. Across the country, parents watched over their children’s shoulders as schools began presenting every subject through a ‘race lens’. Oregon’s Education Department toolkit for teachers declared that focusing on ‘the right answer’ in a maths class is an example of ‘white supremacy culture’. A Californian elementary school forced nine-year-olds to deconstruct their racial identities and to rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege’. One New York City principal explained the school’s mission to create ‘white traitors’ who would advocate for ‘white abolition’.
When Joe Biden was elected President in November 2020, gender too became an issue. From the moment he arrived in the White House, he began issuing executive orders and directing government agencies to find ways to promote gender ideology ‘in the classroom, on the playing field, at work, in our military, in our housing and healthcare systems’ (New York Post, 22/02/23). Children as young as five were told that their parents might have got their sex wrong, that they might be a boy or a girl, both or neither. Schools encouraged students to declare their pronouns (even before they learned to read) and to share their gender identity. When parents objected, school districts denied that they were doing anything out of the ordinary.
When it comes to juggling their jobs and their kid’s schedules, parents in the US are well organised, but political organisation does not come naturally. Although national organisations such as Parents Defending Education, Parents Unite (mostly private schools), Moms for Liberty and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) have sprung up, this parents’ ‘movement’ is extremely local. Parents tend to organise around a particular school district or individual school and are responding to whatever issue feels the most urgent: masks, vaccine mandates, CRT or gender ideology.
Some have voted with their feet, leaving the public schools, enrolling their kids in charter schools, home schooling them, or moving to a state such as Florida that protects parents’ rights. All this makes it very difficult to get out in front of the issues and make real headway. In contrast, the proponents of CRT and gender ideology in schools are highly organised, powerful, and effective. To understand what parents are up against, it is worth looking at the state of Virginia, which some consider the ‘epicenter’ of the parents’ rights movement.
Virginia is one of the two states bordering on the nation’s capital in Washington DC and is home to some of the nation’s most powerful government agencies including the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon as well as countless defence contractors, policy thinktanks, foundations, and NGOs. Although a historically conservative state, the Washington DC suburbs in the northern part of the state have grown progressively more liberal.
Voting patterns have shifted so that the Democratic Party dominates northern Virginia, and the Republicans control the rest of the state. Until 2019 local elections were regarded as an afterthought; few people followed them and even fewer voted in them.
In 2019 Democratic governor Ralph Northam became embroiled in a scandal over a photograph from his 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook. It showed two men, one in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The governor claimed not to be either one of the men but sheepishly admitted to darkening his skin to look like Michael Jackson in a dance competition. There were protests and calls for his resignation, but instead of resigning he engaged in some political horse trading with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Overnight he went from being a middle-of-the road politician to a progressive champion, passing laws to tighten gun laws, to abolish the death penalty, and to legalese marijuana. More significantly for parents, he appointed woke educators to important posts in the state’s Education Department.
Around the same time, Democrat activists with the backing of the local party machine gained a foothold on local school boards.
Once upon a time, these organisations were bipartisan, peopled by parents or other civic-minded locals.
By the 2019 election, candidates had only the shallowest connection with the local area. In Fairfax County, 10 of the 12 existing school board members didn’t even have children in the local schools. Eventually, even the two candidates with kids in the schools (Republicans) were ousted by candidates who made up for their lack of local knowledge with progressive credentials (they were LBGTQIA+ activists, environmentalists and ‘anti-racists’).
Once they were elected, they began working hand-in-glove with Northam appointees to the Education Department to remake K-12 education by shifting the focus from education to identity and social justice. The same happened across all seven school districts in Northern Virginia.
In all the counties, Loudoun stood out because it aggressively pursued a woke agenda, introducing children to CRT and gender identity ideology over the heads of parents. School board meetings became national news, with scenes of pitched battled between parents and school board members over ideology, closures and mask mandates. One of the most enduring images came when Scott Smith, father of a high-school student, was wrestled to the ground by police and arrested. Smith was angry that school officials had remained silent about the rape of his daughter in the girls’ toilet by a ‘gender-fluid’ teenaged boy wearing a skirt. It later emerged that school officials knew of the assault but chose to move the boy to another school because publicity might derail their efforts to enact a new transgender bathroom policy. The boy promptly assaulted a second girl.
The fallout from this dispute and others led to a stunning upset in the election of Virginia’s governor (November 2021) when voters chose Republican Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe, Democrat and former governor. McAuliffe made the mistake of responding to parents attempts to remove sexually explicit books from the school library by opining, ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’. Parents were not impressed. Youngkin, who believes in ‘parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions with regards to their child’s upbringing and care’, won a resounding victory.
However, if parents thought the tide was turning, they were soon disappointed. Even with the most powerful elected official on their side, the state department of education, school boards and teachers’ unions continued to defy parents’ wishes. When the governor issued an executive order leaving the decision of whether to mask up to parents, all seven school districts in northern Virginia schools refused to comply until they forced to do so when a new state law was passed. In December, parents learned that several districts had withheld notifications of National Merit Awards (for outstanding academic achievement) for two years in the name of ‘equal outcomes’.
When Governor Youngkin nominated Suparna Dutta, a Fairfax County parent who cofounded the parents’ group, to the Virginia Board of Education, Democrats blocked her appointment. Just last week, Virginia’s largest teachers’ union, the Virginia Education Association, distributed a Black Lives Matter toolkit to help teach students ‘principles’ including ‘transgender affirming’, ‘queer affirming’, ‘restorative justice’, and ‘globalism’.
If the experience of the past few years shows us anything, it is that woke indoctrination in schools is like a hydra. Just when parents think they have defeated a policy or exposed an unfair practice, new initiatives appear. The irony is that outside of the rarefied world of America’s elite, there is little support for what schools are doing. Parents gaining support in high places is a good start. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has acted decisively to curb the teaching of gender ideology in K-12 schools and is experimenting with ways to crack down on DEI bureaucrats without impacting academic freedom in higher education. But that on its own is not enough. Taking back education will take collaboration between like-minded teachers, parents and students who are tired of being taught what to think. Leadership is the most difficult challenge.
By taking over the Democratic Party, progressive activists benefit from a national reach, political influence, and deep pockets. Republicans aspire to be the party of parents but tend towards illiberal solutions, such as banning CRT, that are unlikely to work and are, more importantly, alien to America’s democratic ideals.
At a time when cynicism about politics is at its worst, these ideals of democracy, equality, freedom, and the political legacies of Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr, provide hope. These traditions, when coupled with our deep commitment to new generations, make it possible to transform our fight from individual resistance into a movement of citizens to restore this birthright to our children and all who come after them.
