In search of a new demos

Starmer wants schools to create the electorate he would prefer to govern

Photo by Carlos Magno on Unsplash

We have a Labour government in charge of Britain’s education sector for the first in over a decade. With little money in the national coffers and few concrete proposals for economic growth, reforming the people rather than improving the nation seems to be the party’s goal and the classroom is, inevitably, seen as the starting point. 

Take teeth. Shocking new statistics show that fewer than half of British children have seen a dentist in the past year. With private care prohibitively expensive for many parents and NHS provision so rare that large areas of the UK have been labeled ‘dental deserts’, five million children are now overdue for an appointment. Yet rather than tackling this problem by wholesale reform of the dental service - a feat which would require both money and political courage - Labour wants to use schools to reform the nation’s children. It plans to introduce lessons in tooth-brushing for the youngest pupils, taking time away from instruction in reading and writing. 

Back in the 1990s, Tony Blair led the Labour Party to electoral success with the mantra ‘education, education, education’ but for Keir Starmer, that word is, it seems, difficult to utter. Schools are certainly important institutions for today’s government but, in the party’s vision, they are to serve a political, rather than educational purpose. Starmer wants schools to create the right kind of citizens, the electorate he would prefer to govern. And it’s not just teeth he has in his sights.

This logic was on display in the government’s response to the disorder that swept through English towns this summer following the murder of three young girls at a holiday dance class. Rather than engaging with people’s legitimate concerns about high levels of immigration, the new Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, announced that schools will teach children how to spot extremist content and fake news online. She wants teachers to ‘arm’ pupils against ‘putrid conspiracy theories’. It seems that government ministers are happier correcting children’s thinking than dealing with immigration or knife crime.

Of course, children should be able to distinguish truth from lies. But this is best achieved through a solid grounding in subject knowledge. The more children know, the better they are able to place new information in context and think critically about what they have just learnt. Without this intellectual capacity, children are in no position to evaluate the politically-loaded categories of ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’, they must simply accept the perspective of the teacher. This is not a concern for Britain’s Labour government. It expects schools to correct children’s ‘wrong’ opinions and substitute beliefs picked up at home for state-approved values.

Lessons in fake news are not the only way in which children are to be taught a Labour-endorsed world view. The school curriculum has long been a political battleground. Recent years have seen the introduction of new classes in subjects such as ‘Relationships and Sex Education’ and ‘Citizenship’ into England’s schools. Such classes are not meant to transmit a body of academic knowledge but to inculcate particular views. Manipulating children into adopting a ‘correct’ outlook is not a by-product of these lessons but the whole point. The UK’s previous Conservative government opened the classroom door to activists determined to teach children that gender is an identity that floats freely from biology and that racism is deeply entrenched in the psyche of white people. Too late in the day did ministers try to prohibit the teaching of gender ideology in schools. Prior to the election, Phillipson described the Tories’ recently updated guidance on Relationships and Sex Education as ‘partisan’ and criticised its ‘unnecessary language’. ‘There are trans people within society and their existence should be recognised’, she told the BBC. Unsurprisingly, one of Labour’s first acts in office was to place this guidance under review. 

Not even traditional academic subjects have been safe from activists. Despite the Conservative government of 2010 introducing changes to the curriculum to make the teaching of subjects such as history more rigorous and focused on telling a coherent national story, many schools opted for a far more disparate, skills-led or topic-based curriculum that introduced children to past national wrongs without the redemption of historical context. Rather than history teaching being driven by what children should know about the past, it all too often became led by currently fashionable causes. Research carried out in 2021 found that 87 per cent of secondary schools had made substantial changes to their history curriculum to address issues of diversity. 72 per cent claimed to teach the history of migration while 80 per cent taught ‘Black and Asian British history’. These are important topics. But without a broader understanding of British history it is hard to make sense of an issue like ‘migration’. And in an era of identity politics, focusing on ‘Black History’, as opposed to the history of black people within British society, can serve to divide students and alienate them from a sense of national identity. Gearing history around the values of diversity and the stimulus of recent events paves the way for the subject to be politicised.

In order to tackle this problem, the previous Conservative government launched a review of the history curriculum. It wanted to prevent schools coming under pressure to ‘decolonise’ the subject and focus instead upon teaching children a nuanced curriculum that covered all aspects of topics such as colonialism by placing events in historical context. This badly needed initiative was also too little, too late. When the election was called in July, the review panel had finalised its report on the primary school history curriculum and was due to investigate practice in secondary schools. After Labour’s election win, ­members of the panel were reportedly advised that their input was no longer needed.

