Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No92
Themes: breast binders, smear campaigns and artistic freedom, smear campaigns, teachers and professional values, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
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This week the Daily Record reported that a senior pastoral care teacher at the Bannerman High School in Baillieston, Glasgow, had organised a fundraising event to raise money for ‘chest binders’ for girls who identify as trans. The teacher ‘coffee morning’ was promoted to all staff, and some brave souls raised concerns and went to the papers. The fact that the school was promoting breast binders, without the knowledge of parents, seemed wrong. The school has subsequently attempted to backtrack on the purpose of the fundraising, but regardless of that, why is a school promoting the idea that children should be damaging their bodies in this way? We would have expected common sense to prevail long before the senior member of staff sent out the invite. Often, though, these things are not discussed and considered, because you need to be morally courageous to question transgender ideology. You could lose your job or your friends, and there is a strong likelihood that there will be a smear campaign against you. This is no way to run public discussion about such an important issue. Smear tactics are one of the most serious and damaging developments in public life; they are undermining our capacity to discuss and make meaningful policy and form healthy social relationships.
Last year SUE wrote about Rosie Kay, founder of Freedom in the Arts (FITA). Kay, a renowned choreographer and artistic director, was forced out from her own dance company after she told someone she thought that biological sex is a fact not a social construct. Kay really knows what it means to have your voice and your livelihood stolen from you in the current censorious climate. FITA is running an important survey to create a record of the many ways in which people working in the arts find it hard to speak their minds for fear of smears or cancellations. So if you know anyone involved in the arts, please forward the link to them – we need to collect evidence of the small, everyday restrictions on our speech. In many sections of the arts and in education, Kay’s view has been effectively outlawed. Anyone brave enough to argue against transgender ideology is likely to find themselves socially and professionally ostracised and subject to smears.
Increasingly, the same smear tactics are being adopted on race issues. In Glasgow the thoroughly nasty campaign to discredit Audrey Dempsey, a charity worker and the Glasgow City Councillor for Springburn and Robroyston, is ongoing. Back in April, Audrey asked the council’s Labour group if she could raise a question about an apparent rise in racist attacks on white children and teachers in schools. Instead of recognising Audrey’s question as a genuine concern, her colleagues, and her opponents, called her a racist. The Herald stepped in, to spread the accusation. Even though Audrey chose to resign from the Labour Party, many news headlines reported that she had been suspended for being a racist. This past week, anonymous laptop warriors (suspected to be local SNP and independence activists after her council seat) have been making up more stories to discredit Audrey. It seems that if you dare to talk about race in public, you are a legitimate target for any activists and you lose your right to speak or be heard.
Even the Educational Institute of Scotland, whose positions are not often aligned with those of SUE, concedes that there is a problem with violence and discipline in Scottish schools. Is it so unbelievable that in some areas where poor discipline coexists with issues related to race, that there are problems that need to be addressed? Frank McAveety, former leader of Glasgow City Council, told Audrey that her question about attacks by black kids on white kids in schools was too ‘Tommy Robinson’. If only she could switch her concerns around so that they were about attacks by white kids on non-white kids, Labour could support her. When a veteran politician and former teacher, like McAveety, is keener to parrot a political script than discuss real problems as they present themselves in Glasgow schools, it doesn’t bode well for the future for children or, indeed, for education in the city.
This week we return to the issue of educational standards and the curriculum. Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE, takes a closer look at the General Teaching Council for Scotland. In addition, Rachael Hobbs provides an important guide for any of you who have heard about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). In 2023, the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed the UNCRC into Scottish law, and this year it received Royal Assent. Many Scottish schools are involved in the UNICEF UK Rights Respecting Schools Award, another one of these quangos-cum-award-cum-training schemes funded by the Scottish government. Increasingly, the Scottish government organises its social and educational policies around UNCRC themes such as well-being, participation, relationships and self-esteem. The authority and assumed neutrality of the United Nations is used to justify highly intrusive campaigns dealing with issues that would previously have been the responsibility of the family and the community.
Penny Lewis, SUE Editor
There’s an absence of adult authority and educational leadership in Scottish education
Stuart Waiton is Chair of SUE and a university lecturer.
If you want to get a sense of the nature of education in Scotland, you could do worse than read some of the documents written by those responsible for it. It’s not so much what they say (although what they say is terrible), so much as what they don’t say, and perhaps even more tellingly, the way they say it.
