The classroom is no place for anti-Reform activism

The National Education Union’s annual conference always provides useful insights into the concerns of the teachers present. And this year’s gathering, held in Brighton this week, was no exception. The four-day jamboree revealed that politics is of far more concern to union members than teaching and learning.

Indeed, questions actually concerning educational standards were dealt with spectacularly quickly – and the consensus was that they should be discarded. With motions passed to ban Ofsted, the schools’ inspection and regulation body, and challenging the planned statutory reading assessment for Year 8 pupils, delegates were then free to discuss the really important stuff.

First up was global conflict. America clearly looms large in the minds of the around 1,500 teachers and school-support workers present. They passed a motion condemning the US attack on Venezuela, the bombing of Iran and Trump’s actions in Cuba, which, they claim, ‘breach international law and will worsen humanitarian conditions’. But Israel got a look in, too: it was criticised for ‘aggression over Lebanon… which has killed many citizens’. Both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have no doubt been waiting on instructions from Britain’s teachers, who think ‘there needs to be an urgent de-escalation of conflict and global tensions’.

But it is domestic politics that really gets NEU delegates hot under the collar. One motion, which passed to much applause, stated that NEU members oppose ‘all forms of racism, fascism and far-right extremism’, including ‘the divisive politics promoted by Reform UK’. Teachers, the conference promised, will throw their ‘full weight’ behind ‘stopping a Reform UK government’. Dave Davies, a teacher from east London, who seconded the motion, argued that ‘we have to rip the mask of respectability away from the far right’. ‘Nigel Farage is not a respectable politician’, Davies told the conference floor, ‘he wants to replicate what Donald Trump does in the United States and put ICE on to the streets’ (a reference to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which presides over Trump’s deportation policies).

The same motion called on union branches to affiliate with Stand Up To Racism – a campaign group that seeks to fight fascism, but has little to say about the rise of anti-Semitism. Like so many ‘anti-racist’ organisations, it seems more concerned to stop Reform gaining ground at the next election than with actually stopping racism. Delegates also agreed that the union should support ‘school groups, districts and regions to mobilise for anti-fascist demonstrations’ by organising transport to ‘anti-right-wing counter-demonstrations’. Leigh Seedhouse, the executive member who proposed the motion, told the conference floor that ‘parties based on racism are shaping the political agenda’ across Europe and that ‘the rise of Reform UK with its relentless scapegoating of migrants is a warning’.

It is hard not to laugh at the NEU’s delusions. Members leap from an inflated sense of their own importance – dictating Trump’s foreign policy – to paranoid fantasies about fascism and ICE agents patrolling British cities. But what is not funny is the influence NEU members have on Britain’s children. The ‘fighting racism, fascism and far-right extremism’ motion also calls for the creation of anti-racist and anti-fascist teaching materials, as well as ‘literature making the case against the far right’, which would then be distributed to union members who are teachers. In other words, the NEU’s campaign against Reform will not be conducted on teachers’ own time but will also be waged in the classroom.

Another motion that promises to bring politics into the classroom calls on schools to be ‘aware of the need to support trans and nonbinary rights’. Encouraging teachers to ‘treat trans and nonbinary people with dignity and with respect’ may sound nice enough, but, in practice, showing ‘respect’ often turns out to mean forcing children to accept the use of female pronouns for a person who is very obviously male. And safeguarding alarm bells ring with the chilling statement that ‘trans and nonbinary people can regularly face abuse from family members’. The implication is that teachers should collude with gender-confused children to keep their social transition a secret from their parents.

With trans rights, criticism of America and scare-mongering about Reform on the agenda, it is hardly surprising that the conference’s headline speaker, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, received a standing ovation. He backed the abolition of Ofsted and supported the campaign against Year 8 reading tests. Alongside the promise of a ‘serious cash injection’ into schools, Polanski argued that a future Green government would provide an education ‘that genuinely equips children for the world they’re growing up into’. This, he spelt out, means ‘giving them the media literacy they need in a dizzying social-media and fake-news landscape’.

We need to be clear: calls for ‘media literacy’, whether made by Polanski or Labour’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, are not a demand that teachers offer a classical curriculum that could prompt knowledgeable critical reflection on the world today. Instead, fake-news spotting means bringing yet more propaganda into the classroom in order to train children to hold only teacher-approved views.

The warm reception given to Polanski reflects a shift in teachers’ voting intentions. As Daniel Kebede explained, ‘I think our membership feels that Zack speaks more for schools and education than Labour does at the moment’. But pity British schoolchildren if NEU members have their way: when it comes to the classroom, standards are out, and politics is in.

Between the Green Party and the NEU, we’ll have children who struggle to read but know to yell ‘fascist’ at Reform voters.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.