Proposal to introduce political impartiality obligations
Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, has used her speech to the Conservative party conference to accuse some teachers of ‘brainwashing’ children, and said they would face tighter rules on political impartiality under a future Conservative government. She also criticised the current government’s proposed reforms to vocational pathways and school inspection.
Addressing delegates in Birmingham earlier this week, Ms Trott argued that ‘children as young as seven are being told they have white privilege’ and that others had been ‘told to rewrite negative headlines on migration to make them more positive’. Attacking a network called Schools of Sanctuary as having ‘an agenda’, she pledged that she would ‘keep political activism out of the classroom’. A policy paper accompanying the speech set out plans to add a political impartiality obligation to the Teachers’ Standards and leadership qualifications, as well as the frameworks for both initial teacher training and early career teachers. Ofsted would also be directed to inspect political impartiality. Later in the speech she also widened her criticism to include education unions, specifically accusing the National Education Union of being ‘a campaigning organisation bent on politicising education’. She said the Conservatives would bring forward ‘a specific law around Trade Unions involved in education’.
Ms Trott also made the argument that ‘what’s being taught under the guise of equality or citizenship’ is often a waste of time, saying that ‘the more time children spend on this extra stuff, the less time they’ve got to learn the important stuff’. She argued that instead schools could deliver lessons in empathy, curiosity and resilience by studying Dickens, Darwin and Churchill respectively. Turning her attention to core curriculum subjects, she also said that ‘there’s no reason to believe that the importance of maths and English will change as AI becomes more pervasive.’
Elsewhere in the speech she defended the record of the last Conservative government in raising standards in education, saying that ‘English children are now among the best in the world for reading, maths and science’, and calling it ‘arguably the greatest public policy achievement of the last two decades’. She contended that these improvements were being put at risk by the current government, suggesting that possible reforms to Ofsted grading which might take into account that a school serves a disadvantaged area ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. At a fringe event prior to her speech, Ms Trott also said she was ‘furious’ about the government’s plans to introduce technical pathways from 14 and new qualifications, arguing that specialisation should instead happen at 16 as ‘you’ve got to get the basics right first’.