The Glasgow Teaching Council for Scotland’s The Standard for Headship is a case in point, a document that could have come out of the mouth of Ricky Gervais’s character in The Office, but without the jokes. So rigid is the document that by the second paragraph we are already confronted by a list of bullet points. Thankfully, there are no tables on the first page, but flip over and it begins – a relentless document of tables of lists.
If you’re looking for inspiration from our senior educators in Scotland, you’ll not find it here. The blood drains as you read and reread the exact same terms and categories, almost none of which relate to what most people think of as education.
Of course, it’s riddled with the new dogma of social justice. Indeed, the very first item on the first table, Table 1.1 Professional Values, is ‘Social Justice’: ‘Social Justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities now and in the future’ (p. 4).
Whatever we think about schools being taken over by social justice warriors, at least the idea sounds like it might be inspiring, but that is to misunderstand what social justice is all about. From concerns about ‘health and wellbeing’, anxieties about the need to be ‘fostering positive relationships’, and the endless promotion of ‘sustainability’ and ‘equity’ (i.e. equality of outcome), all helped by including pupils with ‘protected characteristics’ (like ‘gender reassignment’), or engaging children who have ‘experienced trauma’ (p. 4), social justice is a manifesto of protection, prevention and harm reduction.
No wonder that these documents fail to inspire.
Perhaps it shouldn’t matter that a document explaining what it means to be a headteacher is so devoid of words or sentences that feel uplifting or energetic, or have depth, but by the time you get to the robotically titled Table 3.5.2 (p. 15), you feel the need to reach for a gun.
In both The Standard for Headship and in the 2023 Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment document entitled It’s Our Future, we find that pupils have turned into ‘learners’. This seemingly more democratic term is used in part to progress beyond the delineation of teachers (adults) and pupils (children) – as we’re now all lifelong learners on a ‘learning journey’.
The title of the 2023 document comes from a complaint from a pupil about how little a say they have had about the nature of qualifications in Scotland. But then, as we’re all just ‘learners’ on a journey, why not get children to decide the nature of our education system?
Everything about these documents gives us a flavour of what is a crisis of education in Scotland, a crisis predicated upon the loss of belief in a knowledge- and a subject-based education system. In essence, our educational establishment has lost its soul.
Step back for a second and think about any subject, from maths to one of the sciences, to remind yourself of the depth and the levels of complexity and understanding that humanity has accumulated over centuries of experimentation and insight. Or consider the beauty and the sophistication, and the endless attempts to express ideas and emotions or search for what it means to be human, that we find in our history, literature, art and music.
In education, this is what we mean by knowledge: human knowledge that we have accumulated over thousands of years, knowledge that we have been able to ingeniously categorise through the framework of subjects.
All this, the enormity of what we now know and what we need to pass on to the next generation, is conspicuous by its absence in our educational documents, of all places.
For the authors of It’s Our Future, one feels that subject knowledge is barely relevant to their contemplations about qualifications. Worse still, the very idea of ‘opportunities to study in depth subjects’ seems to leave them with a rather bad taste in their mouths, with the foreword stating that both learners ‘and Scottish society will need more than that’. Like the embarrassing uncle, the document wants to move us on quickly: ‘Yes yes, subjects and all that, now let’s talk about the important stuff, the “skills” and how to make students feel good’. Let’s make education all about ensuring ‘every learner leaves education with a sense of achievement’ (my emphasis in bold) – something that can apparently be achieved by creating a ‘flexible, agile qualification system’. Yoga, anyone?
The loss of a confident sense of adult and educational leadership can be found throughout these documents, whether that’s in the deadening word salad or the downgrading of teachers to the status of ‘learners’. Even the title, chosen from the mouths of babes, is accusatory: ‘IT’S OUR FUTURE’ (NOT YOURS!).
Of course, the word salad was foundational to the Curriculum for Excellence, reflected not only in something that wasn’t a curriculum and had nothing to do with excellence, but also in the four ‘capacities’ (why capacities?), of successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens.
Many universities adopted similar ‘capacities’. Of course, they changed over time and changed again. At my own institution, having thought they were utterly meaningless from the outset, I was tempted to start a campaign to defend the old ‘capacities’, simply for the fun of it.
It’s our Future goes on to talk about the ‘narrow’ nature of subjects, and the ‘heavily [read ‘bad’] exam dependent status quo’. Even the use of the term dependent feels not only dismissive but a form of addiction or illness embedded in our narrow subject-driven education system (if only).
Of course, status quo, as used here, doesn’t mean something that has been developed over generations and has demonstrated something useful and meaningful. It means something that is from the past, that is necessarily archaic, meaningless, even harmful.