Nancy is speaking at a special SUE live event on Thursday 2 March at 7 p.m. Book tickets here.
Negotiating the Transition to Adulthood
Dr Stuart Waiton, Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education
It is difficult not to get angry when you are listening to parents who are scared for their children; some have found out that their school’s headteacher is unable to define a woman, while others have been put in the position of needing to remind their child what sex he or she is. Schools are being encouraged to adopt a gender-fluid approach to the trans question, so what should we do?
There have been several protests, in Glasgow and outside Holyrood, rightly raising concerns about the rapists and other sexual offenders who, had recent cases not been publicised, may have, and may still in the future, end up in women’s prisons.
Magically, it seems, Nicola Sturgeon has come to realise that perhaps when someone says they are a woman, it may not actually be true. This is really the only logical conclusion one can draw about double rapist Isla Bryson, previously known as Adam Graham. The prison placement of Bryson, along with other ‘trans’ prisoners, will at least initially now be based on their sex, as recorded at birth.
For Sturgeon to maintain the idea that trans women are women would mean that she has just sent the woman Isla Bryson/Adam Graham to a male prison – it’s like a Monty Python sketch gone wrong.
When we think of the trans issue, it is often men who have transitioned who come to mind. And it is often those individuals we see on TV debate shows, or who we hear about denouncing people such as J. K. Rowling. And it is individuals such as Rowling and other feminists who we see protesting around the trans question. However, when we look at what is happening in schools, the greatest change, by far, is not in the number of boys now saying that they are girls, it is the other way round.
The emergence of teenaged girls saying that they are trans is an entirely modern phenomenon. In a Google Books search, the first use of the term ‘female gender dysphoria’ was in 1979. The number of citations only starts to rise, and rise at an alarming rate, from 2005. Concerns have been raised about young children and teenagers who would previously have grown up to be homosexual adults, now ‘discovering’ that they are trans; there is even talk about lesbians becoming extinct. Those who have studied the phenomenon, such as Dr Lisa Littman, have explained that it is often also adolescent girls with autism and those with a history of mental illness who have become ‘trans’.
Littman and others, including Helen Joyce, author of the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, explain that what is happening is best described as a form of social contagion.
To put it crudely, teenaged girls saying that they are boys has become trendy and schools are endorsing this trend.
Helped by social media, particularly platforms such as TikTok, where children are often creating their own online universe, encouraged by trans rights activists and a wider culture of ‘identity’, teenaged girls are increasingly turning inwards, into their bodies, and concluding that they have been born in the ‘wrong’ one.
Dr Littman believes that ‘online content may encourage vulnerable individuals to believe that nonspecific symptoms and vague feelings should be interpreted as gender dysphoria stemming from a transgender condition’.
As Dr Jenny Cunningham explains, a key component of what leads young girls to transition, with all the medical and personal implications of this, is how society behaves. We have seen that Nicola Sturgeon et al. have just adopted the gender-fluid approach. There is one group of people in society who have the capacity to make a huge difference, and that is teachers – and especially headteachers.
If the massive and sudden increase in the number of children identifying as trans is to do with wider mental health problems, with adolescent trends, and with political and cultural activism, at the very least our schools need to look at the research work being done in this area and to consider the implications of what they are doing.
It may be a challenge to say that teen transgenderism has more in common with other teenage ‘trends’, such as anorexia, than it does with gay liberation. It may be confrontational to challenge the trans rights activist educators in schools. It will also be difficult to face the moralistic arguments about the potential suicide risk in these girls, but these ideas and arguments need to be questioned (as they have been here: Suicide Facts and Myths - Transgender Trend). To help teachers and parents do this, we hope to build on work already undertaken and to start a campaign around the idea that biology is real.
As adults, individuals have the absolute right to decide how they want to live, but children are not adults, and they need to know that biology is real. No individual has been ‘born in the wrong body’. A tiny number of people may grow up feeling this way, but today, the ever-expanding number has little or nothing to do with the mental disorder gender dysphoria. It is us, the adults in the room, who have helped to create a situation where sex and gender has become confused, and it is we who can stop it.
In the coming months, helped by the work of Dr Cunningham, we hope to initiate this campaign.
Perhaps we need public meetings to discuss the issues, or we may need to produce leaflets and pamphlets and give them to schools and to headteachers. Whatever we do, we are going to need your help, so get in touch and let us know what you think.
To finish, it is perhaps useful to note the argument made by the novelist and commentator Lionel Shriver, who observes that we used to understand and talk about the need to develop ‘character’ rather than an identity. Character develops through a life of struggle and changes throughout a life until our older selves have developed wisdom. The latter, the idea of your identity, is more like a trap, a limiting label that children are being encouraged to ‘discover’, often inside themselves, and to then reveal to the adult world.
Today, rather than understand that education, and the struggle to learn, is part of the necessary process to develop character, schools are turning to children and affirming their self-discovered identity, saying, ‘Go with what the kid says. They’re the best experts on their lives. They’re the best experts on their own identities and their own bodies’. By doing this, Shriver notes, we are abandoning minors, who understandably know little or nothing of the world, or indeed of themselves, ‘Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers ... (but) with no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff’. This, she argues, is a form of abandonment. She’s right.
The Scottish Government’s National Discussion on Education
Stuart Baird is a secondary school teacher who has worked in the state sector in Scotland for over 25 years.
The ‘listening phase’ of the Scottish Government’s National Discussion on Education is over and we await a ‘Call to Action’ due to be published in the spring. Engagement in the discussion has been celebrated by government for the number of tweets, meetings, and responses from parents, pupils, and organisations. One of my main concerns about the discussion is that the outcome of all these diverse views is that the central role for schools could be lost. Our education system has been organised around subject areas for a long time; they play an important role in introducing children and young people to the world around them. This subject-based learning gives pupils the tools to develop and as adults to make the world their own. It is through the subjects that schools provide a framework and pupils can see the world as a historian, a physicist, or an artist. These subjects are built from the shared knowledge that humanity has accumulated, distilled, and made accessible for pupils.
So, teachers have a key responsibility for shaping the content of the curriculum that is taught. It is their knowledge of specific subjects and how it can be introduced to pupils that gives them their authority in the classroom. Introducing enquiring minds to the world through the subjects is one of the joys of teaching. In delivering the curriculum, teachers plan and craft lessons using the best methods, or pedagogy. Teachers’ training and experience, shared with others, puts them in the ideal position to know what works with the pupils that they teach. Through their engagement and participation with their lessons, with interactions with peers and extra-curricular activities, pupils refine and develop their social and personal skills and understand the rules and behaviour that support their progress.
