The intersectional feminist rewriting the national curriculum

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.

For a flavour of Ms Francis’s politics, look at the titles of some of her academic papers: Power plays: primary school children’s constructions of gender, power and adult work (1998); The gendered subject: students’ subject preferences and discussions of gender and subject ability (2000); Understanding minority ethnic achievement: race, gender, class and ‘success’ (2006); Re/theorising gender: Female masculinity and male femininity in the classroom? (2010); Reassessing ‘ability’ grouping: improving practice for equity and attainment (2020).