Time and again we see and feel the contempt being expressed for anything that wasn’t invented yesterday, or preferably tomorrow. The ‘learner’, not the teacher, is king; the child’s sense of self, not what we can make of the child, is central; what you did in the past, how you gained your qualifications, what you thought a headteacher was – all that knowledge, those subjects, those exams, all of your past, your experiences – sweep them away and become ‘progressive’.
Reading these documents, I was reminded of a conversation with someone studying for their teacher training qualification. As well as noting the obsession with social justice, I was struck by her frustration about the endless need for self-reflection. Everything was about self-reflection. At the time it didn’t mean much to me. But there it was again, particularly in the headship document.
Reflecting on what you have done sounds commonsensical, perhaps even a building up of your experiences. But this is not what is happening here; in fact, it is the very opposite.
‘Use cultural and emotional intelligence to explore bias, through questioning your own assumptions’, the headteacher document instructs (Table 2.2.2, p. 8). Read: forget your past, your norms, your experience, your actual knowledge and understanding – doubt yourself, because you are a product of the bigoted past.
More than this, however, the relentless idea that we need to constantly be self-reflective is a questioning of the very idea of experience and knowledge that can lead you to an answer or to the truth. To constantly self-reflect is, at a more philosophical level, to never reach maturity; in social psychology, it is understood as something that means you never reach adulthood; instead, you remain forever a ‘youth’, as the American Kenneth Keniston defined it in 1960.
The demand for neverending self-reflection reflects the currently fashionable cynicism about and rejection of the past. In educational settings it means the need and desire to always be new, to always innovate, but to do so not by building on the past, your knowledge and your experience, but by rejecting those things, leaving yourself living in a permanent state of self-doubt. Taken to its logical endpoint, it is a recipe for endless uncertainly and for professional and even mental instability. And one wonders why teachers are retiring ever earlier.
There is something cult-like about our educational documents. The language is often obscure and unreadably alien, a type of ‘expert’ language that transmits sentiments more than ideas, a type of knowledge that embodies no actual knowledge. You can see it when you read the reports sent home from school: in the preset sentences filled with meaningless verbiage that leaves us all clueless about our child’s achievements or difficulties.
Lacking the foundational framework, the passion and purpose of education based on millennia of human knowledge, the teaching profession is fast turning into a disconnected cult of self-styled experts whose ‘expertise’ is cut off from both the past, from the people, and from education itself.
Watch out for the UNCRC in your school
Rachael Hobbs is a parent and an educator.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) came into force for countries that ratified it, in 1990, as an international agreement outlining a set of decreed economic, political and social ‘rights’ for children. It was endorsed in part, in 1991, by the UK government, which created its own legislation around ‘Every Child Matters’ within the Children Act 2004.
In Scotland, it prompted the (not uncontroversial) Getting it Right for Every Child legislation, which has involved comprehensive measures for public services. In 2023, the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed the UNCRC into Scottish law, and following recent amendments, it received Royal Assent in 2024 [1].
The Scottish government increasingly focuses its social and educational policies around the UNCRC, and it is centrally referenced as the bedrock upon which the theme of children’s ‘wellbeing’ is framed.
On the surface, the UNHCR sounds like an important initiative for promoting the interests of children – who would want to argue against it? On closer inspection, however, it is for many a mechanism whereby often distinctly political matters – and hence their rightful debate – are sidestepped through the misdirection of legislation.
The problem with ‘children’s rights’
How the UNCRC is benefiting children is open to debate. Few may argue with some of its more obvious and tangible Articles, for example, which ban the use of children in armed forces or combat, and the sale or trafficking of children.
The fact is, however, that through the UNCRC, important national legislation on matters around children is, for a start, transferred to a transnational (indeed, supranational), non-accountable, non–publicly elected organisation. The UNCRC gets to direct national decisions on what tend to be profoundly ill-defined matters, which paves the way for arbitrary and subjective judgements.
What becomes more apparent as we look at some of its vaguer themes around children’s rights is that the UNCRC actually articulates, within many of its various Articles, adult-level concepts around self-determination and freedoms that cannot truly apply to the young.
This is because children, by their very nature and developmental needs, are reliant on adults to provide and decide on matters over their care. Children are also protected via existing adult laws which recognise the vulnerability of children as a group due to their dependence on adults, and so their protections come via legislation across all manner of criminal law, for example related to child abuse, neglect, failure to provide formal education, and so on.
