The Sunday Telegraph

Three-month-old children ‘racially biased’

Council poster points to ‘racial prejudice’ among young children, sparking anger at ‘activist educators’

- By Ewan Somerville

CHILDREN as young as three months old may be racially biased, a London council’s poster has announced, as parents raise alarm at “activist educators” in the nursery sector.

Islington council’s under-5s department shared the graphic with diagrams of babies up to age six, titled: “Children are never too young to talk about race.”

The poster said that “at three months, babies look more at faces that match the race of their caregivers”.

It added that “children as young as two years use race to reason about people’s behaviours”, and “by 30 months, most children use race to choose playmates”.

The graphic claimed that “expression­s of racial prejudice often peak at ages four and five” and that “by five, white children are strongly biased in favour of whiteness, and have learned to associate some groups with higher status than others”.

It was shared on the Islington Early Years Twitter account late last year.

It is sourced from a radical US website called the Children’s Community School, and cites a series of contested studies, most from before 2010, for each of the six claims about children and race.

Parents have raised alarm at the revelation after The Telegraph reported last week how at least four Labour-run councils have drafted in “Maoist” diversity consultant­s to “decolonise the mind sets” of nursery staff working with toddlers.

Nottingham City Council, the Welsh Government, Islington council and Early Years Bristol have worked with the Black Nursery Manager, a diversity consultanc­y. The company has previously criticised “the violence of whiteness” and called the Government an “agent of white supremacy”.

MPs told this newspaper the training must be investigat­ed as “the most poisonous and divisive kind of dogma”.

This prompted the Early Years Alliance to hit back and say critics were “incredibly short-sighted”, while the National Day Nurseries Associatio­n said such training “should be encouraged not criticised”.

But campaigner­s say the backlash from the early years bodies shows how entrenched radical race theories have become in nurseries. Many such organisati­ons reject the “colour-blind” idea of meritocrac­y because it refuses to focus on difference­s between races.

Adrian Hart, a parent from the campaign group Don’t Divide Us and author of The Myth of Anti-Racist Kids, said: “Fundamenta­lly, many of the studies presented in support of these sorts of ideas about children and race simply conflate acceptance of one group with rejection of another.

“Children’s choices in relation to things like doll or toy preference, in artificial experiment­al conditions offer no indication of whether the child takes account of race in everyday social interactio­ns.”

The mandatory curriculum for nursery staff makes no mention of racism or particular races.

The Government’s non-statutory Developmen­t Matters guidance is designed to support impartial teaching of diversity, but early years sectors released their own separate version last year which endorsed the idea of “white privilege”.

An Islington council spokesman said: “As we work to create a more equal Islington, we will keep challengin­g the subtle and complex ways in which people are held back and opportunit­ies are denied.

“Structural inequaliti­es stop too many people in our borough from reaching their potential, and we will keep challengin­g inequality so all our children, young people, families and communitie­s can thrive.”

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