In this week’s Spectator, I’ve written about the appointment of Becky Francis, a former Professor of Education and Social Justice, to lead the Government’s shake-up of the national curriculum. This is significant because, in addition to rewriting the national curriculum, the Government is going to force academies and free schools to teach it. I wrote a thread on X about why this is such a disaster here. Here’s how my column begins:
The appointment of Becky Francis CBE to lead the Department for Education’s shake-up of the national curriculum is typical of Labour’s plan to embed their ideology across our institutions – or rather entrench it, since the long march is almost complete.
On the face of it, Professor Francis is “unburdened by doctrine”, to use Sir Keir Starmer’s phrase about how Labour intends to govern. As former Director of the Institute of Education and current CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, she has the outward appearance of a technocrat. But scratch the surface and, like so many Labour appointees, she emerges as a long-standing adherent of left-wing identity politics.
After earning a PhD in Women’s Studies at the University of North London (I’m not making that up), Ms. Francis went on to become Professor of Education and Social Justice at King’s College London. She was then promoted to head of the Institute of Education, UCL’s most left-wing faculty, where she launched the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity, a research centre dedicated to advancing “equity and social justice” in schools.
For those unfamiliar with the jargon, “equity and social justice” does not mean creating a level playing field so that all children can excel, regardless of colour or creed. It means tilting the playing field so various fashionable identity groups – women, people of colour, members of the LGBT community, people with disabilities, etc. – can win at the expense of the unfashionable – men, white people, heterosexuals, the able-bodied, etc. And helping them win by any means necessary. Not the philosophy of Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X.
You can read the rest of my piece here.
I’m not the only person to ring the alarm bell about the appointment of Ms. Francis. Tim Stanley wrote about it in the Telegraph earlier this week and David James, the Deputy Head of a leading independent school, wrote about it in the Critic. It’s worth quoting from his piece to give you a flavour of Becky Francis’s politics:
You would think that in education there would be a consensus view: namely, that schools should be orderly places which allow all children to get a good education before moving on to either university or employment. You couldn’t be more wrong. The truth is that education at both primary and secondary school levels is riven with ideologues who believe that schools are places of cruelty, that rules are oppressive, and that a knowledge-rich curriculum should be abandoned in favour of less prescriptive, more creative, skills-based courses.
Take this abstract from “Schools as damaging organisations”: In it the authors argue that “schooling in the Global North damages young people (and their teachers). The range of damage includes: the reproduction of social inequality via schooling and the psychological injury and practices of harassment and exclusion this involves for pupils; institutional structures of discipline and surveillance; brutalisation of young people; and the effects of participation and experiences of these practices for teachers.” My own optimism levels dropped quite considerably after reading that.
In this essay schools sound more like Gradgrindian institutions, rather than the mostly liberal and compassionate places they are. But many on the left seek to characterise schools today as trauma-inducing organisations that need to be reformed and made more “inclusive” and child-centred. What is worrying is that one of the authors of this article is Professor Becky Francis, who has just been put in charge of “refreshing” the National Curriculum by the Secretary of State. Professor Francis sees structural inequalities everywhere: she is a strident critic of setting by ability, characterising it as “symbolic violence”, which is “incompatible with social justice”. Professor Francis’s research areas are ideological and principally focused on social disadvantage; it is difficult to imagine how they will not transfer to the “refreshed” curriculum that she will be so instrumental in shaping. Indeed, the main areas of focus for the review makes it clear that the new National Curriculum will have to reflect the “diversities of our society” so that “all children are represented”, coupled with an assessment system that “captures the full strengths of every child”. If you try to argue against such wording you are immediately accused of being pro-exclusion and anti-inclusion,and who’d want that? The problem is that an examination system can’t be fully inclusive: it has to reward those who do well more than those who do not. If you try to bend the final outcomes so that more pupils are able to get more qualifications you have to work backwards and make what is taught in the classroom more accessible — or easier — as well. Standards, inevitably, will fall, as they have done in both Wales and Scotland when both countries, disastrously, reformed their own curricula to make them more inclusive.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.