Bestowing a specific set of ‘rights’ on children themselves has, ironically, the potential to undermine their ultimate right as children not to be burdened with what are adult responsibilities (not ‘child rights’) and associated major decisions. Increasingly with UNCRC interpretations in Scotland, children are being encouraged to recognise their independence in making decisions, such as with the policy emphasis on ‘inclusion’ of their voice in different matters. While this may sound like a noble thing on paper, it increases their vulnerability to making mistakes that have serious or lifelong negative consequences, because children have yet to develop adult skills of taking on measured or difficult decisions.
UNCRC rights and political interpretation
Another inherent risk within the UNCRC’s interpretation of ‘children’s rights’ is that they can all too swiftly become political; hence the importance of such a broad topic remaining within a nation’s democratic apparatus. By enshrining ‘children’s rights’ doctrine into matters of law, political and even philosophical questions around the care and capabilities of children are bypassed.
In recent years, the UNCRC has incorporated ‘children’s rights’ within clear political interests, despite its standing as an objective charter. Legal academic and writer Andrew Tettenborn, in his critique of the UNCRC, points to a recent report to the UK government in 2023, where, ‘giving children the right to declare their gender identity; completely preventing schools selecting by religion; banning “conversion therapy” aimed at changing the gender identity of children; and compulsory LGBT-friendly sex education “without the possibility for faith-based schools or parents to opt out of such education.’ [2].
It also emboldens groups promoting activist interests. According to Tettenborn, ‘if they want to get their way, to use lawfare rather than politics. Want to change the law on sex education, or church schools? This might be difficult if you have to persuade voters, or move Holyrood into action. Much easier to make common cause with the progressive establishment and get the Court of Session to issue a declarator that this is already required as a matter of the interpretation of the UNCRC. The activists will be rubbing their hands.’ [2].
The UNCRC is open to political interpretation by others on many matters. Nowhere more so is this seen than through the controversy of transgender ideology. In Scotland, the Children and Young People’s Commissioner website provides ‘UNCRC Simplified Articles’ which misquote Article 8 – the right to identity. See if you can spot the difference:
Children and Young People’s Commissioner website version: ‘Article 8 – I have a right to an identity’ [3]
A child or young person’s identity is made up of many different parts. Among other things, it includes:
their name and nationality
their race, culture, religion and language
their appearance, abilities, gender identity and sexual orientation
Actual wording from UNCRC’s Article 8 [4]
States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference.
Where a child is illegally deprived of some or all of the elements of his or her identity, States Parties shall provide appropriate assistance and protection, with a view to re-establishing speedily his or her identity.
Quite a deviation. Similarly, Scottish governance groups are misinterpreting areas such as this while also failing to assess the harms that transgender ideology poses to the young, as evidenced in the recent Cass report. The Convention thus becomes open to manipulation to fit the interests of those using it to further their subjective causes.
Restricting parental consent
More recently, the UNCRC itself seems to be adopting subjective policies which have more to do with political programmes than children’s interests, and it is unable to delineate between the two, which is a serious overstep. As Tettenborn highlights, ‘The [UNCRC] has demanded a total ban on excluding any primary schoolchild; a bar on children being “threatened” for involvement in climate activism; and (of course) the compulsory decolonising of the school curriculum.’ [2] He asks, ‘Do parents really want the courts to decide that if their children bunk off school to support Greta nothing can be done by them or anyone else, or to tell them that if their children’s education being wrecked by the disruptive, or stymied by a politicised curriculum, that’s all right because the law demands it?’ [2].
Separating children’s rights from those of the family
More widely, the very separation of ‘children’s rights’ within UNCRC from the rights of parents is a subtle but highly significant circumventing of family as the most meaningful foundation for making decisions over children’s care.
It pits child against parent in many decisions (including, of course, those related to recent scandals over ‘gender-affirming care’) but also often simply private and innocuous matters which may engender natural tension between parent and child; for example, the promotion of the UNCRC through the UK Rights Respecting Schools Award encourages children to ‘take action’ if they are not given parental permission to do something. This is set to continue as long as legislation applies to all children, beyond the minority of troubled families whose situation requires state intervention.
More deeply, the push in Scotland to overly articulate children’s rights within the curriculum risks encouraging them to think constantly in terms of entitlement. This creates a reductive world view for themselves and others and fails to enable instead a necessary maturation which balances personal prerogative with duty or a sense of responsibility to the collective.
Transference of political ‘values’ onto children
In her endorsement of the UNCRC in early-years settings (an increasing push also by various lobby groups in Scotland), researcher Dr Aline Cole-Albäck upholds that children must have formally defined rights as a social group, as they are ‘Vulnerable to adult agendas or a professional’s personal morality, which lack accountability to the wider society’ [5].
