Esther McVey is right about the Birmingham schools row
by Joanna Williams, spiked:
It is not the role of schools to teach children about relationships.
Five-year-olds are on the frontline of the culture war in Birmingham. At school, they are taught about lesbian, gay and bisexual relationships and about gender and transgender issues. Meanwhile, mainly Muslim protesters argue that these lessons are inappropriate for such young children and run counter to the religious beliefs of their parents. They have taken to demonstrating outside local schools. ‘You say we are homophobic, we say you are Islamophobic’, said one, neatly summing up the state of identity politics today. There is now a High Court injunction banning protests in nearby streets.
No child should have to run a gauntlet of placard-waving just to get to school or have lessons curtailed because of demonstrations. But it is not parents or even protesters from outside of the school community who have politicised education: it is activist teachers backed by successive governments. Sex education has been taught in schools for decades, but lessons in relationships, soon to be compulsory for all children, are a much more recent and far more political project. One of the Birmingham protesters criticised the ‘No Outsiders’ programme, the books and lessons used across several schools to teach about relationships: ‘It is changing our children’s moral position on family values and on sexuality and we are a traditional community.’ Parents are right to be wary of this state overreach into what should be the domain of the family.
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