Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No5
Newsletter Themes: Parents’ power, the law, and the history of Section 28
Trans activist counter protest, Edinburgh, January 2023. Credit: Penny Lewis
In this week’s Substack Stuart Waiton looks at the role of parent campaigns in education policy as he prepares for our first SUE online event with Nancy McDermott, ‘Parent Power in America’; Ciarán Kelly, Deputy Director of the Christian Institute, argues that ‘Education not indoctrination’ isn’t just a slogan, it’s written into law; and Penny Lewis talks to gay filmmaker Malcolm Clark and asks whether it is legitimate to teach that the trans movement campaigning for gender recognition is equivalent to the movement that decriminalised homosexuality and opposed Section 28. Also included in this week’s newsletter is a link to the film of Frank Furedi talking at the Education Not Indoctrination conference, held in November 2022, at which SUE was officially launched. Frank provides a very compelling argument for education and the need to remind ourselves of its fundamental purpose and principles.
What should parents do about concerns they have regarding their child’s education?
Stuart Waiton is Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education
Talking to parents, it is clear that there are a lot of concerns about the state of education and about some of the new political developments in schools, both in Scotland and elsewhere. These concerns are not all new, and there are various issues that have prompted a bit of head scratching over the past few decades.
The tendency for schools to give awards to almost every child is one that springs to my mind, in addition to the awareness that activities such as competitive sports are often frowned on and viewed as not being inclusive. Others, which I have experienced with my own children, include the desire schools have to train my children, from the moment they walk through the door, to be actively ‘anti-racist’. This was something I questioned at an early parents’ night and then, like many other things, just forgot about.
Today the problems inherent in such approaches to education are increasingly obvious, and we have discussed a number of these in previous editions of the newsletter. But it is still not all that clear what an individual parent can or even should do other than feel puzzled and perhaps anxious but trust that, all in all, teachers are decent people and things will work themselves out.
I think this tendency to generally trust teachers is a good one. Equally, I think it is entirely understandable for parents to not want to ‘cause a scene’ at their child’s school.
I also think there are wider reasons why schools have been able to drift towards some of the dogmas that clash with people’s common-sense understanding of what schools should be about, one of the reasons being that, at one level today, there is no ‘common’ sense.
It is noticeable, for example when getting involved in debates about schooling, that it is often religious people who are the most active in addressing social issues. One of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that religious people still have organisations that they belong to, whereas for the rest of us, the vast majority I suspect, our lives are more isolated or at least less ‘organised’ through affiliations with other institutions.
More than this though, it feels like this is a question that goes beyond mere organisation and incorporates the matter of beliefs and values. Christians, for example, while not all singing from the same hymn sheet, often have a set of principles that means they react almost spontaneously to certain issues in a similar way.
In this respect, it has been interesting to note over the past 20 years that non-religious parents have been trying to get their children into Catholic schools. Apparently this is also happening with Muslim parents. We may not all believe in God, or in a particular religion, but many of us, it seems, understand intuitively that a school having a moral framework means that the children will experience a more ordered, even a more disciplined and meaningful environment – and indeed, partly because of this, a better education.
I think this issue of having a common sense is important because its presence means that we have a confidence that what we are thinking is what our neighbours and the parents we see at the school gate are also thinking. As a result, it also means that when we raise our concerns with the school, we know we are doing this not simply for our child but for all the children at that school.
This is essentially where we need to get to, as best we can. We need to get to a place where we don’t feel like we are alone with our concerns or feel that we are being small minded or even bigoted when we raise concerns about some of the dogmas being embedded in schools. And I think we need to approach schools, teachers and headteachers in a spirit of collaboration and in a way that helps to inform the discussions we need to be having about education.
With this in mind, the Scottish Union for Education is hoping to develop as an organisation that gives a space for both parents and teachers to talk to one another, and to read and think about how best to look at and question areas of school life that have a doctrinal dimension.
What we need is a new or at least a more developed and nuanced vocabulary, a new type of moral clarity perhaps, that will enable us to question and confront these issues and to do it in a reasoned and reasonable way.
One of the ways we hope to enable this is to create forums for discussions.
If you have a group of friends who would be interested in having a meeting to discuss these ideas, let us know. If you have concerns about what is happening at your school but are unsure what you should do about it, get in touch. And if you are a teacher who is worried about developments in your school, tell us about it.
