Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No65
Newsletter Themes: removing transgender ideology from schools, and the meaning of education
Education, according to Lorne Primary School in Edinburgh!
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In this week’s newsletter we look at the wider implications of the Cass Review for schools, and Stuart Baird discusses the meaning of education and the continuing limits of school league tables, which tell us little about the content and quality of the knowledge that should be transferred from one generation to the next.
The Cass Review: implications for Scottish schools
Stuart Waiton is Chair of the Scottish Union for Education.
One of the things missing from the Cass Review is a discussion about what’s going wrong in schools. As schools are one of the key places where children are being encouraged to think of themselves as ‘transgender’, this is an area that we believe is vitally important to address.
Last week, after a deafening silence from the Scottish government regarding Dr Hilary Cass’s findings, the Sandyford Clinic has announced that the prescription of puberty blockers has been paused for new patients under the age of 18. This is a victory for common sense. However, at the same time, we continue to find schools queuing up to appoint primary-school children as ‘LGBT champions’ and encouraging kids as young as four to think about whether they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.
As someone who fought for gay rights, even I find this push for discussions with young children about their supposed sexuality hard to fathom and see within it one of the underlying problems within education at the moment, which is the collapsing sense of what it means to be an adult and what it means to be a child. As one parent pointed out to me, the incessant use of the term young person, a term that on first appearance seems progressive, is often part of the process of the elimination of the ‘c’ word – child – from schools.
In part, it is this declining sense of adulthood and understanding of the importance of maturity that explains why adults simply affirm children’s ‘identities’. Here, once again, we find that the seemingly progressive ideas that we should teach ‘the whole child’ and ‘listen to the child’ have paved the way to abandoning not only adult responsibilities but also the recognition that children are children rather than mini adults.
Writing in UnHerd, Kathleen Stock (a woman who was hounded out of her academic job for questioning transgender ideology) makes the useful observation about a child’s ‘right to an open future’. The point she is making is that the idea of trans liberation and freedom for children is a fallacy. Having not reached the ‘age of maturity’, children who are affirmed, called by different names and treated as the opposite sex by adults, are ultimately being pushed down a road from which it is very difficult to escape. If we understand, as we should, that it is only adults who have autonomy and the right to make life altering decisions about their bodies, this promotion of a transgender identity with children can be seen as an assault upon freedom rather than its expression. If a child is left alone and decides as an adult, they want to change themselves, that is entirely their choice. When a child is affirmed, validated, re-labelled and celebrated by the world of adults, by teachers and psychologists, and helped by medical professionals to be ‘transgender’, this is in reality an assault upon both their childhood and their ability to make free and informed decisions as an adult.
As SUE has pointed out since being set up, the Scottish government’s Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools guidance promotes the idea that ‘being transgender’ is a fact of life. For some people, this is true; for many, it is not. Ignoring the potential harm this can do to children (or the biological reality of there being two sexes), the very fact that this is a highly contested idea should mean that primary-school teachers do not teach it. By doing so, they breach one of the basic ideals of a liberal education system.
New Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) guidance will be announced soon, and we will have to see what it says about ‘being transgender’. However, it does not bode well that staff from Sandyford, a clinic that has been promoting the now-discredited affirmation approach, were included as advisers during preparation of this guidance.
Dr Cass did not discuss schools in detail, but she did point out that affirming a child’s ‘identity’ without considering wider factors is extremely bad practice and potentially dangerous. This is exactly what the old guidance did (and does). In fact, a child saying that he or she is the opposite sex is casually dismissed as ‘not a child protection or wellbeing concern’ (p. 12). Worse still, if a parent raises concerns about this, the guidance presents them and their concerns as a wellbeing issue.
Under the guise of ‘Put the young person at the centre and keep them there’, the Scottish government’s guidance explains to teachers that keeping parents in the dark is the correct approach ‘unless they [the child] give their permission or there is a risk to themselves or others’ (p. 41). As the Cass Review has shown, the affirmation approach is a potential risk to children. At present, however, the potential for parents to limit the risk of harm from the use of this approach remains constrained, meaning that current government policy is a potential harm to children.
