A celebrity-backed think tank is pushing for children to be taught (’trained’) in inclusion, and is calling for diversity (DEI) training to become part of the national curriculum as standard.
A new report, entitled Everyone Included: Transforming our education system to be ambitious about inclusion, urges the creation of “an inclusive education system…crucial to tackling a system that is not working well for all children.” Its recommendations include curriculum reforms—the focus of much of the press coverage to date—by which they mean integrating “diversity of representation and perspective” into the official curriculum.
This is currently a source of conflict within the teaching profession and local authorities, which typically have responsibility for schools, following calls from the National Education Union to agitate for Gaza among school children. It’s clear to many observers that official DEI already plays a big part in the UK curriculum, prompting frequent controversy over history teaching.
While it is clear that Britain’s schools are performing poorly and failing many children, it is less likely that the researchers at the Centre for Young Lives, part-funded by motorsport’s Lewis Hamilton and his Mission 44 foundation, will be able to fix this. Reform UK’s Nigel Farage has already proposed a ‘patriotic curriculum,’ and his victorious county council election candidates could try to put this into practice (albeit within the constraints of a UK-wide national curriculum, itself often politicised in a way that the think tank would like to see more of).
The think tank also recommends changes to schools’ admission practices, uniform policies, and more, which could produce interesting results—if they go beyond the continual insinuations of structural racism strewn throughout the report.