Now, under a new government, the review of history teaching is to be swept into a far more fundamental reform of the entire national curriculum. This work will be led by Professor Becky Francis, a specialist in social justice in schools. She is the co-author of the 2006 book, Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement: Race, Gender, Class and ‘Success’, the preface of which claims, ‘Our intention is to help lever social justice concerns back into mainstream educational debates that have been dominated by the neo­liberal language of ‘quality’ — in which concerns with ‘equality’ have been evacuated and consigned to the margins.’ Later in the volume, Francis despairs over an ‘obsession with academic achievement’ as evident in ‘testing regimes, academic league tables and the regular high-profile publication of achievement statistics’.

Speaking at the launch of the curriculum review, the Education Secretary Phillipson said: ‘this government, alongside leading education experts, leaders and staff on the front line, will breathe new life into our outdated curriculum and assessment system.’ The words ‘teachers’ and ‘subjects’ are notable by their absence. Instead, we are blithely informed that what children are learning now is somehow ‘outdated’ and therefore of dubious relevance for a society that aims to break down barriers so all children can ‘get on’. Labour wants schools to stop obsessing over knowledge of the past in order to focus on ‘the issues and diversities of our society, ensuring all children and young people are represented’. History, in other words, will be replaced by identity politics and grievance archaeology.

Confining children to present concerns and restricting the curriculum to what is perceived to be ‘relevant’ to a diverse society paves the way for far greater politicisation of schooling than ever before. The Labour Party shies away from the word ‘education’ because what it proposes is far more akin to indoctrination. Not content with reforming children’s dental hygiene, Starmer’s government plans wholesale reform of children’s attitudes and values.

Parents unhappy with this hyper-politicised curriculum have few options. All schools will be required to teach the updated curriculum once it has been confirmed by the Department for Education. Currently, private schools are not bound by the national curriculum and academies (similar to charter schools) also have greater freedom to adopt their own curriculum. Under Labour’s plans no school will be able to go off piste. In any case, parents will find opting out of state provision to be increasingly unaffordable. From January, VAT will be added to private school fees, increasing the amount parents have to pay by up to 20 per cent. This has been cheered on as an attack on privilege and elitism but will cause huge disruption to children while doing nothing to improve state provision. Labour’s vision of indoctrination for all allows no room for either quirkiness or excellence.

Wayward teachers are to be similarly brought into line. At present, private schools and academies are free to employ teachers who do not have a formal teaching qualification. In other words, with a head teacher’s approval, enthusiastic subject experts can put their talents to use in the classroom without having to undergo further training. But Labour wants to put an end to this. It wants to make it a requirement for all new teachers to either hold or be working towards a teaching certificate. The big winners of this change will not be children but university education faculties. Almost every bad idea in UK schools can be traced back to teacher training courses. One recent proposal is designed to ensure future educators are ‘anti-racist’ by instructing them in how to challenge ‘whiteness’ in the classroom. According to a university’s ‘best-practice’ document, teachers should be instructed in how to ‘disrupt the centrality of whiteness’ or, in other words, to call into question the attitudes and values apparently considered ‘normal’ by white people, such as ‘meritocracy’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘individualism’. That such stereotypes might themselves be racist has clearly not been considered.

Prospective teachers who think they may be able to challenge this guidance will have their work cut out. One of Labour’s very first acts in office was to block the previous government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which - in the absence of a First Amendment - would have made universities and students’ unions liable to fines if they failed to uphold free speech. It was prompted by high profile cases of speakers being ‘no-platformed’ at universities and professors being hounded out of employment for stating their belief in the scientific fact of biological sex and questioning transgender ideology. In scrapping this Act the government’s message to academics and teachers alike is clear: Shut up. Conform. And expect the same from your students.

For anyone who cares about education, Labour’s plans are enough to prompt despair. Unable to change the country, Prime Minister Starmer is looking to bypass adults and mould children to conform with his own preferred values. Subject knowledge, excellence and aspiration are to be sacrificed along with generational cohesion and national unity. This must serve as a call to arms. The time is surely ripe for a conservative revolution. We urgently need an underground classical education movement, complete with contraband texts and ancient wisdom.