Labour to Make National Curriculum More ‘Diverse’
The national curriculum is set to be made more ‘diverse’ under Labour plans – oh, and every school will have to teach it. The Telegraph has more.
Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has begun a review to “refresh” what is taught in schools, pledging to “breathe new life into our outdated curriculum”.
The new curriculum will be compulsory in all state schools, including academies that were previously free to opt out.
The Telegraph can reveal that the Department for Education’s terms of reference for the overhaul explicitly say that the department (DfE) aims to create a curriculum that reflects the “diversities of our society” and help produce young people who “appreciate the diversity” of Britain.
This newspaper has also seen suggestions for changes to the curriculum that have been submitted to the review by unions and other teaching groups, including for how to “decolonise” subjects which have been branded too “mono-cultural”.
The moves were criticised by the Conservatives on Sunday night. Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, said: “Instead of spending time fiddling with our academic curriculum, which has led to English children being the best at maths and English in the Western world, the DfE needs to concentrate on getting absence rates down and kids back in the classroom.”
Sir John Hayes, the former Conservative education minister, said the changes would “undermine the education of young people” for ideological reasons.
He added: “The truth of the matter is there’s a canon of English literature, there’s a factual basis to learning, and you can’t twist the facts to suit your political agenda.
“When you do you risk undermining the education of young people and leaving them ill-equipped for life beyond schooling.”
Sir John, who trained as a history teacher, warned that the move would add to the “distortion of history” for political reasons, adding: “The pretence that some things count and others don’t – that’s just not intellectually rigorous.”
The review, announced in July, is being led by Prof Becky Francis, a feminist professor who started a call for evidence in November urging teaching experts to offer proposals on achieving the aims of the curriculum overhaul.
Prof Francis, who criticised the Tony Blair government for “an obsession with academic achievement”, and the committee leading the review are now considering proposals suggested by teaching unions, school groups, think tanks and Royal Societies.
After a review of the evidence, an interim report is expected to be published in early 2025. A full set of recommendations to curriculum changes will be released later in the year.
Among the proposals submitted by major unions and educational institutions are suggestions of the introduction of more diverse material, particularly in “majority white” classrooms, and a move away from English literature which is seen as “traditional”.
The teachers’ union NASUWT, which has about 280,000 members across the UK, told the review that it must “embed anti-racist and decolonised approaches” in the curriculum and advised “inclusive curricula that reflect diverse authors, cultures and perspectives”.
The Association of School and College Leaders warned that “history and English curricula are seen as largely mono-cultural”, and welcomed plans to “diversify the curriculum”.
The group, which represents more than 25,000 senior secondary school teachers, warned that “in particular, ethnicity and sexual orientation are under-represented in the national curriculum”.
The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) told the review that the planned curriculum must reflect “the diversity of our society”, adding that members saw the benefit of using diverse reading material for “subverting racial biases” especially when “teaching to a majority white classroom”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Bridget Phillipson has been accused of “gaslighting” middle-class parents after claiming that they support Labour’s private school tax raid. The Telegraph has more.
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OK and pray tell me, Professor Francis, what are they going to replace this terrible white monoculture focused education with?
Look around: nearly everything that modern life is built upon is a product of this berated white monoculture.
The entire industrialized west is founded on inventions of predominantly white European men. Your feminist educators and black historians can do nothing about it. You can promote some insignificant nonentity and pretend she invented sliced bread and the toaster as well but one day when this madness is over, she will fall back into obscurity together with your ideas. Because let me tell you something that you are so desperately trying to deny: truth exists and ultimately prevails. Always and every time and, as a result, you are fighting a battle that you will lose.
Truth will in future be what Whitehall says it is and deviation from that will result in criminal proceedings after loss of your job.
And below is a graphic showing global life expectancy over the last 200 years. There is no equivalent event anywhere in the history of life on earth and that covers a period of 3.7 billion years.
The graphic below is by Buckminster Fuller and shows the Industrial Revolution in terms of the acquisition of elements. This extraordinary explosion in acquired knowledge was not because of colonialism, or slavery, or oppression (look at the nationalities of each discoverer), but because of the freedom to write, speak and freely associate. Again, there is no equivalent event anywhere in the history of empires and nations. What is bizarre are those seeking out advanced civilizations from the past and the only evidence seems to be the ability to move really massive stones? In the graph below the number of inventions available to humanity jumped from about 200 to over 10,000 in around 200 years. China was responsible for 4 important inventions and numerous others over more than 1,000 years, but their restrictive top down collectivism meant nothing really happened. There are too many useful idiots who will happily take us back to the top down collectivism thinking it is somehow revolutionary and new. It is not, and takes us back to a Mongolian, Assyrian, Babylonian type world, which has actually been the norm for at least 8,000 years.
Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, is an idiot.
“The truth is The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”
W. Churchill
The Ministry of Truth is operating already. (1984).
Another nail in the coffin of England.
Thinking back to my History lessons, we were taught history began in 1066, nothing much happened until Henry 8th, then it was pretty quiet until Victoria and the Industrial Revolution, after which there was one or two wars (I forget…) and that was about that. In principle I don’t have a problem with a broader appreciation of history and history of other thing. I had no meaningful knowledge of the significance of the American Civil War, for example, or the Ottoman Empire, until I took up reading later in life. I have a feeling that Mary Seacole, or bigger topics like the Atlantic Slave trade would be a few weeks of study, but not the bit where we outlawed it and stopped it from happening. How relevant that is to the education of our youth is open to debate I think.
“We don’t need no education”
That’s lucky, because under labour your not going to get any! But you will be taught all about poisonous planet destroying Co2, about skin colour and how trans have special rights over the rest of us, what’s between your legs and what you believe should be between your legs, so no time in the curriculum for ‘lil old fashioned learning’
Do we need a “National Curriculum”? If so, why, who should decide what’s in it, based on what criteria?
The “National Curriculum” used to be: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic.
My gut feel about this, as with so much, is that the state has no business making this kind of decision. Let people set up schools or curriculums as they see fit and parents can choose. Happy for someone to convince me otherwise.
You do realize that Mick Philpottle had children (possibly still has if he didn’t kill all of them)? The problem is that you’re assuming that parents will be educated enough to be able chose sensibly and responsible enough that they will actually bother to do so, and neither of both is necessarily true. The natural state of affairs (so to say) is that (most) children of well-to-do people (middle class upwards) will get an education because (most of) their parents believe they’ll need one and children of poor people won’t because they have more directly important stuff to worry about than abstract concepts like letters and numbers. Such as working to earn money as early as possible. The question here are really “Is it desirable that all/ as many as possible members of society have a certain minimum set of skill, ie, reading, writing at least basic math and is it fair to children from poor people to exclude from all the better jobs because they don’t? Considering that children of poor people will be as talented as other children, is it sensible to exclude them from all these jobs or rather a regrettable waste of resources?” If any of… Read more »
I think parents would on average choose at least as well as the state, and they would have a choice.
An what about the children with non-average parents? Serves them right for chosing the some carelessly? Don’t want Philpottle’s offspring to compete with my children, anyway?
Your evading the issue by claiming it doesn’t exist despite it historically certainly did.
I am not sure what “issue” I am evading.
Anyway, your definition of “choosing well” and mine and someone else’s will likely differ. I think I am right, you think you are right, etc.
My guess is that education would happen and society as a whole would be OK. Most parents have reasonable instincts towards their children would understand that sending them to a school where they were taught nothing, or not sending them to school at all and not educating them at home, would not be a smart idea.
The questions I formulated. You’re basically just asserting that there’s no problem here despite it’s know than, for instance, illiteracy was common-place only about 200 years ago, when everybody was free to teach anything in exchange for any fees someone might be willing to pay for that.
Who said anything about fees?
I am advocating choice over the curriculum, that’s all.
How education should be paid for is a related but separate question.
Absolutely spot on. I would wager that there’s a high percentage of pupils who are failing to grasp even the basics, in all of the above.
By design too.
A national curriculum exists. And trivially, the only way to stop Labour politicians from abusing this fact to attempt to brainwash children below voting age to accept Labour policies as evidently impartial, factual necessities is ensure that the national curriculum doesn’t include that. A discussion of abstract first principles for a better but entirely hypothetical world will have the exact opposite effect. Labour takes the national curriculum and runs with it. Anybody else is fast falling asleep instead of following this semi-theological lectures.
The only way to win a confrontation is to assert control of the field. Voluntarily yiedling it to the enemy while trying to convince bystanders that the field simply shouldn’t exist won’t work.
As long as there is a “national curriculum” someone will control it. You could put it into the hands of some nominally “independent” body but then the body would be populated by people following some agenda or other. I have no interest in dictating to anyone what their children should study at school.
In the given context, that’s an entirely hypothetical point: A national curriculum exists and nobody who could wants to abolish it anytime soon. TPWCL (The Party Wrongly Called Labour) wants harness the power to control it they presently have to ‘breed’ children who’ll hopefully be much more open to woke idiocies than the general population, ie, basically, abuse a system that’s supposed to provide children with an education to turn them into future Labour voters instead. That’s something which is not supposed to happen because Labour doesn’t own these children. They just think they will get away with behaving as if they did, melody Might makes right! See what you can do about it!
