Schools Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support Amendment 171F, excellently introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and backed up by others. First, I will comment on this whole group of amendments and the interesting speeches we have heard on them.

I think what lurks behind some of the frustrations with the Bill is an absence of anything about the content of education and the curriculum—the whole question of what education is for. I regret that we are not spending more time on the substance of schooling rather than the structures and systems. These speeches

indicate that people want to talk about something that is not in the Bill: education, which is, after all, the point of schools.

One trend we have seen over recent years is the tendency to see schools instrumentally as a means to address social, economic and cultural problems, which I worry squeezes out a focus on knowledge for its own sake, which is my particular hobby horse. Regardless, because that has led to an ever-expanding demand on teachers to solve myriad non-educational social problems, I fear that it is stirring up tensions over the distinct division of labour between schools and families—a sort of mission creep that often makes parents feel that teachers are encroaching into areas, such as values, that are either politicised or at odds with their own values. I think that lies behind some of the tensions that have emerged around Amendment 171F.

At the very least, this expanded remit has dragged teachers into some highly contentious arenas that they now have to teach. We have heard the contributions on British values in this debate; one could argue indefinitely over those things, and there have been arguments. The question is whether schools are the places where they should be fought out.

I have a couple of examples. Head teachers and senior teachers I know told me that there was something of a panic after the Black Lives Matter moment, when teachers were told that they had to decolonise the curriculum in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and also in relation to the government extension of relationship and sex education in 2019. Teachers were saying, “Well, this isn’t just teaching biology”—they are aware that it is a toxic topic these days. It is not just something you can send in the teaching staff to do; they know it goes far more broadly than science or facts.

The solution has been to bring in outside experts—third parties, NGOs—with their ready-made materials, but I think there is a real problem here. This is actually undermining the professionalism of teachers. These experts can be used to train governors and teachers or to run workshops directly with pupils and to supply materials, as we have heard. But when you look at who is doing it, some of them at least are partisan political activists who embrace one-sided ideological approaches to contentious issues. They are not trained as teacher trainers, they are not accredited and there is no central regulation.

One would think from the Bill—which is, as several people have noted, such a centralising power grab that it is likely to squeeze the life out of school autonomy—that the Government might be all over a situation where there are all sorts of people going into schools and teaching things and nobody knows what they are teaching. However, on this issue, the DfE seems to be washing its hands, saying that it is up to schools to vet third-party providers. But without clear guidelines it is hard for schools to navigate around what are, if we are honest, contentious culture war issues.

I do not know whether Ministers have looked at the resources produced by some external organisations, but I urge them to go through the research provided by Transgender Trend or the Safe Schools Alliance, because it is more ideology than facts: pronouns for primary school kids, et cetera—I will not rehearse it. I think

the excuse is that the material is commercially sensitive, but often what is going on here is that things are politically sensitive. These are not benign ideas, let alone facts; they are often divisive and totally at odds with parents’ values, and certainly fall short of statutory requirements for teacher impartiality.

Moving to a different subject, so that it is not all gender, I was struck during the lockdown by the Channel 4 documentary, “The School That Tried to End Racism”, which involved 11 and 12 year-olds at a school in south London. Many parents I knew were horrified at the use of pseudoscientific implicit association testing and the splitting of classrooms into white and non-white affinity groups, all through the prism of critical race theory. The campaign group that I was involved in setting up at the time, Don’t Divide Us, was drowning in concerned parents asking what was going on and whether their kids were being taught that all white people are racist. Parents went into schools to ask whether they could see the materials being used—even though sometimes that meant dodging lockdowns—and were told that there was nothing to see here, treated as a nuisance and told to go away.

When a group of parents led by DDU challenged Brighton & Hove City Council about its Racial Literacy 101 materials for schools, they were constantly rebuffed. Eventually, what was revealed showed some shockers. For example, under the heading “Overt and Covert White Supremacy”, lynching was listed alongside colour blindness. This is a shocking slur against generations of civil rights and anti-racist activists who took Martin Luther King’s mantra that we should judge on the content of character and not skin colour—no longer, it seems.

When you finally do see some of the teaching materials, they show that Martin Luther King’s position is dismissed as “old-fashioned” and that pupils are often being told that parents are the problem—that they are old-fashioned and backward. We must be very wary of this. For example, parents who go along with colour blindness are being described as exhibiting unconscious bias; those parents who believe in the biological facts of sex rather than the fluidity of gender identity are labelled to their own children as bigots and transphobic, guilty of cisnormativity.

The Government have a responsibility to diffuse what could become quite a nasty set of tensions. Potentially, one of the ways of ensuring against this breach of trust between schools and parents would be more transparency. It is a no-brainer for the Government: they should ensure that the spirit of Amendment 171F goes flying through and becomes part of the Bill.