While new ideas for both curriculum content and pedagogy should be considered, these must be weighed against what is current practice. Professional dialogue and engagement are essential for teachers who have always tried to avoid pedagogical panaceas and dubious scientific claims. Today we find that the curriculum is being used to promote political positions and contestable values and that there is an undermining of the authority of teachers and a challenge to the role of parents.
It is certainly the case that the Curriculum for Excellence, since its inception in 2010, has been a vehicle for political priorities. There was a strong economic and skills push when the curriculum was established, including ‘the need to increase the economic performance of the nation’ and ‘more skills-for-work options for pupils’. Today the economy has taken a back seat to a policy programme aimed at ‘closing the attainment gap’ and overcoming ‘child poverty’. Just as schools do not shape the economy, how can schools seriously be expected to overcome poverty?
Another example that brings politics into the curriculum is in learning for sustainability. Here curriculum content is used by the Scottish government in ‘facilitating the delivery of a wide range of related policy commitments’ including Scotland’s pledge to become a Net Zero Nation.
The successful integration of previous policies’ initiatives into education has paved the way in allowing education to be the target of a new wave of activist’s ideas such as critical race theory and gender ideology. Such theories are contested and problematic and should not be taught in school as society’s settled outlook on such issues.
While politicising education can win headlines and help MSPs and their allies to look busy, they undermine the special contribution of schools through the subjects and erode the authority of the teacher and ultimately the learning and experience of pupils.
To challenge indoctrination, teachers should draw on their subject expertise to defend both the curriculum space for and the content of their subjects; a thoughtful subject specialist is one who values education over political diktat. Parents should support those teachers putting subjects first and be ready to challenge those who overstep their authority and follow without question government or activists’ leads. When we read the ‘Call to Action’ in the spring, let’s assess it for its education benefits and be ready to challenge partisan policies and ideologically loaded policies.
Sex and Gender - Part 1
Jenny Cunningham is a retired community paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for over 30 years. She has specific experience in neurodevelopmental and autism diagnostic assessment.
Parents are being told by their school-age children and teenagers that there are transgender pupils in their school who want to change their sex. They are allowed to change their name and pronouns (he/him or she/her) and wear the clothes of their chosen sex in school. Teachers encourage children to accept their new transgender classmates and to call them by their chosen names and use their ‘correct’ pronouns. Making sense of this new approach to gender is difficult if you are unfamiliar with the terms used. This essay has been written to help parents get to grips with some of the ideas associated with the debate.
What does it mean to transition to the opposite gender?
First, we need to be clear: we cannot change our sex. Our sex is determined by our chromosomes (XX in females and XY in males) and sex hormones
(e.g. oestrogen or testosterone). Acting together, they determine development of the reproductive organs in babies (ovaries and womb in girls and testicles in boys) and genitals (vagina and clitoris, or penis). The sex hormones become active again during puberty, when secondary sexual characteristics develop. (See the table of pubertal changes below.)
What is meant by transitioning from one gender to the other is that a child or young person expresses an urgent desire to become like the opposite sex (known as gender dysphoria or gender incongruence). This can only be done by changing their secondary sex characteristics and altering their genitals to approximate those of the opposite sex.
The first step in gender transition (or realignment) can start just before or in early puberty with the use of drugs known as puberty blockers. These can interrupt puberty and prevent or slow down the changes – the thought of which the trans child or teenager may fear or hate. Puberty blockers are discontinued at around age 15–16, before the next stage in treatment, which is to administer feminising or masculinising hormones.
It has been argued that puberty blockers may be used to give the child or teenager time to consider whether they want to proceed to this next stage. However, studies have shown that virtually all those who are given puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormone treatment. The final stage of realignment may involve surgical treatment such as mastectomy (breast removal) and phalloplasty (creation of an artificial penis) in females or castration and vaginoplasty (creation of an artificial vagina) in males. None of these steps are without dangers.
Puberty blockers are not licensed for use in gender realignment, and little is known about their long-term effects. They do, however, reduce bone density and may interfere with bone development. Use of cross-sex hormones after puberty blockers results in infertility. Surgery is associated with sexual dysfunction and may result in incontinence and pain.
How has the Scottish government promoted gender identity and social transitioning in schools?
The government’s sex education curriculum in primary schools exposes children as young as 6–7 years to the language of gender identity: transgender, cisgender (i.e. not identifying as trans), gay and lesbian, bisexual, etc. Most children will only have developed a stable self-identity as a boy or girl at age 4–6. Introducing this kind of gender terminology can be extremely confusing for children.
In 2021, the government issued guidance to schools and teachers about supporting ‘transgender children and teenagers’ in school. Teachers are advised not to question children or teenagers who express their unhappiness about being a boy or girl, and instead to allow them to change their name, pronouns, and clothes in school (sometimes without their parents being informed). In other words, teachers are affirming the child’s new gender identity and allowing them to socially transition, so that society, or at least the school, now treats the child as if he or she were the opposite sex.
Social transitioning has consequences. Transgender children and teenagers will invariably be referred to the NHS gender identity service at the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow (the national service for children and young people). This service also follows a gender affirmative model – unquestioningly accepting the child’s or teenager’s gender identification and desire to undergo gender realignment. In a large proportion of cases, children and teenagers will proceed to puberty blockers (even children as young as age 9) and then to cross-sex hormones or even surgery.
What parents may not know (or have not been told) is that if children with gender incongruence are not socially transitioned, and instead a ‘wait and see’ approach is taken, with support for the child and family from health professionals, the majority will desist, that is, decide not to transition. By their mid-teens they will be accepting of their sex, their bodies, and their sexuality (be it heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual). So why are teachers, who have no expertise in this field (nor be expected to have) being advised by the government to socially transition children – an intervention that is highly likely to put them on the pathway to gender realignment?
The problems associated with the Sandyford Clinic gender identity service and the particularly worrying tidal wave of referrals to the service of teenagers with gender incongruence, especially girls, will be discussed in another article on gender identity and transitioning next week.
Changes during Puberty
Age (years) : Changes
Girls
From 9–11 : Breast buds; pubic hair starts to appear
After 12 : Armpit hair; acne; height increases at fastest rate
Around 13 : First period
Around 15 : Reproductive organs and genitals fully developed
Boys
Around 11 : Pubic hair starts to appear
Around 13 : Voice changes (‘breaks’); muscles enlarge
Around 14 : Acne; armpit hair appears
Around 15 : Facial hair appears
Sex and Gender - Part 2
Jenny Cunningham is a retired community paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for over 30 years. She has specific experience in neurodevelopmental and autism diagnostic assessment.
