BRITISH schools are flouting the law on political impartiality – so why isn’t the government doing anything about it?
Maybe it’s because the partiality in schools is always left-wing.
By 2020, 32 per cent of self-identified ‘right’ or ‘fairly right’ Britons stopped airing opinions in teaching and research, compared with 13 per cent of centrists and leftists.
By the same year, 73 per cent of British school children had been taught at least one of: ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias’, ‘systemic racism’, ‘patriarchy’ and innumerable genders. A teacher was filmed tasking students with stepping forward in answer to their ‘white privilege’.
That was a crazy year: lockdown, BLM, etc. But in 2022, headteachers told the Guardian of their worries of continuing ‘far-right’ radicalisation among students.
Now, an audio recording has emerged of a teacher in Trafford, Greater Manchester, telling students that she has been countering protests against asylum hotels, where she saw her opponents ‘using Nazi salutes and throwing very racist abuse towards the people inside’, and using British flags to express racism and to intimidate (even though she claims not to be saying that British flags are ‘inherently racist’).
On the same day (a school day!) ten schools in Liverpool bussed about 100 minors to the Labour Party conference to distribute leaflets at the behest of the National Education Union. A teacher lamely claimed it was all the choice of the students.
A NEU representative says that ‘engaging with the democratic system, including taking part in lobbying MPs, or councillors or other elected figures, is a way children can learn about our parliamentary system’.
True, but when a partisan group organises the lobbying, and the lobbying is directed at a particular party’s conference, and the lobbying is for a particular policy, the lobbying seems partial.
The NEU is lobbying for school meals to be provided to all pupils, beyond Keir Starmer’s extension of the entitlement to all recipients of Universal Credit.
The teachers’ actions seem to violate the Education Act (1996), which says that ‘the local authority, governing body, and head teacher shall forbid (a) the pursuit of partisan political activity by any of those registered pupils at a maintained school who are junior pupils, and (b) the promotion of partisan political views . . .’
The latest government guidance on the act repeatedly warns schools to ‘ensure political impartiality’. Seems clear enough – except the guidance gets lost in semantics. This is politically convenient. I do not believe it is accidental.
The guidance contains no definition of ‘political impartiality.’ The guidance introduces some terms, poorly defined, and thus fails to clarify ‘political impartiality’ to an operational evidentiary standard. Any guidance on the law should define the crime, unambiguously, even where the law is ambiguous. Instead, the trend is towards loosely-defined law and guidance.
Why?
Because ambiguity allows authorities more flexibility in how they enforce.
And that’s how you get two-tier justice.
The guidance on ‘political impartiality’ in schools moves on to a section titled ‘Understanding Terminology’. That sounds useful.
The first paragraph acknowledges that schools face a challenge in ‘interpreting’ ‘political impartiality’. That too sounds useful.
However, although the paragraph promises some ‘key terms’ from the statutes, the guidance hangs out the following quote, without context or citation, ‘. . . forbid the promotion of partisan political views’. But the guidance does not define them!
Are the civil servants who wrote this guidance morons? I don’t think so. I think they are wilfully dancing around the law, lest they box themselves into political impartiality.
Moving on from statutes, the guidance recognises in case law a court ruling that the best synonym for the term ‘partisan’ is ‘one-sided’. A synonym is not a definition, folks!
This synonym does not help, legally or practically. The synonym actually makes prosecution impossible. Any time we accuse someone of being one-sided, they could say, ‘Well, I did acknowledge the other side.’ Puff, no longer one-sided.
This case law is pathetic. The Department for Education is pathetic to offer it unless the DfE operationalises what the court failed to operationalise. Instead, the DfE left as much flexibility as before.
Note that this case law comes from 2007, at the height of the Blairite age. Why is this relevant? Because the progressive revolution included ever fuzzier statutes, and ever more reliance on case law, while judges were being selected for their leftism.
And that’s how you got to judges routinely making up case law, to punish non-compliance with leftism while protecting leftists from the same punishment.
Partisan two-tier justice is as true in family courts as in criminal courts. This is relevant because family courts, social workers, and schools collude to punish parents who are in dispute with schools.
Yet despite all these efforts by leftist legislators, judges, and civil servants to make ‘political impartiality’ as easy as possible for fellow leftists to evade, the teachers I quoted earlier are clearly in violation of the guidance.
The trouble then becomes: the authorities aren’t acting on the violations.
First, let’s explain the violations.
The guidance eventually warns schools that ‘partisan political views . . . may also be held by campaign groups, lobbyists and charitable organisations’. These terms clearly include counter-protesters outside an asylum hotel, the NEU, and students leafleting attendees at a partisan conference.
The DfE’s guidance then draws its only red line: ‘What is prohibited in the legal duties is promoting partisan political views to pupils. This means encouraging their support for, or the adoption of, these views . . . such as presenting partisan political views as undisputed factual accounts and failing to explain their contested nature.’
Schools are supposed ‘to secure that, where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils, they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views’.
I cannot see how a teacher’s description of her opponents as ‘Nazis’ or the NEU’s campaigning for a particular policy could be accepted as offering ‘balance’ unless the other side were allowed to rebut, which clearly did not happen in either case.
Kemi Badenoch has already declared that the schools’ behaviour in Liverpool is partial. Adults ‘should not be using children to make bad political arguments’.
The school in Partington has apologised for its teacher’s comments, although in a careful way. It acknowledges ‘concerns’ about ‘partiality’ and promises a review, but does not admit partiality.
Liverpool City Council still does not have an opinion, days later – perhaps because it is run by a Labour super-majority. The Starmer administration still has not expressed an opinion.
I telephoned the press offices at DfE and Liverpool Council. Nobody answered the phone. I left voicemails specifying the issue, but nobody returned my calls.
I have now written to both authorities, with my opinion that the teachers and schools in this article are in violation of ‘political impartiality’. I will report back.