That you wouldn’t employ a national curriculum for anything¹ if you had one at your disposal doesn’t matter in the slightest. They will.
¹ Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to teach children about the evils of national curricula to eventually get rid of them?
Hypotheticals normally start like “what if…”.
We’re discussing the national curriculum, and the thrust of the article is that it’s going bad. Most people’s solutions to this “going bad” seem to amount to “it should be changed to be more like what I think it should be”. We can change it in 5 years time, and then Labour will change it back in 2035 ad infinitum. I don’t care whether other people want to abolish it or not – I want to, and I am hoping to persuade others to my point of view. That’s what we do here.
You’re simply ceding the field to Labour based on theories about a better world which really ought exist somewhere. Labour laughs and you lose. And that’s all. No deus ex machina coming to rescue to supply $paradise.
I don’t expect rescue. I can’t unthink what I’ve thought. Given the choice between Labour’s curriculum and yours or mine, I would not choose Labour’s. I just don’t think it’s a long term solution, for the reasons stated. You seem to believe in possibility of some benevolent technocratic class emerging that will manage things sensibly, to your liking. That seems at least as unlikely as my desired outcome happening.
I know (not seem to believe) that our current crop of rulers and their crazy ideas had predecessors who were much less crazy and these predecessors who were even less crazy and that this coincided with the great improvements to human life in general in Europe which have taken place since about the middle of the 19th century. In the 1840s, it was common-place (in Germany at least) for people working +12h shifts in menial jobs while being barely able to feed themselves and their families from their earnings. As late as the 1920s, it was still common for a whole family to live in a single, rented room and rent parts of their sole bed out to strangers (called Schlafburschen) who would then sometimes end up impregnating a teenage daughter here and there because of the constant, close proximity to her (Tucholsky writes about this as a well-known everyday problem). I’m not convinced that everything was worse in the past and is much better nowadays, ie, that our current crop of politicians is as good as it can possibly get. Their track records certainly don’t suggest this. But that’s really besides the point. Which was a so-called national curriculum… Read more »
The Party Wrongly Called Labour?
They do make heavy work of anything they do, and end up making the situation worse.
Don’t forget The Party Wrongly Called Conservative. And, even more hilariously, there is The Party Wrongly Called Liberal Democrat. It’s not Liberal, or Democratic.
It must be something to do with History. 🙂
It is a pity that they don’t think about teaching kids about real life and finance. Practical things like cooking from scratch, the virtues of working for a living, living within your means, responsibility for family and community, honesty. You know, all those old fashioned ideas that were the basis for a strong country in the past.
All the so-called modern virtues of diversity and tolerance spring naturally from this and don’t need to be taught separately.
My No.1 would be statistics and how people use different ways of presenting them to mislead. Actual vs. relative risk reduction, for example.
Spot on comment. The Blob and Co, generally use the relative rather than the actual, because if they did, the effective results would be so minimal that everyone would see the pointlessness of their agendas. It would also indicate that the greater the drive towards greater control, (towards 6 sigma for example) effects a propensity for skewed and or Bi nominal distributions, and therefore less control. As for populations……….
As for cause and effect analysis, and risk reduction, they don’t even do this themselves, so they unlikely to want to teach someone to know what they have no knowledge of themselves.
Real poverty (barely known in this country now) vs relative poverty (ie if you do not have Sky/Netflix and a TV that takes up a whole wall of a room)
Parents can teach their children all those things. I did pretty well with most of it.
Unfortunately the children of those who weren’t paying attention in class won’t learn this from their parents. I was a precocious child and thankfully my mum is one of those who did pay attention.
The national curriculum as proposed will generate low-resolution thinkers. I truly don’t think the government has any business telling people what’s true and what isn’t.
But also, why should the unions be allowed to do this? They’re supposed to be there for employer/employee relations.