One of the dangers of children and young people being socially transitioned from one gender identity to the other in school, to become ‘transgender’ pupils (as advised by the Scottish government), is that most of them will be referred to the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow. This is Scotland’s only specialist service for children and young people expressing distress related to their ‘gender identity’. The service follows the same model of assessment and treatment as the gender identity service at the Tavistock Clinic in London. In July 2022, NHS England announced the decision to close the Tavistock by spring this year, after a damning report by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who found the service to be clinically unsafe. Cass censured the Tavistock for a number of reasons:
The starting point for assessment was the unquestioning acceptance (‘affirmation’) of the child or young person’s desire to change their gender, especially if they were already being treated as the opposite gender in school or at home.
The service was so focused on the treatment of gender incongruence that any other problems that the child or teenager might have had were ‘overshadowed’ and inadequately assessed, if at all. These problems included poor mental health, developmental conditions (such as autism), and social or emotional difficulties.
Children and teenagers approaching or in early puberty were being started on puberty blockers, even though little is known about the long-term effects of these drugs.
Teenagers were being referred for cross-sex hormones to endocrinology specialists who were not part of the assessment team and did not know their background.
There was a lack of follow-up of children and young people after treatment in order to monitor outcomes.
The Sandyford service has all these deficiencies, but the Scottish government has ignored the warnings in the interim findings of the Cass report and refused to close the clinic. It has indicated that it will only review the service. There are two groups of children and young people most endangered by the present situation in Scotland. The first are children and teenagers between the ages of 9 and 13 or 14 who are coming up to puberty or are in early puberty. The Sandyford Clinic says that it prioritises this group. This is the age group most likely to be started on puberty blockers to minimise the development of secondary sexual characteristics. This makes the subsequent use of cross-sex hormones more effective (as they will not need to ‘undo’ the changes brought about by puberty). Most children and teenagers treated with puberty blockers move on to treatment with cross-sex hormones, despite the risk of subsequent infertility.
The second group endangered by the government’s policy of encouraging social transitioning in schools and the government-sanctioned gender identity service is teenaged girls. The Cass report highlighted a disturbing trend in the pattern of referrals to the Tavistock (which is the same for Sandyford and most other gender identity services in America and Europe). Before 2009, there were quite small numbers of referrals, mostly for boys. After 2009, referral rates increased rapidly, and by 2016 by far the largest group comprised teenaged girls. These girls had not experienced any gender identity concerns in childhood. Neither the Tavistock nor the Sandyford service appear to have asked the question, ‘Why should so many adolescent girls suddenly develop gender incongruence?’
Two writers, one in the USA and one in the UK, have answered the question through careful analysis and extensive interviews with teenagers and parents. In her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, calls the phenomenon a ‘craze’. In Trans, Helen Joyce, a former editor of The Economist, refers to it as a ‘social contagion’. In Scotland and England, the number of teenaged girls in the same school and even in the same class who are transitioning is evidence of a similar trend. This has strong parallels with the nearly simultaneous increase in teenaged girls with eating disorders and self-harming. Adolescent girls as a group can be extremely anxious about pubertal changes and body image, including their appearance and inability to match unrealistic stereotypes of female beauty. The teenagers most susceptible to the allure of gender transitioning are often those with mental health problems (anxiety or depression), developmental disorders (such as autism) and social problems (e.g., in the cases of looked-after young people and those suffering neglect or abuse).
However, as Hilary Cass highlighted, these problems are not being identified or adequately assessed and treated by gender identity services such as the Sandyford Clinic. Nor is the possibility being considered that teenage friendship groups may be affected by a social contagion or craze.
Instead, these girls are being propelled along a pathway to major medical and even surgical interventions. The scandal, as Joyce and Shrier argue, is that many of these teenagers may not have gender incongruence at all. This is brought home by a small but growing number of young women who have decided to detransition, who recognise that they have made a mistake but now must live with irreversible changes, such as breast removal, deep voice and facial hair.
Imagine how much more dangerous it would be for this group of teenaged girls if gender self-identification by 16-year-olds were to go ahead under the Scottish government’s Gender Recognition Act – fortunately halted by the UK government.
Drag Queens and Storytelling
Dr Stuart Waiton, Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education
In early December last year, a Drag Queen Story Hour event in Dundee, targeted at 2- to 10-year-olds, was cancelled after ‘abusive threats’ were sent to the venue. Or so we were told. Sometimes the language used by both sides in this divisive issue is explosive, but what are drag queen shows and should we be concerned?
Having noticed opposition to the event on Facebook, I went to the Dundee Contemporary Arts centre (DCA) to find a rather polite group of about ten middle-aged protesters. In front of the venue, two bouncers stood cross-armed, but I suspect they felt little threat from the women in woolly bobble hats who were happy to chat about their concerns.
The following day the local press ran an ‘abusive threats’ story. According to the DCA the performer, Miss Peaches, did not feel safe due to ‘hateful and intimidating online behaviour’. Apparently the ‘appalling’ behaviour was directed at the performer and the DCA team – behaviour that was reported to the police. Having not seen any of this hateful behaviour either on Facebook or at the protest, I thought I would look into it further. It is not clear what was said to Miss Peaches online, but he claims that he was misgendered (I might be guilty of this too). He also claims that he was being accused of paedophilia, which may well have happened.
I contacted the DCA to ask if I could see the abusive, hate-filled messages, or to see if they could give me an idea about what had been said. They declined to do so, and interestingly, many of those articles with headlines about hate and abuse finished with a parting line explaining that the police had investigated and found no hate crimes being committed.
It is possible that some people called Miss Peaches a paedophile; however, the posts I saw online did not, nor were they homophobic. Rather, the concerns being raised were about drag queens being sexualised entertainers and that it is wrong for them to be used to ‘educate’ children. One could argue that it is up to parents to decide what shows to take their children to see, which is a fair argument. However, the DCA is publicly funded; they are using our money, which makes this a public issue.
The ‘paedo’ question is worth a little more thought. It is quite common to see articles and digital posts from authors who believe that what we are witnessing is grooming by paedophiles, and in America at least, one Drag Queen Story Hour performer has been found guilty of this charge. Elsewhere, in the UK, we find journalists complaining about acts like that of Aida H. Dee, who appears in front of children in tight outfits with bulging genitalia and who has declared online that they believe ‘love has no age’.