This statement overlooks the fact that adults are held accountable already via wider law, and that such conventions in themselves are susceptible to adult agendas. She makes the further mistake of equating children’s rights with the same thing as values – a political slip-up, when looking at what drives those endorsing the work of UNCRC: ‘Children’s rights are important in early childhood because it has long been recognised that early childhood is a critical time for establishing values and attitudes.’ Recognising that ‘Values, attitudes and behaviours begin forming at a very early age’, she concludes that ‘Early childhood settings therefore play an important role in laying the foundation for understanding and experiencing rights and democratic values in society’ [5].
Children’s ‘rights’ within this context quickly become an opportunity to mould ‘values’ using educational (and in this case even nursery) settings to impart the supposedly correct attitudes on any number of topics.
In Scotland, there is now an industry of unaccountable policy ‘consultancies’ jumping on the commercial bandwagon ‘children’s rights’ has become, to sell all manner of social activism branded as ‘rights’, and the whole theme is becoming saturated with influencing what children think politically – this is something far more insidious.
Watch this space
Overextension of the Scottish state into civic and family life through creeping authoritarianism is, for many critics, nothing new. The UNCRC, and how it is used, is something for parents and the wider concerned public to monitor.
It is another mechanism whereby controlling political ideologies endorsed by the state under the banner of ‘progressivism’ is projecting one-sided activism onto citizens, but most alarmingly, using children to do so.
References
Wikipedia. Convention on the Rights of the Child. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child.
Tettenborn A. The rights of the child? The Critic. January 2024. https://thecritic.co.uk/the-rights-of-the-child/.
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland. UNCRC Article 8. https://www.cypcs.org.uk/rights/uncrc/articles/article-8/.
Convention on the Rights of the Child. https://www.unicef.org/media/52626/file. p. 4.
Cole-Albäck A. 2021. A brief history of children’s rights. https://www.birthto5matters.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Childrens-rights-for-Birth-to-Five-Matters.pdf. p. 8.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
Andrew Doyle, What is “gender identity”? Why are so many government policies based on a concept that no-one can define? 05/11/24
https://www.dailywire.com/news/georgetown-university-offers-students-stressed-about-election-milk-cookies-and-coloring-books?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dwbrand Amanda Harding, Georgetown University Offers Students Stressed About Election Milk, Cookies, And Coloring Books. Several colleges are providing similar outlets for students to deal with their negative emotions. 05/11/24
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgl87zp81no BBC News, Poor pupil answers blamed for exam slump – review. 06/11/24
https://www.thetimes.com/article/68babce1-a543-42d8-b766-43c50e41c65b?shareToken=7025ecccf7da66b99bf361ae1cc32f23 Mark McLaughlin, Unconscious bias training ‘could invite pupils to spy on teachers’. Documents, which were later withdrawn, reveal how the government is under pressure to train children to raise questions about biased marking and to replace exams with classroom assessments. 08/11/24
https://unherd.com/2024/04/how-to-spot-the-next-mania/ Lionel Shriver, How to spot the next mania. Each new panic follows the same playbook. 09/04/24
https://x.com/iainmacwhirter/status/1854575374912405617 Iain Macwhirter, repost of Trump video. 07/11/24
https://archive.is/VzwXT James McEnaney, Permanent job prospects for new teachers in sharp decline. 10/11/24
https://www.thetimes.com/article/b3d98d5e-7617-4119-b529-6d2821090cd3?shareToken=371ce15df8d21c24141d9861b03270b5 Sian Griffiths, Scrap Shakespeare and study Instagram posts – how I’d save English Lit in schools. No wonder degree courses are shutting and only 28% of boys read in their spare time, Freddie Baveystock, head of English at Harris Westminster, writes. Exam boards and politicians stifled their creativity. 10/11/24
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labours-exam-reforms-make-some-sense/ Kristina Murkett, Labour’s exam reforms make some sense. 11/11/24
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-strange-death-of-english-literature/Patrick West, The strange death of English literature. 10/11/24
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Anyone currently working in mainstream education and engaged with this substack, we should collect our stories of the collective outpouring of rage for the recent US election by those "progressive" teachers who forgot the part about remaining impartial when imparting wisdom - what a day that was! The phenomenon is being referred to in some circles as "Trump Derangement Syndrome". Theres still many in the teaching fraternity that still suffer from Brexit "PTSD" and like to pin all our presents ( and future) problems on those "thick working class racists", the same types found it very easy to sling the same mud at the American public.