In England, having obtained legal advice, a family is threatening to sue their council unless it withdraws its Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit. It seems only a matter of time before something similar occurs in Scotland: watch this space.
The Scottish government guidance encourages schools faced with the scenario of a girl who says she is a boy (or vice versa) to ‘support their transition’ (p. 42). This is something that is being supported by the ‘many teachers [who] have already received training in transgender inclusion’ (p. 43). As a result, we find that schools are not simply ‘affirming’ transgender identities but celebrating them, helped by LGBT Youth Scotland posters, one of which reads, ‘Gender is NOT this... Girl – Boy’. As there is no agreed definition of the term gender, not only should this not be in schools, but a more useful poster – one that is true – would read, ‘Sex IS this... Girl – Boy’.
The Scottish government guidance, with its uncritical acceptance of transgender identities, claims to put the individual child ‘at the centre of any decision making’ (p. 12). However, a more honest interpretation would be that it puts the ‘progressive’ child who follows their ‘gender-affirming’ approach at the centre and keeps them there. We know this because schoolchildren who assert that there are only two sexes might, like Murray Allan, find themselves excluded from class, suspended, and then thrown out of school (watch the video interview with Murray here); or, like a couple of girls in England, be told that their common-sense attitudes to the idea of there being multiple genders are ‘despicable’ and that they should go to a different school.
In the recording of the girls in England, the conversation starts and ends with the hypothetical question of a child identifying as a cat. However, we have heard recent reports of a school in Scotland where this is actually happening, and we hope to provide details soon. The question this raises is whether teachers – adults – in Scotland see this simply as a case of another identity (albeit an animal one) in which they must put the child at the ‘centre’ and affirm his or her expressed belief? As it stands, the answer to this appears to be ‘Yes’!
The transgender ideologues claim that their approach is caring, but for those who question the dogma, or indeed for parents who raise concerns, the opposite is the case. In some, and perhaps many, cases, dissent is crushed, and we find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that now even Dr Cass herself is facing online abuse and has been advised, for her own safety, to avoid using public transport.
For SUE, the transgender ideology in schools is a problem on many levels. Ignoring the terrible harm it can cause for individual pupils, it is also a problem in terms of the time and energy being expended on something that has nothing to do with education. To turn things around, a key development needed within education is the recognition that education is a thing in itself – something of such importance that we need to get back to celebrating not identities but knowledge – and to understand that this is key for both the development of the child and also of society.
To do this, we need to develop an understanding of the role of teachers and parents. The sexuality and ‘gender identity’ of a child has nothing to do with schools, and transgender ideology and transgender rights activism need to be removed from educational establishments.
Open debate and discussion need to be encouraged, and the talk of ‘safe spaces’, together with the assertion that the gender-affirming approach must be followed to reduce the risk of suicide in trans-identifying children (an idea shown by Dr Cass to be inadequately supported by the evidence; p. 187 of her final report), needs to stop. If senior-level pupils are to engage with the issue of transgender identities, it should be done as part of an open debate, not a closed issue with punishment for those who raise questions.
Parents and their role need to be respected, and it is important that schools develop an approach that recognises that personal and private issues are best left to families to work out for themselves, and for older children, to resolve with their parents.
Let parents parent and let teachers teach. This should be obvious, but as the current situation stands, schools are losing their purpose, and this is having a detrimental effect on all children.
Over the coming months, SUE is determined to further highlight some of these issues. If you would like to help us, please get in touch by emailing info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
As we go to press, James Esses, founder of Thoughtful Therapists, has appealed to Rishi Sunak to launch a public inquiry into ‘the harm, both physical and emotional, caused to children in the name of gender identity ideology’. SUE is a signatory to this request. It is our hope that, with the help of other groups campaigning on this issue, we can develop something similar in Scotland.
Where does a good education rank in the secondary school league table?
Stuart Baird is a secondary school teacher who has worked in the state sector in Scotland for over 25 years.
The Sunday Times recently published its secondary school league table. Well-rehearsed arguments point to the table as little more than an indication of where the middle-class schools are in Scotland, and in commentary, Dr Keir Bloomer, former Director of Education, stated that very fact: ‘the more affluent a school’s pupil intake, the better the results’.[1] Bloomer believes it would be more useful for ‘A major research study of schools consistently over or underperforming over five years’.[1] That, though, leads to the question, ‘Performing at what?’