I believe that the term paedophile should be reserved for those found guilty of that crime itself and that we do not need to find paedophilia to recognise that there is something seriously wrong with an act that both sexualises childhood and also promotes gender fluidity to small children.
Drag acts are sexualised performances historically associated with late nights and gay clubs. Nobody questions or condemns these acts. The concerns are only raised when these sexualised personae are imported into libraries and council-funded venues and presented to small children.
It is entirely legitimate for members of the public to be concerned about the breaking down of the boundary between adulthood and childhood. Drag queens may not be reading explicitly sexual material, nor are they there to physically abuse children, but nevertheless, they are themselves sexual – as seen quite clearly with certain named acts like that of FlowJob. There also appears to be a tacit acceptance that these acts are there to promote transgenderism. Aida H. Dee, for example, reads from his own work on ‘diversity’ and has raised funds for trans groups that advocate the use of hormone treatment for 12-year-olds. Other acts promote the idea of exploring ‘gender fluidity’, providing ‘queer role models’ and ‘breaking down the notion of sex binary’. In Dundee, the DCA promoted Miss Peaches as part of their ‘Transcendent season’ that is ‘pushing past gender norms’.
So it may be wrong to think that libraries and staff at art centres are grooming children for sex, but it is unquestionably the case that they are ‘grooming’ them for a gender-fluid outlook that they believe is ‘progressive’. They are of course entitled to their opinions, but that should not mean that they can use public funds to promote something that many, arguably the vast majority of people, think is wrong and confusing for children.
Finally, it is worth unpicking the image of the hate-filled intolerant protesters who oppose Drag Queen Story Hour. Some of the comments directed at Miss Peaches may well have been abusive, but it is worth asking what exactly the DCA were complaining about, especially when the police saw no criminality. In fact, the more you look at the Dundee example, the more it appears that the intolerance, and even the hate, appears to have been directed at the protesters, helped by a one-sided media that did everything it could to promote the idea of a threatening and abusive mob.
Nobody, not the press nor the DCA, bothered to talk to the protestors, reply to their emails or engage with their arguments. Being ‘inclusive’ appears to be a one-way street that shuts out those members of the public who oppose drag queens entertaining children. In England it was discovered that more than a hundred librarians met online to discuss ways of dealing, rather than engaging, with protests against Aida H. Dee. One suggested solution was to call drag queens ‘pantomime dames’ to hide the reality from the public.
In all these cases, never is there a recognition that public venues and managers should relate to the actual public. Rather, venues make complaints to the police and the press and even to employers. One individual protesting online against the DCA event, for example, found herself being dragged to the human resources department by her council under charges of ‘harassment’ before being found not ‘guilty’.
It is those people who have raised legitimate concerns about drag acts who are being treated in a profoundly intolerant way, demonised, ‘dead-named’, reported to the police and even having their livelihoods threatened.
Hiding behind the language of safety, shielded by the victim persona, it was the ‘progressives’ who demonstrated their intolerance towards the protesters. These ‘tolerant’ elites exercise an official bigotry that means no debate was allowed. Drag queens telling stories to children may not be paedophiles, but they clearly are helping to sexualise childhood, something that for many people will be seen as worth protesting about.
To end on a more positive note, perhaps rather than simply protest, we should create an alternative and truly progressive story time by setting up an Elderly Hour, where people who have lived, loved, worked and struggled to make our communities, read to our children and pass on their wisdom and wit to the next generation.
Schools are being reracialised
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is Director of Don’t Divide Us, a grassroots movement that advocates a colourblind approach to countering prejudice and campaigns against racially divisive messaging.
Most people in Britain are open-minded in their attitudes towards race, so much so that 89% of respondents in research from 2020 said they would be happy for their child to marry someone from another ethnic group. This is a significant improvement from earlier figures and marks the huge progress Britain has made since Enoch Powell’s apocalyptic, and wrong, ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968.
So why are schools being encouraged to accept the views that Britain is systematically racist, that white pupils are bearers of privilege, and that pupils from ethnic minorities are inevitably oppressed? That this is happening can be in no doubt.
You may not have yet experienced it first hand, and are therefore perhaps wondering whether this article’s title is itself somewhat apocalyptic. Maybe your particular child is lucky enough to attend a school where the head has not felt under intense moral pressure to ‘do something about racism’, even if pupils in the school have been playing and making friends across ethnicities with few or no problems. Maybe your child goes to a school where experienced teachers and heads, with common sense and humanity, do not think it is an educationally or ethically good idea to make children see the race of their friends and regard this as more important than their (developing) personalities. Maybe your child goes to a school that is not reaching out to one of the proliferating organisations offering equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) ‘anti-racism’ training in order to fulfil official requirements to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘respect diversity’.
You may think none of this applies to you. But no one in authority is scrutinising the content of such courses. Nor are they checking the qualifications of the staff of these organisations or whether they have the suitable experience and ethical principles to be working in schools. There is no form of quality control, yet they are endorsed by sources of cultural and political authorities who should know better. This means that their influence will percolate across schools unless stopped.
Liz Pemberton, aka The Black Nursery Manager, offers her services as ‘an anti-racist trainer and consultant’ to help schools make sure their dressing up boxes for under 5’s are culturally sensitive. Teachers will be taught how to ‘audit’ their dressing up boxes and be told about the history of ‘yellowface’, ‘blackface’ and pantomime. Teachers are being told that it is okay, or even cutting-edge best practice, to treat individual pupils as members of a group according to ethnicity, and to tell children a historically illiterate narrative of victims and oppressors – all in the name of inclusivity and anti-racism!
The irony is that such strategies are likely to make young children hypersensitive to skin colour and interrupt the normal developmental processes of making friends. One mother told us how her 5-year old (mixed-race) daughter suddenly stopped holding the hand of her best (white) friend as they walked to school. When she tried to find out the reason, she discovered that the school had recently started a new ‘anti-racist’ strategy. This was news to her and other parents.
Another example from the secondary sector is that of Penny Rabiger, who is cofounder of BAMEed Network and influential in certain professional circles. In this clip from a recent webinar hosted by the EDI company Flair, she warns her audience of the need to ‘circumvent resistance’ and that ‘the impartiality police will come for you’, and that teachers need to break down ‘every single area of school life’ (the school development plan, professional development plans, recruitment, induction, relationships with families) in the anti-racist effort.
