Not so long ago I rewatched the original Jurassic Park and was struck by Ian Malcolm’s monologue in which he says to John Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It struck me that this unintentionally captured the essence of a growing problem in today’s education system: EDI. School managers and teachers are so eager to rush into whatever is trending in EDI. So convinced are they, without any evidence, of EDI’s supposed moral, ethical, educational and societal benefits that they neglect to consider whether they should be promoting it.
The virtues of EDI are extolled throughout the education system and my own school is no different. Schools openly bow down to EDI and an entire industry has developed to ensure EDI is embedded across the education system, despite evidence that it has had detrimental effects in the workplace. It is commonplace now to see schools advertising themselves as “inclusive” and numerous websites have popped up to promote EDI, such as the Inclusive Schools Network. The EDI approach has ostensibly been embraced because Britain is now a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society and it’s supposedly essential to help tackle discrimination, break down stereotypes, facilitate better communication and foster social cohesion. However, I think the push for “inclusivity” distorts education, disempowers the individual and poses a threat to a free society.
One assertion that’s frequently made these days is that “inclusive language” should be used in lessons. But what, exactly, is it? Who defines it? And how can such a thing exist in any case? The economist Ludwig von Mises observed in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis how Marxism thrived on “dialectic artificialities” and a “word-fetishism” which made it “possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands” (e.g. Queers for Palestine). This linguistic sleight of hand can be used to brainwash the broader population, and this is exactly what “inclusive language” does. Those who advocate “inclusive language” claim it’s a tool for promoting open conversations. But for “inclusive language” to exist and function, it must by its very nature be at odds with intellectual diversity, free speech and democratic values. It requires a central authority to dictate what is or is not inclusive, thereby strengthening that authority’s power, while discriminating against those who are deemed to have said something offensive.
The drive to use “inclusive language” and to be “inclusive” is in reality exclusionary and intolerant. A cursory glance through some typical ‘guidance’, such as that produced by the University of Leeds, reveals that it usually focuses on what not to say rather than on what to say. The implications of this are worrying as it’s a method of importing identity politics and ideological authoritarianism into schools. As John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty, “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility”. By pursuing “inclusive language”, school managers are going along with this linguistic totalitarianism and, in my experience, are never open to any discussion about whether they are embarking on the best approach for pupils and staff.
On one level, the emphasis on “inclusive language” encourages others to find offence where none is intended and in doing so undermines resilience. It feeds a culture of victimhood and is hardly beneficial to learning, where failure is often a necessary precursor to success. On another level, it establishes a right not to be offended. This type of approach is fundamentally unworkable, as we have seen through inane legislation like Scotland’s Hate Crime Act. By seeking to protect certain identity groups from being offended, it introduces a form of bullying into a school since it provides bad actors, both pupils and staff, with the perfect cudgel to attack their opponents.
Offence is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. It requires no evidence other than someone’s claim they were emotionally harmed by something that was supposedly said, regardless of the speaker’s intention. It is extremely easy to make an unfounded allegation because it’s so difficult to challenge without seeming to disbelieve a ‘victim’ about how upset he or she really is, and, therefore, extremely hard to defend against. Besides teaching children to simply accuse, rather than debate, an obvious consequence of this is the sewing of suspicion and distrust. According to the Mental Health Foundation, 20% of adolescents currently suffer from some form of mental illness. Mental Health UK notes that 92% of teachers distrust their line manager and 88% of teachers say there is a negative ‘team culture’, with 86% saying they don’t feel supported at school. One cannot help but wonder whether EDI initiatives, which promote linguistic totalitarianism and thereby create an environment in which one must constantly tread on eggshells, are contributing to this state of affairs.
Besides being contradictory in a theoretical and philosophical sense, the censoring of language is extended into censoring or distorting curriculum content. This is why we see misguided initiatives, embraced by the Historical Association, among others, to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, as well as a growing tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of British and Western history and culture. Thus, as many readers will no doubt already be familiar, pupils are spoon fed narratives in which Britain is cast as an evil slave trading nation with few redeeming qualities, if any. Little mention is made of all the other countries that trafficked in slaves, or of Britain’s key role in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade.