The table ranks schools using the ‘gold standard’ of five Highers and Higher equivalents. In recent years, there has been an increased uptake of these Higher equivalents, awards from Sports Leadership to Computer Games Development – a range of courses boosting choice but often without a final exam. The way in which these courses are equivalent to a Higher is open to debate, but their popularity is increasing and is partly responsible for improved results from 2019.
The pressure to get this ‘gold standard’, driven in part by league tables, can reduce the value of courses to the outcome of the coursework and exam rather than the content explored and experience had by the pupil and teacher. Education is more than an exam result; assessment should flow from the course, building on the engagement between teacher and pupil. Lessons must not be spent solely as a period of preparation for an exam.
Gert Biesta, Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the University of Edinburgh, has used the term ‘performativity’ to capture, ‘a culture in which means become the ends in themselves so that targets and indicators of quality become mistaken for quality itself’.[2] For schools, their position in the league table or under scrutiny from others can lead to decisions based on what the results for these tables may be rather than on what is best educationally.
Through his work, Biesta has asked how we can explore ‘the question of good education – the question of purpose, the question as to what education is for’. Biesta outlines the parameters of the discussion through three ideas that will be touched upon in turn: qualifications, subjectification, and socialisation.
Biesta recognises that a function of education is ‘qualifications’, of ‘providing students with the knowledge and skills that make it possible for them to act in the world’.[3] Previously, I have written about the importance of our subjects, as bodies on knowledge, as central to that process, and of the threats to those subjects from ideologues and activists.[4]
Lindsay Paterson, Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at the University of Edinburgh, extols the value of a liberal education to inspire and liberate the individual.[5] Biesta describes a process of ‘subjectification’, in which ‘we want our students to go their own way, we want them to take up their own freedom and “own” it in a grown-up way, which means that they may go in a very different direction from what we envisage for them, up to explicitly refusing the future we may have had in mind for them’.[6] Education must nurture critical thinkers with a healthy scepticism.
I doubt the Times can create a league table to capture Biestas’ ‘subjectfication’ or Patersons’ ‘liberation’, nor should it, but that does not mean that our data-driven education system has not tried to quantify characteristics and life skills. The four capacities of the Curriculum for Excellence have bamboozled teachers as they consider how to quantify a ‘responsible citizen’, an ‘effective contributor’, a ‘successful learner’, or a ‘confident individual’.
One thread that runs through the Times coverage revolves around the school at the very top of their table: Jordanhill School. Formerly attached to Jordanhill College of Education, the school remains directly funded by the Scottish government. Its board of management of three staff members and seven parents, selected by other parents and staff, was compared with that of an English academy school. Autonomy from the local authority is seen as a strength, with Walter Humes, Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling, writing, ‘In the state sector, head teachers are told that they are in a line management relationship to the authority and their first loyalty is to the “officers of the council” rather than to the pupils, parents, and community’.[7]
That link between councils and school leaders has been questioned by the Scottish Union for Education as an enabling route for educational indoctrination and activist intervention in schools. Critical race theory and transgender ideology have been taught as fact, and the Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood education lessons criticised for their content and delivery. Here, the concerns and wishes of parents are usurped as political programmes are implemented. As philosopher Hannah Arendt warned, ‘the belief that one must begin with the children if one wishes to produce new conditions has remained principally the monopoly of revolutionary movements of tyrannical cast which, when they came to power, took the children away from their parents and simply indoctrinated them’.[8] Our local authorities are not taking away the children, but they are breaking the partnership with parents and placing barriers between them and what is being taught in schools. A break from local authority control could strengthen the relationship between parents and schools and rebalance how schools depict the world to our young people.
For our young people, understanding their place in the present world is describe by Biesta as socialisation bringing ‘individuals into existing ways of doing and being. In this way education plays an important role in the continuation of culture and tradition...’[9] Teachers act as representatives of the world, even if they themselves are not in agreement with that world. For Arendt, it is that shared responsibility that is the source of authority of a teacher, which allows trust to be established between teacher and parent.[10] If teachers do not take that responsibility for the world, if socialisation cannot take place, then parents cannot trust teachers.