This is the language of someone who thinks they are at war, not that of an educator whose primary role is to contribute to the intellectual and aesthetic development of the younger generation in an educational context that respects the dignity of the individual, our common humanity and justice within a universal moral framework. The framework of critical social justice, articulated clearly by Rabiger and adopted by many EDI organisations, is a highly politically partisan, intolerant ideology that brooks no dissent or alternative approaches and therefore runs counter to important democratic principles.
There are two other points to note in this example. The first is Rabiger’s allusion to the need ‘to circumvent resistance’. This is reminiscent of Brighton and Hove’s strategy meeting in November 2020 to discuss their Racial Literacy 101 Strategy, which is based on core ideas from critical race theory. In a Don’t Divide Us detailed case study, we expose the council’s minimal consultation with its citizens, indicative that they regard anyone who disagrees as ‘resistance’ or as ‘obstacles’ to be overcome – including parents from minority ethnic groups. The reluctance of many schools to show parents the materials being used for ‘anti-racism’ lessons or lessons on sex, sexuality and gender and related training is becoming more obvious by the day. In producing our report on councils’ use of third-party organisations offering ‘anti-racist’ training for schools, we issued over 172 freedom of information requests. Over 54% of councils contacted either did not respond or provided insufficient information, often citing commercial interests as a reason to withhold materials.
The second point to note is Rabiger’s hostility to impartiality (‘the impartiality police will come for you’!). This particular criticism is often closely allied to a hostility to colourblind approaches. Both impartiality and the colourblind anti-racist approach are assumed to be at best naive but more often a sign of privilege or assertions that themselves perpetuate oppression. At a political level, educator-activists who say this are often venting their knee-jerk anti-Conservative inclinations. In 2020 the Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, issued a stern reminder to schools of their duty to teach impartially. It caused a furore among some academics, who saw it as an attack on educators’ professional autonomy. But in making such protests, they forget that schools are different from institutions providing higher education. One main difference is that the relationships in schools – primarily between adult staff and younger pupils – are not those of adult individuals with equal rights. Most of us tacitly understand that children do not have equal rights to those of adults, because they need time to develop into adulthood. This understanding is formalised in law (hence the minimum ages of sexual consent, learning to drive and so forth).
Legally, and by custom, parents are considered the primary source of care, nurture and development of children. Schools in England have an important but distinct role, but one which depends on the trust of parents, and as specified in Section 9 of the Education Act 1996, with the consent of parents and in accordance with their wishes. Sections 406 and 407 of the same Act stipulate that schools have a duty to teach impartially; where contested views are part of the lesson, alternatives should also be presented, including opposing views. Instead, we have a situation where teachers are being encouraged to reject colourblind universal approaches (i.e. the belief that skin colour is not the most meaningful or important aspect of our sense of self) by edu-activists who see themselves as harbingers of some utopian fantasy based on a cocktail of statistics and social justice moralising.
In reality, we are seeing a highly racialised outlook being presented as normal, or even good, practice. Witness the accolades heaped on Channel 4’s documentary ‘The School That Tried to End Racism’, where ‘anti-racist’ experts observed a young child visibly distressed at being separated out into racial affinity groups and commented that at least the pupil was ‘doing the work’. One teacher at a school that is paying Flair to become an ‘anti-racist’ school told me that one of the pupils asked, ‘Why are we excluding our white friends?’ Truly it seems that just when skin colour was less important than ever in Britain, this new ideology of ‘anti-racism’ is reracialising our society – it is divisive, unethical and politically dangerous. That is why Don’t Divide Us is focusing on schools. We are launching a petition – Educate Not Indoctrinate – and look forward to working alongside like-minded friends including the Scottish Union for Education.
What is Education for?
Lindsay Paterson is Emeritus Professor of Education Policy, School of Social and Political Science, Edinburgh University.
The purpose of education has always been subject to debate. Today there are two key controversies, and they are often confused. Working out which controversy we are talking about is a first step to making up our minds on what education is for.
The most prominent controversy today is between ‘personal fulfilment’ and ‘social contribution’. On the face of it, in Scotland, the personal angle is winning. There is much talk of personal wellbeing, of education’s contribution to mental health, of encouraging young people to be self-reliant, confident and autonomous. The main obstacle to these goals, it is claimed, is self-doubt. Education, it is suggested, ought to provide guidance on how to overcome that.
The academics Katherine Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes have called this ‘therapeutic education’, and they claim that it is dangerous. They argue that focusing on emotions just makes bad emotions worse. A search for the sources of victimhood, far from being empowering, merely reinforces the emotional dependence. A culture of self-revelation degenerates into narcissism, out of which self-reliance never grows. As this emphasis on personal vulnerability has been going on for quite a long time in education – at least since the 1990s – it has now allegedly created a society in which young people obsess about things that make them feel bad. That very obsession makes them feel even worse.
The other pole of this first controversy is to direct students’ attention to what they can do for society. Much rhetoric is still devoted to this, but in practice the actual scope for developing social purpose has been so fundamentally undermined that we barely remember how it worked in the past. All versions of ‘social contribution’ as it was understood for Scottish education now seem quaintly out of date. Perhaps the most familiar might be the work developed by early–twentieth-century socialists, through the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), the Labour Colleges, and, for children, the Socialist Sunday Schools. Here, the aim was to use education to create a better society.
In some of these organisations, this was indoctrination. The Labour Colleges’ explicit purpose was the teaching of Marxist ideas to adults. The Socialist Sunday Schools, flourishing at much the same time, had a children’s version of that. The Labour Colleges were always far smaller than the popular WEA, which aspired to build a better society but firmly eschewed propaganda, believing that its social goals would be best achieved by widespread public enlightenment. For the WEA, if the workers could have access to the same quality of teaching and knowledge as the social elites, democracy and thus enlightenment would ensure that social reform would come about gradually.
We can recognise these traditions of social contribution or purpose in Scotland partly because of the political inclinations of majority opinion here, and because the WEA did allow for personal fulfilment as well, even if justifying it in terms of the social choices that the personally fulfilled would then make, but other social purposes have now long gone.
Creating a godly commonwealth was the reason the Protestant Reformers founded Scotland’s advanced system of parish schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but that goal now strikes as us belonging to theocracies we associate with places such as Afghanistan. Training children to be docile workers was a common rationale for better schooling in the aftermath of Scotland’s initial industrialisation in the early nineteenth century, but that aim of inducing conformity was already becoming unfashionable by the late nineteenth century. Educating children to be faithful servants of the Empire was discredited by the catastrophes of two world wars and destroyed by colonial liberation.