We’re hoping to raise £7000 to write, print and send to every headteacher, a pamphlet explaining what is wrong with the gender-fluid approach that is being encouraged in schools. We’re doing this in the belief that the current approach is dangerous and unethical and in the belief that many headteachers are open to having this discussion.
We aim to have roadshows around the country – public discussions – about the direction in which the government and the education authorities are taking schools. Do you think you could help set one up in your town? If so, let us know.
We’re also setting up a number of online discussions to help clarify what it is that is happening in schools and what we can do about it. The first of these discussions is today, Thursday 2 March, with the American parent and author Nancy McDermott, who will be discussing the parent ‘revolt’ in the USA.
So let’s get together to collectively work out the common-sense approach that will help make schools places that inspire the next generation.
Stuart Waiton in conversation with Nancy McDermott to discuss
‘Parent Power in America’.
Contact SUE: info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
‘Education not indoctrination’ isn’t just a slogan, it’s written into law
Ciarán Kelly is Deputy Director of The Christian Institute
A few years ago, The Christian Institute and others won a genuinely historic legal case against the Scottish government that stopped it implementing the full data-sharing nightmare that was the Named Person scheme.
In its ruling, the UK Supreme Court said:
‘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.’
You might have thought that after that the Scottish government would have learned its lesson. You’d be wrong. The underlying mindset on Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) is the same. The state knows best, and parents are to be seen and not heard.
There are some solid foundations in Scottish law for the relationship between state and family in education. But in practice, the state is ignoring them and constructing an entirely different building across the street.
It’s a basic principle written into law that parents, not the state, are responsible for the education of their children [1]. Of course, most parents are happy to delegate the responsibility for schooling to schools, usually state schools, paid for by those parents’ taxes. But it is a delegation. And where the state does provide education, the law requires that ‘pupils are to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents’ [2]. That’s the same principle found in Article 2, Protocol 1, of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that ‘the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’. And this applies to all subjects.
Actually, the European Court of Human Rights read it this way: ‘The State [and this includes state-funded schools] is forbidden to pursue an aim of indoctrination that might be considered as not respecting parent’s religious and philosophical convictions.’ [3].
This is the dynamic at play. The struggle is between the ‘totalitarian regime’, with its doctrines of intolerant tolerance and exclusionary inclusivity, and the ‘subversive, varied influences of the families’, which may want schools to uphold the reality of biological sex, or to give space to the belief that marriage is only between one man and one woman. Or a family which has no desire to see its children taught about porn, even if it’s rebranded as ‘ethical’ porn. Or a family which, horror of horrors, simply wants to see the materials being used in RSHP classes and to know that Stonewall, or Mermaids, or Time for Inclusive Education, or LGBT Youth Scotland aren’t going to be allowed to peddle their wares to kids.
The fact is that ‘education not indoctrination’ is written into law. State schools are under a legal duty to provide education without indoctrinating children or seeking to recruit them to any cause or campaign, whether that be through a Pride march, or Purple Friday, or whatever.
Schools have become a key battleground in the ongoing cultural debates, and RSHP is one of the strategic beachheads into the minds of young people. But teachers have 30 kids – how can they possibly reflect 30 sets of beliefs? Actually, it’s quite simple. The courts have found that it is done [4] by teaching in a way that is ‘objective, critical and pluralistic’. In other words, fairly presenting different viewpoints and helping pupils to consider them critically and come to their own view.
Perhaps because of this, the current statutory guidance on the conduct of RSHP has several positives. Consultation with parents should be ‘standard practice’ when developing or reviewing an RSHP programme and parents should have ‘the opportunity in advance to view key teaching materials’ [5]. The guidance also provides for a right to withdraw ‘from all or part of a planned sexual health education programme’ [6]. But the Scottish government has been trying to produce a new version of this guidance, potentially removing these provisions, which is due to go out to public consultation at some point.
That guidance also says the subject ‘should present facts in an objective, balanced and sensitive manner’. It also expects teachers to ‘be aware that children and young people come from a wide range of backgrounds and respect this in their teaching practices’ [7].
In short, the current position is that councils and schools are under no obligation to use the government-backed resources or even implement the government’s take on RSHP at all.
So that’s what should happen. But what is happening is that the Scottish government has promoted a bank of resources that even fall short of its own standards for RSHP. To take just one example, one resource teaches children as young as five that ‘sex is what your parents are told you are when you are born’ [8].
Another recommends to parents a video that says: ‘If a girl can be a senator, or an astronaut, or a plumber. If a girl can wear pants and have short hair. If a girl can even have a penis. What is a girl anyway?’ Well, that escalated quickly.
