RSE lesson content – Why parents should get to see the resources teachers are using
by Claire Fox, Teachwire:
If you’d told me 10 years ago that in 2022 there would be angry protesters clashing outside toddlers’ reading sessions because ‘Rhyme Time’ was being replaced with ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’, I’d have thought it a preposterous fiction.
Likewise, I could never imagine that teaching primary school children about pronouns wouldn’t necessarily refer to grammar lessons, but instead to gendered language and that refusing to use the singular ‘they/them’ in a classroom could be called a hate crime
And yet here we are, with schools having now taken centre stage in the Culture Wars – something that’s seemingly happened inadvertently, under the auspices of making the curriculum conform to diversity norms. And the trend is unhelpfully pitting teachers against parents.
Ill-prepared
Maybe we should have seen the writing on the wall. Over recent years, schools have increasingly been viewed instrumentally, as vehicles to address an ever-expanding array of social, economic, and cultural problems.
This has placed demands on teachers to solve non-educational social problems – often at the expense of focusing on their subject expertise, and knowledge for its own sake. On the one hand, this mission creep can strain the division of labour between schools and families, making parents feel that teachers are encroaching into values-based areas, such as sex and relationship education, in ways that are at odds with their own beliefs.
At the same time, many teachers have found themselves in a quandary, dragged into teaching sensitive personal and political matters for which they’re ill-prepared. They may be qualified to teach English, maths, history or music, but these new, contentious subjects have often proved to be hot potatoes that many either wish to avoid, or at the very least, outsource.
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