I cannot fault this chap’s comment, which he posted in response to Rupert Lowe sharing this news article on Twitter yesterday. Fully concur. Indoctrination is eclipsing education, it seems; ”Labour’s at it with their “diversity” obsession, aren’t they? Bridget Phillipson waltzing in to tell us we need a “refreshed” curriculum, as if what kids really need is another dose of woke claptrap shoved down their throats. Let me tell you, it’s not “diversity” these kids need – it’s discipline, rigour, and a proper education in reading, writing, arithmetic, and British bloody history. And when I say history, I don’t mean this rehashed, guilt-tripping version where kids are told Britain was nothing but some oppressive colonial overlord. I mean the real stuff – Shakespeare, Churchill, the Industrial Revolution, Magna Carta, Trafalgar, the Blitz spirit. Teach them about the greatness of this nation, the hard graft of the working class that built it, and the innovation that made Britain the powerhouse it was and should be again. But no, Labour’s solution is to take the curriculum, already sinking under the weight of left-wing ideology, and hammer another nail into its coffin. They don’t want kids thinking for themselves, they want a generation… Read more »
They assume that Children are racist and so need to be reprogrammed, they assume children are sexual beings from infancy, which suggests that the Adults designing and teaching programmes have an unhealthy interest in Children. I don’t know what other parents send their children to school for, but mine were sent to learn how to read, write, matriculate, to learn the countries History, to learn Geography and Science a language and the Christian religion as it was a traditional UK based school. In addition there was Sports, and play time whereby children learn to socialise and are watched over by caring Adults, who understand that falling out is all part of learning and getting along. I did not send my children to school to be indoctrinated, sexualised by adults, told that there is shame in their country, that the colour of your skin especially if white is the source of wickedness, that belief in a Christian God is to be abhorred, to be denied great literature, to be instructed that the human alone in the animal kingdom has no biological male or female people but that thinking alone can decide what sort a person is from day to day, and… Read more »
“Epsilon semi-moron” is the phrase that stuck in my mind – and I did genuinely laugh out loud, despite the chilling overtone of the book.
Brave New World and 1984 should be compulsory reading.
I’m sure His Hypocritical Majesty of Windsor is delighted by this “news.”
He is fully supportive of the mission to deconstruct the UK …. which he swore to uphold only 18 months ago.
Ar a cost to us taxpaters of £150 million just to satisfy the cranky Prince’s vanity and self-obsession
I wonder if the refreshed curriculum will permit pupils to question why it is that the West became the most advanced society in the world (long before the slave trade started) whilst in Africa they continued living in mud huts, and many still do (long after the slave trade ended)?
Or ask from whom did Arab and later European slave-traders buy their slaves? Could it be from African kings and chiefs particularly of those tribes which specialised – for over a thousand years – in raiding weaker tribes and taking them as slaves?
And ask why are Africans still practicing slavery, particularly children, forced to work in the lithium and cobalt mines to produce the materials for wind and solar power and the batteries for BEVs?
We led the world in ending slavery – so we needn’t make and further reparations.
We ended our Empire in a (mostly) sane manner – so we don’t need to de-colonise anything.
But somehow our historical efforts will count for nothing.
No this is White Supremacist lying. This is exactly why we need a new curriculum.
The British invented slavery to create their wealth.
Shakespeare plays were actually written by a Nigerian.
Penicillin , jet engines, steam engines, electricity, nuclear energy, aeroplanes, ships, TV, computers and much, much more were all invented by Africans.
Shakespeare was actually translated from the original Klingon.
Classic case of what haven’t we ‘effed up yet….Ohhh we haven’t ‘effed up educashin….right off you go lass, go and ‘eff that up.
including for how to “decolonise” subjects which have been branded too “mono-cultural”.
“Decolonise” being a lie designed to disguise and promote the colonisation of Britain.
Multi-culturalism, diversity is our strength.
That being so, why has every multi-cultural, diverse empire collapsed precisely because its diverse cultures wanted each to be distinct and exclusive, and not dominated by one in particular?
People who don’t think history started yesterday afternoon, will know that throughout the written record multi-culturalism, diversity = tribalism, conflict, bloodshed, warfare.
“…members saw the benefit of using diverse reading material for “subverting racial biases” especially when “teaching to a majority white classroom”.
Isn’t that statement an example of racial bias?
It certainly is an expression of racial bias. Unfortunately, there seems to be a perception in some circles that anti-white bias is never racism.
In response to those chilling words from the teachers’ unions, I’ll repeat something I posted in response to the article about our universities. Namely, that the purpose of an educational system/curriculum is to:
It is not there to “subvert biases”, indoctrinate our young people, or make them afraid of exercising their right to express their own opinions.
By all means, include literature from other cultures if it’s worthy of study, but don’t just shoehorn it in because it’s the only work by a Ghanaian lesbian writer, for example.
By all means, include studies of historic events from around the world.
But never deny our own national cultural and social heritage, or force our young people to feel guilty about events in which they had no hand.
Hopefully Rachel from Customer Complaints will be guiding the content of the economics course. Um …..
“Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past”
George Orwell
This is nothing more and nothing less than Soviet style propaganda being indoctrinated into our schools getting our children and grandchildren honed into state obeying automatons. It has to be stopped.
Home schooling.
Kiddies in school. Surely there are much more important issues to concern ourselves with.