Considering the parameters set out by Biesta, the league table of the Times has no educational value, but we must all be concerned about how well our local authorities and schools are delivering a good education. The framework Biesta describes can help us discuss what that looks like and what it is not. For the sake of our young people, we should ask questions about the courses being studied, the standards set, the support given for their growth, and how they are introduced to our shared world and tradition. The Scottish Union for Education supports a liberal education for all our young people, with education valued for its own sake, protected from the fads and fashions of politicians and activists. Let’s all work towards that.
References
1. Bloomer K. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/affluence-biggest-link-success-dig-deeper-scottish-education-k2bhtfbjd (https://archive.ph/jf2sz).
2. Biesta G. 2010. Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 13.
3. Biesta G. 2021. World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. p. 8.
4. Baird S. 2023. The subject is the heart and soul of education. https://scottishunionforeducation.substack.com/i/135241388/the-subject-is-the-heart-and-soul-of-education.
5. Paterson L. 2023. What is education for? https://scottishunionforeducation.substack.com/i/100301475/what-is-education-for.
6. Biesta G. 2021. World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. p. 56.
7. Puttick H. 2024. Scottish school league table 2024: the best secondary schools revealed. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scotland-school-league-table-2024-best-schools-n7jjb0dqn (https://archive.ph/7gmkY).
8. Arendt H. 2006. Between Past and Future. London: Penguin Books. p. 173.
9. Biesta G. 2010. Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 20.
10. Arendt H. 2006. Between Past and Future. London: Penguin Books. p. 186.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68863594 Thomas Mackintosh, Cass Review: Gender care report author attacks 'misinformation' 21/04/24
https://archive.ph/2024.04.21-074444/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-you-hate-britain-i-asked-my-pupils-thirty-raised-their-hands-35gxx2t6n Anon, Do you hate Britain, I asked my pupils. Thirty raised their hands 21/04/24
After Katharine Birbalsingh had her prayer ban upheld, the head accused schools of failing to back UK values. One teacher, writing anonymously, reveals the troubling views of children as young as 11 21/04/24
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/21/the-long-hard-road-to-cass/ Jo Bartosch, The long, hard road to Cass. How whistleblowers, detransitioners and gender-critical activists took on trans ideology – and won. 21/04/24
https://archive.ph/5johx Daniel Sanderson, Scottish primary schools appoint children as ‘LGBT champions’. Pupils can also join ‘gender and sexual orientation alliance groups’ as part of a scheme run by charity 17/04/24
https://archive.ph/tPsmC Daniel Sanderson, Radical LGBT charity encourages teachers not to tell parents their children are trans. Guidance influenced by LGBT Youth Scotland which receives nearly £1 million a year in public funding 19/04/24
https://archive.ph/0A9T7 Ewan Somerville, Oxford University college scraps St George’s Day event but will host Eid dinner. Banquet to mark end of Ramadan replaces formal celebration of England’s patron saint which ‘stretched back decades’ 20/04/24
https://archive.ph/BmE1p#selection-2667.0-2671.149 Sian Griffiths, The school offering a 12-hour day to break phone addiction. A head in Notting Hill says children’s ‘100 per cent’ obsession is creating an apathetic generation that cannot hold conversation or make eye contact 21/04/24
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hilary-cass-i-cant-travel-on-public-transport-any-more-35pt0mvnh James Beal, Hilary Cass: I can’t travel on public transport after gender report. Author of landmark review into transgender treatment tells of online abuse and her dismay at disinformation spread by, among others, a Labour MP 19/04/24
https://archive.ph/HB5KO Suzanne Moore, People are in denial following the Cass report – it’s like deprogramming cult members. The reactions of gender zealots to their folly being exposed range from notably silent to dangerously delusional 23/04/24
https://archive.ph/2024.04.23-190245/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/23/scottish-childrens-charity-calls-puberty-blockers-wonderful/#selection-2409.4-2413.92 Daniel Sanderson, Scottish children’s charity calls puberty blockers ‘wonderful’. Controversial LGBT Youth Scotland doubles down on its trans ideology despite Cass Review 23/04/24
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