Pressure groups have been highly effective in promoting this kind of teaching in schools, and teachers, parents, governors, and councillors who have doubts are often hesitant to challenge it for fear of being accused of bigotry or transphobia. A student at Mearns Academy who challenged ‘The Authority’ ended up excluded from school.
So the problem we’re looking at today isn’t a problem of law; it’s not really about guidance, although I’m not pretending that’s not an issue. It’s mainly about the cultural water that schools and families are swimming in.
It’s about John Swinney announcing in 2018 that Scotland would be the first country in the world to embed LGBT issues across the curriculum. After all, you can’t withdraw your child from every lesson. And then local authorities and schools just jumping to it – without any law being passed, without any proper legislative process.
It’s about the Scottish government engaging, even funding, groups such as Time for Inclusive Education and LGBT Youth Scotland to tell it what it wants to hear. And adopting that advice and then rolling it out as ‘best practice’ across the country.
It creates a climate of fear of being branded ‘phobic’ or a bigot, and a desire by some schools to go further to avoid the label. That’s where we’re at today, and that’s the problem we have to solve.
References
1. Education Act 1980, s. 30.
2. Ibid. s. 28.
3. According to the European Court of Human Rights, ‘As to the word “convictions”, taken on its own, it is not synonymous with the terms “opinions” and “ideas”. It denotes views that attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance (Valsamis v. Greece, §§ 25 and 27)’.
4. Lautsi v Italy (2012) 54 EHRR 3 s. 62 and 63.
5. Conduct of Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Education in Schools para. 55.
6. Conduct of Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Education in Schools para. 56.
7. Conduct of Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood Education in Schools, p. 10–11.
History and Section 28
Penny Lewis is an academic and a parent, formerly chair of the parent council of her children’s school in Dundee. She is the editor of the SUE Substack.
February was LGBTQ+ History Month. Given the UK government’s use of a Section 35 order to block the Scottish Parliament’s Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill it was perhaps inevitable that historical parallels have been drawn with the battle over Section 28 back in the late 1980s and the current debate on trans rights. As part of LGBTQ+ History Month, LGBT Youth Scotland helpfully supplied schools with a PowerPoint presentation and a lesson plan and BBC Newsround reviewed how things have changed for young gay people in the UK.
Section 28 was part of the Local Government Act (1988), introduced by Margaret Thatcher to prevent left-wing Labour councils from ‘promoting homosexuality’ in schools and public bodies. I spent most of the winter of 1987–88 in the attic of Manchester Town Hall, organising the National ‘Stop the Clause’ demonstration, which took place in March 1988. The demonstration was massive and spectacular, with celebrity support from Ian McKellen et al., but the most compelling thing about it was the large number of young people from across the UK. At the time we imagined that this law could be the first step in a campaign to roll back gay rights. One of the main slogans of the campaign was ‘never going underground’.
The decriminalisation of homosexuality was contained in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act but was not passed in Scotland until 1980. Our ‘Stop the Clause’ meetings involved heated debates around censorship and pornography and political strategy. Some of us pushed for an equalisation in the age of consent (which didn’t happen until 2001). Many of the gay men who worked in Aids prevention saw health advice and institutional acceptance as the imperative, and lesbian campaigners also tended to be focused on welfare issues.
In retrospect I can see that after the Manchester demo, things were tricky for teachers and librarians for a while, but across the UK it became clear that gay rights had already been accepted by most people and that Section 28 wouldn’t change that. Following the Manchester demo, gay businesses started to provide more places for gays to meet and the ‘pink pound’ and ‘the village’ became integrated into Manchester’s regeneration. Increasingly, gay groups switched from fighting for political equality to third-sector provision of health and education advice and campaigns for gay people to be included in conventional social norms such as marriage.
My history is very different to that of LGBT Youth Scotland’s, which suggests that the aftermath of Section 28 was a dark age in which ‘homophobia against both pupils and staff suddenly started to increase’. It says that teachers and others started to self-censor, which was undoubtedly true, but the assertion that ‘LGBT+ clubs and groups shut down across the country and all LGBT+ books were removed from libraries and bookshops’, is clearly not true. Nor is the use of the term LGBT+ to describe organisations from the late 1980s; this mistake might be forgiven if it was undertaken for the sake of clarity but it feels as if today’s campaigners want to stress that trans recognition and gay rights are part of one continuous movement for liberation. And that all opposition to trans ideology is homophobic and transphobic.
