Classrooms cannot, and should not, be political vacuums. Under the guise of ‘impartiality’, right-wing forces are increasingly focused on controlling and restricting which materials, topics and perspectives young people have access to in educational settings – to the detriment of the most marginalised pupils.
Earlier this week at the Conservative Party conference, shadow education secretary Laura Trott outlined the Tories' seven-point pledge to parents to “keep political activism out of the classroom”, including vowing to give Ofsted more powers to investigate breaches of impartiality and making it easier for parents to report impartiality failures.
Trott’s speech took aim at Trans+ people, migrants and even teachers themselves, decrying the work of trade unions and not-for-profits, while conveniently avoiding the real, day-to-day issues plaguing schools, such as cuts to funding, class sizes and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) provision.
At their heart, such political projects seek to force a culture of uniformity in the classroom. They present a vision of British schools where differences are erased as soon as pupils walk through the door, and everyone fits neatly into cookie-cutter shapes.
These boxes are often white, cis, straight, able-bodied, neurotypical and financially stable, characteristics which not everyone shares – including children.
While I am white, cis, able-bodied and neurotypical, I am also a working-class lesbian who grew up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. During my time in state primary and secondary school, there were no discussions about LGBTQIA+ identities or lives – except during one Year 11 sex-ed lesson where the council-appointed instructor admitted she didn’t know if queer women could catch STIs and STDs from one another (they can, obviously).
It was a hangover from the brutal chilling effect of the original Section 28, which banned the ‘promotion’ of queer identities in schools and local services. But failing to build diverse perspectives into the curriculum didn’t improve my maths grades, or give my state school more money for resources in our deprived area of Wolverhampton. It just meant I – and other pupils – felt alone and excluded from the version of the world that was presented to us in our learning materials.
I can’t tell you what it would have meant for an LGBTQIA+ organisation to come in to talk to us. Honestly, it would have been life-changing.
In her speech, Trott caveated that promoting equality in schools originally “came from a good place” but then claimed such “good intentions have opened the door to bad actors”. By this she means “people with political agendas”, like the National Education Union, which recently had a resolution about embedding their own LGBT+ teaching materials in schools.
“This doesn't sound like a professional body that cares about teaching pupils,” Trott told the conference. “It sounds like a campaigning organisation bent on politicising education.”
This sums it all up. The Tories haven’t changed since the days of Section 28: to them, LGBTQIA+ identities are ‘political’, while straight and cis ones are not. “We will always put children first,” Trott claimed, obviously with certain children in mind. Of course, more worryingly, their comments come at a time when the Overton window has shifted so that Labour are the ones heralding in a new form of Section 28, this time aimed at curtailing how teachers can affirm and talk about Trans+ identities.
Classrooms up and down the country need to prepare young people for the wider world – an ever complex and changing world – and that only happens if their classrooms, their learning materials and their discussions reflect the diversity of experiences in that world.
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