This highly selective approach is fundamentally driven by ideological activism and some schools encourage this by engaging in their own types of cancel culture, such as changing the names used within their own house systems for fear that the original names might cause offence. As Doug Stokes points out in Against Decolonisation, this constant denigration of Britain’s history and culture may even have serious implications for national security by virtue of the fact they instil no love and respect for, or understanding of, our country.
The drive towards ‘inclusivity’ and all the associated EDI dogma contributes nothing to education and everything towards indoctrination and the destruction of critical thinking. In my ‘lived experience’, an ‘inclusive’ curriculum often means talking more about LGBTQ+ or BAME people, although the ‘climate curriculum’ is not far behind. Charities with specific ideological or political agendas, such as Stonewall or Schools of Sanctuary, are consulted and sometimes paid to help make lesson content more ‘inclusive’ without any regard to the provisions about not indoctrinating children in the Education Act 1996. This extends into the creation of bizarre extra-curricular activities, such as LGBTQ+ lunchtime and after-school clubs. Schools also embrace various forms of positive discrimination in order to tackle imaginary biases and prejudices, such as girls-only IT competitions. It’s not clear how this sits with the emphasis on ‘inclusion’, given its prohibition on boys’ participation and the lack of provision for a boys-only competition. This is hardly a strategy for improving the performance of the demographic group most overlooked: white working-class boys. But ‘inclusion’ is nearly always about extending perks to officially recognised victim groups and rarely about helping the genuinely disadvantaged.
Furthermore, as each subject on the curriculum is forced to genuflect to the latest ideological fad, less intellectual diversity is tolerated and more groupthink emerges. The push for promoting minority narratives and victimology across every subject means the school curriculum ceases to be about academic exploration and more about ensuring a single message or narrative is instilled in pupils’ minds. Friedrich Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom that it was “not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought”. Through the policing of language and narrowing of curriculum content, inclusion agendas are facilitating the destruction of individual autonomy by limiting the opportunities for pupils to critically evaluate prepackaged narratives. While this is what we might expect in a Chinese-style re-education camp, it should not be the model adopted by British schools.
A generous observer might conclude that those who signal their virtue on inclusivity simply haven’t thought this through – they mean well, even if their initiatives have terrible unintended consequences. A more critical observer might conclude that those who push EDI initiatives do so with an ulterior motive. I’m in the latter camp, and as I’ve said previously this leads to a perpetual cycle in which victory can never be secured until complete equality of outcome between different identity groups has been achieved. It’s also fuelled by self-interest. Those who work in the multi-billion-pound EDI sector need to keep finding new dragons to slay to justify their funding, often as the expense of the taxpayer. Besides, the very essence of EDI-based initiatives, such as anti-racism and unconscious bias training, is to teach individuals to take offence and actively seek out things to be offended by. This is why we see schools embarking on crusades to eliminate the use of “Sir” and “Miss”. By planting the seed that one may be committing a microaggression and establishing a culture in which speech and expression are policed, the logical response of some may be to avoid interaction altogether. Why take the risk of inadvertently treading on a landmine? Or giving a bully an excuse to persecute you? This type of backlash within the workplace has already been documented by the Government.
Why, then, are schools endorsing EDI? If we were to explore the legal roots of this phenomenon, we might look to the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Race Relations Act 1976, the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice in 2001 and the Framework for the Inspection of Schools in 2003. By the late 1990s, a perception had emerged that the colour-blind approach in education had failed. Among numerous other points, the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999, recommended that schools develop strategies to prevent racism and for the National Curriculum to be revised so it extolled the virtues of multi-culturalism. But academies and free schools, which as of January 2024 account for nearly 82% of all secondary schools and nearly 43% of primary schools, don’t have to follow the National Curriculum. Independent schools, which constitute nearly 10% of schools, don’t either. Thus, it is the Equality Act 2010 and schools guidance from 2014 which form much of the bedrock of current practice. The relevant parts of this legislation basically set out a duty of care and make it illegal for schools to discriminate against pupils based on their protected characteristics, such as race, religion, sexual orientation or gender.