For Malcolm Clark, Head of Research for the LGB Alliance, it is clear that there is very little historical continuity between the ‘Stop the Clause’ demos of 1988 and the activities of small groups of trans activists who have taken to the streets in an attempt to drown out speakers opposed to the GRR Bill. Clark, who is a documentary film maker, thinks that we do need government to act to stop the promotion of trans ideology in schools.
Clark was loosely involved in the campaign against Section 28 in 1988, and what he remembers most clearly is that nobody could really define the purpose of the clause. Local authorities were told they should not ‘intentionally promote homosexuality’ but ‘I don’t think even Margaret Thatcher thought that there would be no mention of homosexuality in schools’, says Clark. ‘Dr Az Hakeem, who is one of LGB Alliance’s patrons and a psychiatrist, remembers that about age 14 he was asked what book he wanted to study. He said he wanted to study Maurice by EM Forster, which has got a gay love theme, and he was told that there was no way he could study that book’.
Clark recognises that the situation is very different today: ‘What we can’t do is repeat the mistakes of Clause 28; I assume that 14- and 15-year-olds are discussing trans issues because they are out there on social media, you would want them to be carefully discussed in a balanced discussion.’ What worries Clark is that organisations invited into schools, such as Educate & Celebrate, are often biased rather than balanced. ‘They have now removed the video, but there was one where the woman says, “we are going to smash heteronormativity – queering the school”. I don’t think that anyone is saying that 14-year-olds can’t look at books about trans characters. And we know that it’s important that transphobic bullying is something schools should address. The problem today is that there is no filter to prevent good sensible RSE or anti-bullying advice from pivoting into the whole charabanc of all the crazy stuff. We need to work out precisely what it is we want to stop.’
Clark’s main concern is that we stop promoting to children the idea that a person can be ‘born in the wrong body’. It’s a seductive idea, but it doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny and it is creating a great deal of confusion among young people. ‘One of the key demands of the gay liberation movement was the de-medicalisation of homosexuality, to get it removed from the list of the psychiatric disorders. That campaign was going on in the early seventies before the Stonewall riots. Today’s trans campaign is to gain access to medical treatment. The biggest single issue campaigned upon is the use of puberty blockers, so almost everyone involved in the trans movement supports the medicalisation of teenagers, something the gay liberation movement was trying to free people from’, explains Clark. He cites Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), in which she argues that the distinction between coming out as gay or trans is that gay teenagers tell their parents what they really are whereas trans teenagers are telling their parents what they are not. By definition, ‘coming out’ as gay doesn’t make life easier, but it is affirmative. ‘Thinking you are not in the right body is just tailor-made for the confusion that young people experience, especially girls. The ways in which being gay and being trans appeal to young people is very different’, suggests Clark.
Clark says that UK government rules on impartiality have had a limited impact and that in Scotland there has been no interest in this issue. He recalls a discussion 10 years ago hosted by Schools Out, the organisation that promotes LGBTQ+ History Month across the UK. ‘They were quite explicit that what they were going to do was get their agenda into schools by being concerned about bullying. That’s been the wedge through which organisations have got access to schools – to stop the bullying of kids that are gender non-conforming or teenagers that might be gay. Once they were in schools, they started to argue that the only way to conquer bullying was to brainwash everybody [he laughs]. It started with specific advice but then they started to argue that teachers and kids need to be brought up to date with the latest thinking with the LGBTQ lot.’
The LGBTQ+ advice and support groups have over the past few years become something of a business. Clark would like education authorities to look at how much schools are spending on what he described as brownie point schemes – such as Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme and the LGBT Scotland Youth scheme. He was shocked to discover that Glencoats Primary School, which is located in one of the poorest areas in the UK, had paid £2000 to be part of a scheme which involved bringing drag artist Flow Job in to read stories to pupils. ‘It’s not just that they have books that promote gender ideology, it’s that schools are handing over their curriculum to these visiting organisations. And when you look at these books they are not written by paediatricians or child psychologists. They are just written by activists.’
‘If you are an average teacher, I’m not sure you really want to talk to kids about gay trans LGBT etc. You might think it’s important, especially if you are liberal, but you won’t feel confident enough, not least because the language changes every two minutes. The safest thing is to hand it to someone if they cock it up its their fault. By constantly updating the list of genders etc., it means you can’t rely on what you were told last year, you must bring people in every year,’ says Clark.
