Petition:
Educate not indoctrinate
Don’t Divide Us is Britain’s common-sense voice on race. We believe that all people should be treated equally irrespective of skin colour or ethnicity and that Britain has made good progress towards achieving this. We are concerned that this progress is being undermined in schools by teaching that creates divisions. We are leading a coalition of like-minded groups who see similar moves in schools from groups promoting highly contested ideas about sex and gender.
Having reached around 5,000 signatures, we have sent our petition and a copy of our second report to 50 ministers and peers with an interest in education or who sit on relevant committees or All-Party Parliamentary Groups. The accompanying letter sets out the pressing need to take the education of our young, and the issue of impartiality in schools, seriously .
The petition is now closed, as we move on to looking into the Equality Act in more detail in the coming period. A HUGE THANKS to all of you who have signed our petition; it has undoubtedly contributed to a wider effort to bring the question of educational impartiality into the public domain – whether the focus is race or gender ideology. It’s a good start, and it’s one we’re determined to build on!
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
20 March 2024
Our petition called for support from those who believe that:
- schools should not teach children that they either have ‘white privilege’ or ‘black oppression’
- schools should not teach children that there are many genders
- schools should teach traditional subjects without seeking to influence children politically
EARLY SIGNATORIES INCLUDED
Lionel Shriver, Toby Young, Claire Fox, Inaya Folarin Iman, Matthew Goodwin, William Clouston, Allison Pearson, Jonathan Sumption, Tim Luckhurst, Tony Sewell, Ben Cobley, Joanna Williams, Eric Kaufmann, Stuart Waiton (director, Scottish Union for Education), James Esses and many more.
BACKGROUND
Unproven assertions about race, gender and sex are being introduced into schools by activist influenced groups who are more concerned with promoting political interests than in educating the next generation.
Schools have a duty under the 1996 Education Act to teach impartially and in ways that are compatible with the values of parents. This has wide support: 69% of parents polled for our report agreed that schools should teach in an impartial way. Critical Social Justice (CSJ) – whether the focus is race, sex or gender – is a politically partisan ideology that goes against majority norms and beliefs on these issues and condemns alternative views as being ‘part of the problem’. CSJ dismisses impartiality and objectivity as a political ruse rather than something essential for education.
As an ideological creed CSJ is not suited to promoting positive child development. Introducing radical ideas about race, sex and gender within schools can cause confusion and anxiety. These radical claims disrupt children’s psychological and emotional world in order to normalise a one-sided, pessimistic and anxiety-inducing world-view where there is nothing but oppressive relations of power.
The government’s Impartiality Guidance, while welcome, is insufficient.
APPENDIX OF EXAMPLES
We have gathered examples of politically partisan content, practices & professional development to illustrate these problems. Read them here.
We want schools to educate not indoctrinate. We are calling for:
- The government to commission an independent review of third-party organisations that provide lessons, materials and instruction, for and within schools on contested assertions about race, gender and other contentious issues (similar to the Cass Review on gender identity services for children and young people).
- The Department for Education to issue an explicit and mandatory instruction to schools that their job is to educate as already stipulated in the Education Act 1996 (Part I, Chapter I, section 9) and to teach impartially as stipulated in Part V, Chapter IV, sections 406 & 407.
- The Department for Education to issue an explicit and mandatory instruction to Ofsted to make impartiality a priority in its guidance for inspectors and assessment criteria for judging schools.
