The Institute of Education is a brilliant spoof, I concluded from its website

3 July 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

In IEOLife there’s a round-up of campus reactions to the election of Barack Obama. Almost without exception, the teaching staff at IEO are concerned that Obama isn’t left-wing enough. ‘I fear that he may get drawn into appeasing the enormous engine of capitalism that drives the United States,’ says Julia Brannen, a professor of sociology. Ken Spours, head of Continuing and Professional Education, says: ‘I want to see international change such as justice for Palestine, but I fear he will have to concentrate on internal issues.’

By now it is surely obvious that IOE and its cast of Malcolm Bradbury characters must be a work of pure invention. But just to make it crystal clear, the authors have included a wonderfully loopy ‘Report on Gender Equality’. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a richer source of politically correct gobbledygook. Among its many delights, it contains a passage on ‘transpeople’, defined as people who’ve undergone ‘gender reassignment surgery’. You wouldn’t have thought there’d be many of them at the ‘Institute’, but that hasn’t stopped the ‘Gender Equalities Officer’ from coming up with a series of pledges designed to protect their rights. She promises to ensure that ‘our equal opportunities policies… do not discriminate against transpeople — especially in terms of dignity at work’ and that ‘trans perspectives are included in equality impact assessment processes’.

Marvellous, isn’t it? A whole policy devised just in case a post-op transsexual ever enrols at the ‘Institute’. The ‘Equalities Officer’ (fresh from her last berth on a Soviet nuclear sub) promises to include the policy as ‘part of the mandatory equality training’.

Surely the whole site is a spellbinding piece of satire? No teacher-training college could be quite so idiotic, could it? Alas, the ‘Institute’ is all too real — part of the University of London, in fact — and a perfect illustration of why reform of our education system is so urgently needed.