Parents have a right to know what our children are taught

THERE’S a great deal of trust involved when you accompany your child to school and hand them over to a teacher. You believe that they will keep your offspring safe and give them the chance to learn to read, write and do sums. You hope they will also support them to make friends, protect them from bullying and teach them to understand and discuss the world in which they are growing up. You trust the school to offer lessons that are rooted in known and verified facts.

So, what on earth do you do when your child comes home and reports they are learning things you do not agree with or support — and their teacher, whom you should be able to trust, responds by saying that they simply can’t tell you anything about it?

It’s a question that arose this week at a state secondary school in south-east london, where teenagers were reportedly taught that some of their number had ‘white privilege’ and were part of ‘discriminatory systems of power’. In other words, a string of buzzwords linked to the identity politics that has taken hold in the united states.

after the death of george floyd and the Black lives Matter protests, parents say a violent image was shown to 13-year-olds in an art class. The poster depicted white and black people stabbing each other.

Posters produced by the children in response showed an image of a girl being shot in the head and slogans such as ACAB (all Cops are Bastards). a song by the rapper dave was played to students which included the line ‘our Prime Minister is a real racist’.

Concerned, the parents of one girl at haberdashers’ hatcham College complained, and asked to see copies of lesson plans so that, as parents, they could judge whether the curriculum was unacceptable for their daughter.

It seems a perfectly reasonable request. ultimately, you are responsible for your own child. and you don’t sign away that authority at the school gates.

Remember, a parent has the right to withdraw their child from sex education or religious education if they feel such subjects are unsuitable for their family.

I remember as a very little girl being sent to a Catholic junior school, because its academic reputation was unmatched. We were not Catholic, so my parents asked for me to be excluded from religious education and assemblies. Instead, they sent me to a Church of england sunday school. Their decision did me no harm and I was rather relieved not to be taught, at the age of six, that any misdemeanors I committed would result in me burning in the fires of hell.

But the family in the recent case was told that any mother or father can ask to have a lesson plan, but the school is not legally obliged to provide it.

What? It’s outrageous for the school system to assume that what a child is being taught is basically no business of the parents. What’s happening here is the politicisation of the curriculum. It is profoundly wrong for details of what children are learning to be considered secret. Why would a school consider it Ok to keep something so vital to a young person’s development, understanding and capacity to think and question under wraps?

and yet it seems to be an increasingly common attitude. so how do you react when your child says someone in a sex education class told them, for example, that there were dozens of different genders, and that anyone can change their biological sex?

faced with that situation, I would have to respond that the school was wrong. and then, as a parent, I’d have to ask myself why I did not know such nonsense was being taught to my child as fact.

Clare Page, the mother in question, had complained before about lessons on race, sex and gender, and came to believe her daughter was being indoctrinated.

This latest controversy proved to be the final straw. Mrs Page has written to the Information Commissioner’s Office about the issue — and has taken her daughter out of the school.

all these matters — race, gender and sex — have come to the fore in recent years. Yes, it is essential that young people discuss and understand them. But they are highly political and need to be handled with great care.

I recall, when choosing a school for my two boys, asking serious questions about how the head teachers would handle impressing upon all their male pupils the importance of equality between the sexes.

One seemed not to know what I was talking about. another said he had a couple of ‘ladies’ in the art department. a third said there would be discussions about housework and washing up for the little ones, consent for the big ones and he had brought women in to teach maths and physics.

Boys, he said, needed to know that women were not only good at art and english.

That’s the school I went for. My choice. My right as a parent to know.