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.
Read More: The Intersectional Feminist Rewriting the National Curriculum
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