Some version of these social purposes for education has dominated for so long that today’s emphasis on personal fulfilment still can seem quite novel. However, it too emerged from the eighteenth century, grew to prominence with the development of the mid–twentieth-century welfare state, and became official policy from the 1960s and with increasing insistence since the advent of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Oddly, the longevity of the idea of personal fulfilment means that today’s advocates can find arguments against all previous examples of social purpose – personal authenticity against religion, or workplace conformity, or imperialism. Even socialist ideas can be rebelled against through a mildly disruptive anarchism. Starting in the 1960s in France and the USA, this idea came belatedly to Scotland in the 1980s. Out of all these versions of a history of struggle against social goals comes the now dominant sense that personal fulfilment is revolutionary.
The second controversy cuts across the arguments on social purpose and personal fulfilment: it’s the debate between liberal education and vocational education. On the one hand there is education for its own sake. On the other, education is for use, not only narrowly vocational in the sense that is now common, but more broadly education serving any kind of purpose that is not intrinsically educational. This might seem to be the same as the first debate, but it isn’t, because this one is about what is taught and learnt, not about the students themselves.
Liberal education has an ancient pedigree and has changed its meaning so much over the centuries that we might doubt that it is a single idea at all. Is the liberal learning of Cicero – the distinguished Roman lawyer, politician and writer – really the same as that of, say, Frederick Douglass, the leader of the slaves of the southern US states, ally of Lincoln in the civil war? Douglass found liberty in the capacity to read the bible: ‘from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom’. Nevertheless, there is a common thread in the sense that learning for its own sake is liberating because learning for any kind of extrinsic purpose constrains our freedom.
This meaning is not denying purpose, but rather saying that learning is its own purpose. In practice, what liberal education has come to mean in the modern period – since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment – has been the immersion in a tradition of rational thought. The English liberal Matthew Arnold put this most famously in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy: liberal education is the ‘pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know the best which has been thought and said in the world’. The belief was that by understanding the best that human creativity has produced, the student’s own creativity is inspired.
This view is currently very unfashionable, but it was the motivating ideal of all the reforming educational projects of the twentieth century: the expansion of secondary schooling, the widening of access to universities, adult education, self-education encouraged by municipal libraries and galleries, inexpensive paperback books, and television. In particular, contrary to the more recent view that respect for tradition is inescapably conservative, it was the aim of radical politics, and especially in the twentieth century, socialist politics.
A typical example is the socialist intellectual Harold Laski, professor at the London School of Economics and left-wing gadfly to Attlee’s Labour Party. Radical socialist though he was, Laski had no time for relativistic rejection of the great traditions. Knowledge was universal, and the purpose of education was solely to acquaint people with it. He wrote in 1930 that ‘the business of a university is teaching students how facts are converted into truth. What it is seeking is the method whereby experience in any branch of knowledge can be connected with the structure of the universe. The pathway to that end is, above all, a training in scepticism.’
A more graphic statement of essentially the same position came from Ellen Wilkinson, a radical socialist and feminist who was Minister of Education in Attlee’s government. She hoped in 1946 that proper secondary schooling would provide a haven from the drudgery of the lives that most working-class children were destined for: ‘can’t their three precious years of secondary school be at least a relief from all that? Can’t Shakespeare mean more than a scrubbing brush – can’t enough of a foreign language be taught to open windows on the world a bit?’
The contrast with vocational learning here is explicit, but often, from advocates of liberal education, it is merely implied. In reply to those who asserted that education should be for work, the argument was that the place to learn how to work was at work, education was an escape from that. Equally dubious in this tradition was any idea that the purpose of education was to overcome inequality, or to encourage social mobility, or to achieve social justice. All these extrinsic aims belong to the first contrast of purposes – social or personal – not to the value of what is studied. Indeed, in the liberal education tradition, there has also been the view that being liberally educated was itself the best preparation for work, or for citizenship, or for living with other people. In this view, education for freedom is also education to be a good person, but this outcome is incidental, not the main purpose, because to educate directly for anything other than sceptical understanding is to narrow the content of what is learnt and is to distort the meaning which the student takes from it.
Today that view of liberal education is barely even recognised in education policy. It’s not just a matter of politicians’ wanting to use education to promote economic development or social justice. It is also the intrusion into the very content of education of specific political programmes. Most inimically to the universal ideals of liberal education has been the belief that there is no universal tradition of thought, so that each cultural group must find its own truth in its own traditions. The ultimate result of that view is that each person must do this on their own.
This brings us back to the first kind of controversy, because in ideologies of these kinds, the actual content of education matters little. The whole purpose is to sort people for jobs, or to give them the chance to better themselves, or to do these things in a way that overcomes some identified social evils. Because education has indeed always had these functions, adjusted to suit the dominant ideologies of each age, the claim that these are what the purposes of education ought to be seems quite plausible. Today in Scotland, it is seemingly radical and apparently to everyone’s taste. Education for its own sake says nothing about building a better society.
Education has always found public favour from the belief that it can serve those ideologies which are currently widely accepted by policy makers. Today, these ideologies would be summed up as the aims of social justice and personal fulfilment. Astute liberal educators have known how to take advantage of this dependence on political fashion, persuading those with power and money that an education that is about unfettered freedom of thought is in fact a more effective way of achieving social and personal goals than educating for these aims deliberately. That is probably then the best way to revive truly liberal education.
Personal fulfilment, mental health, social mobility, the creativity required for a flourishing economy, the social liberation that overcoming social injustice offers: we can learn from the very long history of liberal education in all its many varieties that all these extrinsic purposes can be served by trusting students to reach the appropriate conclusions for themselves. The best way to equip them to do that is to immerse them in the great traditions of intellect and practice.
Enough is Enough
Catriona Taylor delivered this speech on 12 January 2023 outside the Scottish Parliament as part of the growing campaign against government policy on gender and sex education in schools.
My name is Catriona Taylor and I’m a retired headteacher of a Catholic Primary School in Edinburgh. I do some supply cover in a few primary schools across the city, both Catholic and non-denominational schools.
What I’m going to share with you is probably very difficult and controversial for some of you to hear, and you might not agree with all that I say. Many of you may not even be aware of what is happening in your child’s school in terms of sex education material being taught. Not just in Edinburgh, not just in Scotland or even the whole of the UK, but across the globe. I have a number of concerns, and parents and grandparents or carers should be concerned too.
