Parents’ evening. Two words that many parents assume are a source of dread for teachers. But most will tell you this is a misconception. Why? Because the evening tends to offer a rare insight into the children we teach. It is, generally, a positive, purposeful discussion.
There are, of course, the dreaded meetings with parents who are convinced you have it all wrong about their child. They will be at pains to point out that an incident with an exercise book, for example, was misunderstood. The book, they will argue, fell accidentally from X’s grip. This, despite the fact your own eyes observed it being unceremoniously flung across the classroom.
Then there is another trying bunch who, in exasperation, ask if they should take their child’s iPad, PS5 or smartphone off them. To which the only answer can ever be that I, as their teacher, am in no place to say since I am not the parent. Meanwhile, their child sits mute, clearly desperate for the ground to open up and swallow them whole.
Now, though, there is the possibility of a newer type of encounter. In this fraught exchange, a parent may ask a teacher to apply values of tolerance and inclusivity to views the teacher believes threatens those values. Given the way that the culture wars have a stranglehold on our politics, it is no surprise schools and teachers are seeing them cross the school gates into our classrooms.
In a lesson on a Shakespearean text designed to discuss the issues of empire and colonialism at the heart of the play, a student may defend the benefits of empire. And a teacher, worried they could be labelled a member of the “woke mob” that the rightwing press claim is taking over our public institutions, may leave the view unchallenged.
This fear for teachers is real. When staff at a Warwickshire secondary school sent home a 12-year-old student who had come to a “culture day” clad in a sequined union flag dress, a la Geri Halliwell in her Spice Girls era, the school had to close for the summer holidays a day early following threats to staff from extremists. Like clockwork, the headlines from a particular branch of our tabloid press wrote themselves.
The school was undoubtedly overzealous in its approach. The girl, whose presentation on British culture involved a segment on our love of the cuppa, should have been allowed to take part in the day’s events. Yet, while the union flag does not carry the same association with far-right nationalism as the St George’s Cross, we can perhaps have sympathy for teachers who must have been trying to avoid the very ire and upset they found themselves surrounded by.
Schools are told they must champion inclusivity, yet teachers’ politics must be left at the door. Nowhere is this balancing act harder to follow than in the immigration debate. Last week, a far-right mob outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Essex could be heard shouting that a seriously hurt security guard should “go home … fuck off back on your boat and go”.
In this febrile climate, it is not beyond the realms of possibility for a geography teacher in any part of the UK to find themselves dealing with the ripple effects. A lesson on migration may end with them fielding questions on whether or not there are “too many immigrants”.
The Department for Education says a teacher must “take steps to ensure the balanced presentation of opposing views on political issues” whenever such claims arise. Yet the teacher must also protect their pupils from hate. If a comment is dismissed outright, the teacher could be accused of limiting freedom of expression and legitimate debate. If they let it stand, however, they are seen as normalising the type of language that led to preteens lobbing projectiles at police guarding hotels housing asylum seekers in Southport. As teachers with a legal duty to uphold the Prevent strategy, we are required to safeguard pupils from radicalisation and extremism. But what counts as radical or extreme is increasingly debated. Pupils and their parents may claim their “political speech” is being muted if we intervene.
The tightrope is about to get thinner still with the government’s announcement that 16-year-olds will be granted the right to vote in the next general election. Classroom discussions on election issues could well be interpreted as examples of voter influence. This is before we have tackled the shortage of specialist citizenship teachers. Or the need for, as Liz Moorse, the head of the Association of Citizenship Teaching, puts it, “clear content on democracy, voting, rights and media literacy”.
I am writing anonymously because the price of doing otherwise is high. After the union-flag debacle at the Warwickshire secondary school, staff received death threats. Students already routinely attempt to hack teachers’ social media accounts in a bid to publish their personal data, or worse, and our employment contracts warn against bringing schools into disrepute. It would be splitting hairs to argue whether the disrepute in question is outrage whipped up by the rightwing press.
The stakes have never been higher for teachers. We have a duty to get these conversations right for the children we teach. But what was once clear is no longer so. We are expected to be moral without being political, inclusive yet not ideological. We should teach critical thinking, but not too much in case we fall into wokery. The classroom is in danger of becoming a minefield.
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