Where there is a possible misstep legally speaking is in schools’ conflation of, and confusion between, content and delivery. Section 2.8 of the 2014 guidance, which advises schools what they need to do to comply with the Equality Act, says curriculum content is excluded from discrimination law but the manner in which it’s delivered is included. According to section 2.9, schools are “free to include a full range of issues, ideas and materials in their syllabus, and to expose pupils to thoughts and ideas of all kinds, however challenging or controversial”. This is important because the advocates of EDI in schools typically appeal to the Equality Act, claiming they’re obliged to roll out these initiatives to comply with that Act, when, in fact, that’s just an excuse for pushing their ideological agenda.
There is, in other words, no legal obligation or reason why a school should indulge in changing (or removing) curriculum to comply with the Equality Act. Schools may of course do this for a variety of reasons, such as capitalising on teachers’ specific knowledge or appealing to pupils’ interests to promote more engagement. But we ought to be mindful of the predilection many teachers have for engaging in social justice activism. It is in fact something which is implicitly encouraged by those who’ve written the material that finds its way onto teacher training courses. For example, Robert Jeffcoat, who describes himself “with pleasure a radical Marxist” due to his “particular view” on injustice, is cited approvingly in a PGCE textbook that’s still in use today.
However, by pitting of one social group against another, as required by various fashionable teaching resources, and teaching children about concepts like white privilege, some schools may in fact be in breach of the Equality Act, which requires publicly-funded bodies to promote good relations between groups with different protected characteristics, which includes white boys. And by developing a curriculum centred on EDI, schools could well be limiting pupils’ academic opportunities and, as such, failing to provide the broad and balanced curriculum that they’re supposed to, as set out in Section 78 of the Education Act 2002.
At a fundamental level, the whole EDI agenda within schools overlooks one simple, crucial and fundamental issue: the provision of education, not indoctrination, will do far more to help disadvantaged children make socio-economic progress in the long term. A report commissioned by Pro Bono Economics, The National Literacy Trust and KPMG earlier this year found that 30% of five-year-olds were behind their expected reading levels. The National Literacy Trust also found in 2023 that only 43.4% of children aged from 8 to 18 enjoyed reading. Obviously, multiple factors contribute to these findings but one cannot help wondering whether one solution might be for teachers to spend less time promoting ideological fads and more time focusing on actually educating children. And perhaps literature promoting woke narratives just isn’t that inspiring. Why should children enjoy reading books that are constantly scolding them for not being ‘better allies’? Those schools which have embraced woke identitarian dogma are abusing their duties and responsibilities, and failing pupils and society in the process.
The reality is that schools cannot truly be ‘inclusive’ precisely because it is a contradictory, unworkable and illogical idea; exclusionary practices and outcomes are an inherent and inevitable part of education and life in general. Not every pupil will achieve an A* at A-level or a 9 at GCSE. Not everyone who applies to work at a school will be accepted and not everyone within a school will be friends with everyone else, despite the claims made on schools’ marketing materials. And, due to practical considerations, not every school will have the capacity to accept every child. An inclusive curriculum is also itself a unicorn precisely because it must, by definition, exclude certain content that is arbitrarily deemed to be discriminatory or insensitive.
The claim that adopting an ‘inclusive’ approach will prepare pupils for life, as my school and many others do, is a fallacy. Such an approach is based on flawed assumptions, fosters unrealistic expectations and leads to troubling outcomes. It fails to instil resilience, encourages children to abdicate personal responsibility and attacks the individual’s ability to think critically. The only people who gain from such an approach are those looking to carve out easy and lucrative careers for themselves. All EDI does is provide a platform for narcissistic managers to crush dissent and signal their virtue so they can gain the requisite peer approval for career progression. The people who lose are pupils, parents and those teachers who have maintained their integrity.
Teachers can bring EDI to the classroom, but they need to start reflecting on whether they should.
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