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.
The reason for rewriting the curriculum is to shoehorn in even more progressive claptrap
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).
Her specialism is how the ‘social construction’ of gender in the classroom contributes to the oppression of women in society. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the reason more women don’t do Stem subjects and go on to start software companies and become billionaires is because of ‘gender stereotypes’. The tendency of those with XX chromosomes to prefer empathising and working with people and the tendency of those with XY chromosomes to prefer systematising and working with things is something that’s true of all human societies – but it’s got nothing to do with biology, obviously. The way to dismantle the patriarchy, then, is to teach boys that masculinity is toxic and get girls to stop playing with dolls.
I’m exaggerating slightly, but the appointment of an intersectional feminist to rewrite the national curriculum seems unlikely to address one of the actual problems in English education – the chronic underachievement of boys, which Francis dismissed as a ‘moral panic’ in a 2006 paper. But today boys perform worse than girls in school on almost every educational indicator. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended and more than twice as likely to be permanently excluded.
Sixty-three per cent of girls meet the expected standard in reading, writing and maths at the end of primary school, compared with 56 per cent of boys. Last year, 68 per cent of girls in state schools achieved both English and Maths GCSEs at grade 4 or above, but only 63 per cent of boys. (By that metric, the lowest-achieving demographic in England are white British boys on free school meals.) Just 40 per cent of 19-year-old males were in higher education at the last count, compared with 54 per cent of women. Moral panic?
So there’s not much sign of government interest in evidence-based solutions to the problems that continue to blight England’s schools, starting with the fact that more than 100,000 English children haven’t reacquired the habit of attending class after schools were closed during the pandemic at the insistence of the teaching unions. No, the reason for rewriting the national curriculum is to shoehorn even more progressive claptrap into schools. Funnily enough, there was nothing about that in the Labour manifesto, almost as if Starmer knew it wouldn’t be popular with parents. Unburdened by doctrine indeed.
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