For the first time in more than a decade, a school year has started in the U.K. with a Labour Party government running the country. With little money in the national coffers and few concrete proposals for economic growth, reforming the people rather than improving the nation seems to be the party’s goal. Labour’s starting point: the classroom.
Take teeth, for instance. Shocking new statistics show that fewer than half of British children have seen a dentist in the past year. With private care prohibitively expensive for many parents and NHS provision so rare that large areas of the U.K. have been labeled “dental deserts,” 5 million children are now overdue for an appointment. Yet rather than pursuing wholesale reform of the dental service—a feat that would require both money and political courage—Labour wants to use schools to address the dental crisis. It plans to introduce lessons in tooth-brushing for the youngest pupils, taking time away from instruction in reading and writing.
Back in the 1990s, Tony Blair led Labour to electoral success with the mantra “education, education, education.” For Prime Minister Keir Starmer, that word seems hard even to utter. As Labour sees it, schools serve a political rather than educational purpose: the party wants schools to create the right kinds of citizens, thus delivering the electorate that Labour needs to govern.
Similar logic was on display in the government’s response to the disorder that swept through English towns this summer following the murder of three young girls at a holiday dance class. Rather than engaging with legitimate public concerns about high levels of immigration, the new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, announced that schools will teach children how to “spot extremist content and fake news online.” She wants teachers to “arm” pupils against “putrid conspiracy theories.” But distinguishing truth from lies is best achieved through a solid grounding in subject knowledge. The more children know, the better they can put new information in context and think critically about what they have learned. Without this capacity, kids are in no position to evaluate politically loaded claims of “misinformation.” They must simply accept the teacher’s perspective. Correcting children’s “wrong” opinions means imposing state-approved values.
On curricular issues, too, kids will be taught a Labour-endorsed worldview. New classes in such subjects as relationships, sex education, and citizenship are not meant to transmit a body of knowledge but to inculcate particular ideas. The U.K.’s previous Conservative government had opened the classroom door to activists determined to teach children that gender floats freely from biology and that racism is deeply entrenched in the psyches of white people. Belatedly, the Tories issued guidance to prohibit the teaching of gender ideology in schools. On the campaign trail, Phillipson described the guidance as “partisan” and criticized its “unnecessary language.” “There are trans people within society and their existence should be recognized,” she told the BBC. One of Labour’s first acts in office was to place this guidance under review.
Not even traditional academic subjects have been safe from activists. In 2010, the Conservative government introduced changes to the curriculum to make the teaching of subjects such as history more rigorous, but many schools opted for a more disparate, skills-led, or topic-based curriculum that taught children about past national wrongs without the benefit of historical context. It was history teaching driven by fashionable causes, rather than by the imperative to give children an informed understanding of the past. Research carried out in 2021 found that 87 percent of secondary schools had made substantial changes to their history curricula to address issues of diversity; 72 percent claimed to teach the history of migration, while 80 percent taught “Black and Asian British history.” These are important topics. But without a broader knowledge of British history, it is hard to make sense of an issue like immigration. And in an era of identity politics, focusing on “Black History” as opposed to the history of black people within British society can divide students and alienate them from a national identity. Gearing history around the concept of diversity or tribal identity paves the way for politicization.
To tackle this problem, the previous Conservative government had launched a review of the history curriculum. It wanted to prevent schools from coming under pressure to “decolonize” their instruction and focus instead on giving children a nuanced curriculum that covered all aspects of subjects such as colonialism by placing these events in historical context. This badly needed initiative was too little, too late, however. When the election was called this past July, the review panel had finalized its report on the primary school history curriculum and was due to investigate practices in secondary schools. After Labour’s victory, members of the panel were reportedly advised that their input was no longer needed.
Now the review of history teaching is to be swept into a more fundamental reform of the entire national curriculum. This work will be led by Professor Becky Francis, a specialist in social justice. She is the coauthor of the 2006 book, Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement: Race, Gender, Class and ‘Success’, the preface of which claims, “Our intention is to help lever social justice concerns back into mainstream educational debates that have been dominated by the neoliberal language of ‘quality’—in which concerns with ‘equality’ have been evacuated and consigned to the margins.” Francis despairs over an “obsession with academic achievement” as evident in “testing regimes, academic league tables and the regular high-profile publication of achievement statistics.”
Speaking at the launch of the curriculum review, Phillipson said that the Labour “government, alongside leading education experts, leaders and staff on the front line, will breathe new life into our outdated curriculum and assessment system.” Labour wants schools to stop obsessing over knowledge of the past in order to focus on “the issues and diversities of our society, ensuring all children and young people are represented.” History will be replaced by identity politics.
Confining children to present concerns and restricting the curriculum to what is perceived to be “relevant” to a diverse society ensures the politicization of schooling. Labour shies away from the word “education” because what it proposes is closer to indoctrination. Not content with reforming children’s dental hygiene, Starmer’s government plans wholesale reform of children’s attitudes and values.
Parents unhappy with this hyper-politicized pedagogy have few options. Currently, private schools are not bound by the national curriculum, and academies (similar to charter schools) also have greater freedom to adopt their own materials—but under Labour’s plans, no school will be able to go off script. All will be required to teach the updated curriculum once it has been confirmed by the Department for Education.
In any case, parents will find opting out of state provision to be increasingly unaffordable. Starting in January, the value-added tax will be tacked onto private school fees, increasing the amount parents have to pay by up to 20 percent. Advocates cheer on the policy as an attack on privilege and elitism.
Wayward teachers will be similarly brought into line. At present, private schools and academies are free to employ instructors lacking a formal teaching qualification. With a head teacher’s approval, enthusiastic subject experts can put their talents to use in the classroom without having to undergo further training. But Labour aims to require that all new teachers either hold or be working toward a teaching certificate.
The big winners of this change will not be children but adherents of faculty-lounge theory. Almost every bad idea in U.K. schools can be traced back to teacher-training courses suffused with bad ideas. One recent proposal is designed to ensure future educators are “anti-racist” by instructing them in how to challenge whiteness in the classroom. According to a “best practice” document, teachers should be instructed in how to “disrupt the centrality of whiteness” and to call into question the attitudes and values apparently considered “normal” by white people, such as “meritocracy,” “objectivity,” and “individualism.”
Prospective teachers who think they may be able to challenge this guidance will have their work cut out. One of Labour’s first acts was to block the previous government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which—in lieu of an American-style First Amendment—would have made universities and students’ unions liable to fines if they failed to uphold free speech. It was prompted by high-profile cases of speakers being de-platformed at universities and professors being hounded out of employment for stating their belief in the scientific fact of biological sex or questioning transgender ideology. Now the government’s message to academics and teachers alike is clear: conform, and expect the same from your students.
For anyone who cares about education, Labour’s plans are enough to prompt despair. Prime Minister Starmer is looking to bypass adults and mold children to align with his party’s values. Subject knowledge, excellence, and aspiration will be sacrificed. Generational cohesion and national unity could soon follow.
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