Labour will turn schools into engines of political indoctrination

Labour is heading into polling day with few hard policies, rounding up support based on Sir Keir Starmer’s charisma (or lack thereof), the virtues of “being nice”, and the idea that stability is the real change.

There is, however, one area where the direction Labour will want to take this country is possible to discern: education. Labour’s pledge to impose VAT on private school fees means that knowledge will now be taxed. Independent schools will be hammered, their parents bilked and their students penalised. But it’s what Labour’s planning to do to the rest of the school system that should worry us most.

The party has explicitly said that it wants to rewrite the National Curriculum. While at the moment academies and free schools can adapt this curriculum to aim higher, as Katherine Birbalsingh has done so brilliantly with the Michaela Free School, this option would likely be closed under Starmer. Academies will lose the autonomy that has driven excellence.

To make up for his lack of coherent and concrete education policy, Keir Starmer employs a mixture of progressive lingo and enthusiasm for projects like “oracy”, presaging a move away from rigorous knowledge-based teaching.

In one area in particular, Labour’s curriculum policy will do immense harm. The Relationship, Sex, and Health Education (RSHE) curriculum, initially introduced as PSHE by the Blair government in 2000, is ripe for revision under Starmer. And in a way that we can already see threatens some of our society’s most important foundations.

By its very nature, covering such a wide range of issues, RSHE serves as a natural vehicle for political indoctrination, particularly for the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Of particular concern is the spread of gender ideology in schools, teaching children that it’s possible to be born in the wrong body and that the classroom can be a space for social transition without parental consent.

Over the last few years, concerned parents have increasingly rang the alarm bell on these ideological harms. But when they’ve attempted to scrutinise the content and methods of teaching too many have been told to mind their own business, denied access to the content their children see on the basis of commercial confidentiality and copyrights.

The Conservative government has finally awoken to the rot spreading in our schools, and strong politicians such as Kemi Badenoch have worked to restrict harmful content. But these efforts are now under threat.

While Starmer has said he’s “not in favour of ideology being taught in our schools on gender” and would wait for the results of a consultation to act, his shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson appears to think the rules will be ripped up.

It is all too easy to see what is likely to happen once the consultation comes in. The protections will be swept away, not strengthened, and Labour will set about promoting an ideology of “social justice” in schools, replacing the “natural learning” found in families with a systematic, deconstructed, theoretical approach. Children will be exposed to concepts they should be shielded from.

There will be little recourse against this. Although sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996 were crafted so as to prevent the classroom becoming an ideological laboratory, politicians have quietly set this aside in favour of the promotion of the creed of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”. This will only grow worse under Labour. Children, not the Conservative party, will be the biggest losers from a Starmer majority.