Firstly, I’m concerned because parents have been kept in the dark. The 2001 Education Act was replaced in 2014 when the Scottish Government introduced a new Conduct of Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Education in Schools. This revised guidance was introduced following the Marriage and Civil Partnership Act 2014 where both opposite sex and same sex couples can marry.
My concern is that the Scottish Government has surreptitiously refreshed the 2014 RSHP (Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood) programme and introduced new sexually explicit materials into primary and secondary schools to support the ‘health and wellbeing curriculum’ in 2019–2020. This was at a time of lockdown and when parents had no access to schools or materials and therefore were kept in the dark.
Parents have not been made aware of these changes to this resource, which now includes new explicit and highly inappropriate material which our children are being exposed to. Most parents will presume it’s much the same as what has gone on before ever since 2001 and certainly no different from when the pilot of RSHP was introduced in 2014. This is not the case.
Historically parents have been seen to be the first educators of their children. According to the document Conduct of Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Education in Schools (2014), parents are a child’s first teacher, a role that continues for life. When in 2006 the Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Act was passed, it stated that schools had a responsibility to improve parental involvement in the education of their child; it recognised ‘the vital role that parents play in children’s learning and development’. So what has happened since then? How can there be parental involvement when you don’t know what your children are being taught?
Remember, you are entitled to find out what your child is being taught in school – it is your right, and you have the right to ensure that your own expectations, your values, cultural identity, and language are met accordingly. Don’t be marginalised; let your voices be heard loudly! I have set up a parents support network where parents can meet face to face to share any help and advice.
My second concern is for teachers. Some teachers are afraid to speak out against this programme for fear of losing their jobs! They may be suspended if they don’t positively affirm the child’s chosen gender and instead use his or her correct given name and correct-sex pronouns. It may be by mistake or for wittingly refusing to do so. But either way they fear losing their job! So, silence is golden! Teachers need to be brave, let their voices be heard, and refuse to teach this unacceptable material.
As a teacher, the content of the material now being taught in schools under the auspices of ‘health and wellbeing’ goes against my morals, my religious principals, and my values as a teacher, a mum and a granny. So, I have refused to share with the children the unnecessary language and terminology and the explicit worksheets and derogatory slides and films. These children do not need to be aware of the explicit sexual plumbing practices of their heterosexual mums and dads or homosexual parents either, be they gay or lesbian. Some of the material verges on the pornographic and is, in my opinion, tantamount to grooming. So come on teachers, it’s now time to stand up and be counted!
Most importantly I am concerned for our children, who are having their innocence and childhood taken away. From nursery age, children are taught and encouraged to be ‘anyone they want to be’, which in itself is good. We want our children to be confident youngsters; however, nurseries now tend to be ‘gender neutral’ and adopt the premise that a child can be one gender one day and another tomorrow, be it a boy or a girl. They suggest that children can change their gender from day to day if they so wish. This approach in the primary school setting, promotes a transgender ideology. Children are taught ‘Love is Love’ regardless of who you love or whether you are same gender or a different gender. It promotes the idea that children can change their gender or identify as multiple genders and explore other diverse gender identities too. So effectively children are taught they can be any gender they choose to be on any given day – an idea that can lead to experimentation and confusion.
This ideology fails to teach that dressing up, experimentation, and pretend play as a nurse or a pirate is a natural part of growing up. It fails to recognise that given time, most of children’s curiosity and gender confusion will be resolved naturally. Body dysphoria is a common condition experienced by many adolescent girls, but again this confusion with the way their body is changing and shaping up usually disappears by adulthood.
I am increasingly concerned with the growth of some children rights. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have 42 rights, and these must be available to all children without any discrimination. Included in the list of rights is the right to an education, the right to be heard and listened to, the right for their views to be taken into consideration in all matters affecting them, and the right for privacy and confidentiality. Thus, the choices that children make in school regarding their gender expression and sexual orientation must be positively affirmed by the teacher or the adult present, so the child has the right to privacy and confidentiality.
While these so-called rights and confidentiality may sound good when applied to adults, they have serious implications when applied to children. The questions that beg to be asked include Confidentiality from whom? And privacy from whom? Children are exposed to the RSHP sexuality programme without the knowledge or consent of their parents. What does this do to the parent–child relationship?
One purpose of this comprehensive sexuality education is the sexual liberation of children, which is not only lucrative for businesses but also coincides with political ideologies that could have the aim of liberating children from their parents’ conservative or religious views and values regarding sexuality. It could mean indoctrinating them in a new worldview that coincides with various liberal political ideologies of the Scottish Government and the NGOs (non-government organisations). So be aware that this is a global initiative and part of Agenda 2030, not just a Scottish initiative! Nicola doesn’t work on her own initiative.
I am concerned for children’s safety. Children have the right be kept safe from ‘mental or physical harm, violence, injury or abuse, neglect, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse’. As a teacher, I am certainly not against sex education in schools, as children need to know how their bodies are changing as they grow up and they need to know how to keep themselves safe. Schools have a responsibility to keep the children safe from harm, and children need to be equipped with the skills to do so.
While it’s a child’s right not to be abused in any way, shape or form, I would argue that this insidious RSHP material indoctrinates children and therefore is a form of abuse. I have had reports of children going home crying, upset, traumatised, distressed and anxious, cutting off their hair after RSHP health and wellbeing lessons and not wanting to return to school. These children are questioning if they are in the right body; a boy questions should he be a girl and vice versa.
Some children have been asked in class if they would prefer to be gay or lesbian, with a show of hands for the results. A school in Inverness conducted a written survey asking children between 5–12 if they identified as transgender or gay. Should the little ones even understand what ‘transgender’ means? For goodness’ sake – let the children be children. I’m finding that our children are very confused!
I am very confused, because talking sexually in the workplace to adults considered sexual harassment but talking about sexuality to children is considered essential? What will the consequences of the new RSHP be? In my opinion these new teaching resources are one of the greatest assaults on the health and innocence of children. Unlike traditional sex education, the RSHP sexuality education is highly explicit and promotes promiscuity and high-risk sexual behaviours as being healthy and normal. Where will it lead to? Sexualised children who are desensitised and curious? Will it normalise anal and oral sex? Will it promote early sexual autonomy and eventually lower the age of consent? According to a sex survey done in schools last year, the age of consent is now unofficially 13! Will it undermine traditional values and beliefs? Right now, it is certainly undermining parents and eroding their parental rights.
So come on parents, stand up for your right to protect your children! They are our future!
Teachers, be brave and stand up for your right to fight for your values and principles and stand by your moral compass. We have to let them (the Scottish Parliament) know now that enough is enough!