It’s not clear how many schools are using the services of the organisations Clark describes or to what extent teachers are aware of what visiting groups are saying to children. We are interested to hear from SUE subscribers about this. Teachers often worry that they are not equipped to talk about these issues. If a teacher can’t discuss the issues, it does raise the question whether children are equipped to. There is a growing consensus that they need not be discussed in primary education, but among teenagers we may need to find ways to ensure that there is balance in the classroom, and this could mean teachers stepping up.
Looking back, I’m struck by how different the campaign in 1988 was from the current campaigns for trans recognition. Gay liberation began in the 1960s and it took 40 years; over that period it was the activities of thousands of people that forced a change in the laws and carried most of the public with them. The GRR Bill was introduced because a tiny group of trans activists captured the imagination of the Scottish government and its administrative bodies. The SNP, who love any campaign in which they can pose as more tolerant than their Westminster counterparts, has cultivated this lobby ever since Scotland became the first ‘nation’ to publicly fund Trans activities in 2007.
It’s an easy argument to make that trans people should not be forced to wait while society catches up with them and learns to be more tolerant. In fact, the opposite is true; if you need to push legal reform through the back door without proper public discourse, it suggests that the ‘reforms’ are flawed. Gay liberation was the just demand for equality, whereas trans recognition is the unjust demand that everyone accepts and agrees that men who self-identify as women are, in fact, women. There are no useful parallels to be drawn between Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to gag gay men in the 1980s and Rishi Sunak’s attempt to stop new trans laws in Scotland. Thatcher was on the wrong side of history in the case of Section 28 and public life progressed without her. Sunak is in the right side of history in protecting freedom of thought and women’s rights.
Nor is there a continuity between gay liberation and trans recognition. I think we need to look a lot more carefully at the content of LGBTQ+ History Month and if it is historically illiterate and one-sided, we need to teach kids something else.
News Round-up
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/19/feminism-has-a-woman-problem/?fbclid=IwAR1ZixzouNzcJbFI1zLaaKUs2oDhZEnTb4YmvnY8cBE9v_2TjFfL1z9mbVA#lebc9klbv31yjhbfe7 Jennie Bristow, ‘Feminism has a woman problem. Why so many younger feminists have fallen for the delusions of gender ideology.’ 19/02/23
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/campaign-launched-send-every-msp-29218605 David Walker, ‘Campaign launched to send every MSP in Scotland book about failings at Tavistock clinic. Parents advocate group Safeguarding Our Schools Scotland wants to raise awareness about potential issues at Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow who offer similar children’s gender services to the now-shut down Tavistock in England. 15/02/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/revealed-aberdeens-curriculum-decolonising-plans/ Stephen Daisley, ‘Revealed: Aberdeen’s “curriculum decolonising” plans.’ 18/02/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/scottish-schools-have-become-places-of-indoctrination/?fbclid=IwAR3yv1hkDTFNT-4wqiP7FYFMB_QTu9lgPEHBvvbRiN-G2aiGkDZuVz7oiBw Stuart Waiton, ‘Scottish schools have become places of indoctrination.’ 19/02/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/20611678.attainment-gap-widens-poorer-pupils-suffer-greater-impact-pandemic/ Kathleen Nutt, ‘Attainment gap widens as poorer pupils suffer greater impact of pandemic.’ 09/08/22
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/scot.2023.0440 Sarah Pedersen, ‘“Believers in biology”: a co-ordinated effort to disrupt the 2022 census.’ February 2023
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/19/the-rewriting-of-roald-dahl-should-disturb-us-all/ Tom Slater, ‘The rewriting of Roald Dahl should disturb us all. Philistines and vandals have taken over art and culture.’ 19/02/23
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/27/isle-of-man-suspends-sex-education-classes-after-drag-queen-tells-11-year-olds-there-are-73-genders/ Toby Young, ‘Isle of Man suspends sex education classes after drag queen tells 11 year-olds there are 73 genders.’ 27/02/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-real-reason-to-be-scared-of-kate-forbes/?fbclid=IwAR26Y24eSd-AKcp1UBFpo4HmruhafLGLW__lCBZuFKxPwWs-24HeygMbSfw Stephen Daisley, ‘The real reason to be scared of Kate Forbes (we have moved beyond the age of tolerance into the age of affirmation).’ 22/02/23
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/two-thirds-of-voters-oppose-snps-gender-reform-plans-d8wh3wh9w Kieran Andrews, ‘Two thirds of voters oppose SNP’s gender reform plans.’ 15/12/23
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