In the past, schools were most worried about exam results and discipline while ministers debated whether to have uniforms or put desks in rows. Now the education system is on the front line in the culture wars. From sexting to transgender lavatories, bullying on social media, safe spaces and extremism, head teachers are picking their way through a minefield of social divisions. These days, Ofsted judges schools on their promotion of British values as well as their pupils’ achievement at GCSE.
Amanda Spielman has just completed a year in the job as chief inspector of schools. In her first annual report, published this week, she raised serious concerns about the blatant flouting of equalities law in some faith schools. Ofsted inspectors found books in Islamic school libraries that endorsed domestic violence. Pupils are leaving these schools with no qualifications and unable to speak or write English. “Before I started the job various people said to me, ‘I’m sure that social care is going to be the tough bit’, and it became clear to me very quickly that this is in many ways the hardest thing we deal with,” she says. “It’s so extremely sensitive that it’s very difficult to make it discussable without people in certain quarters just wanting to shout you down and shut down discussion.”
Ms Spielman admits she has been surprised by the viciousness of the abuse directed at her since she started to raise concerns about the values promoted in some Islamic schools. “I’m not easily bruised. I don’t fall over when I see a load of nasty tweets pointed at me but there has been some pretty venomous stuff,” she says. “I had an email, which was the most threatening one, which was along the lines of ‘We know where you live and we can get you any time we want to’.” The threats appear to be driven by a toxic cocktail of politics and religion. “It’s a mixture of Islamic extremists and the hard left but if we let ourselves be intimidated out of discussing these issues it’s children who will suffer.”
This week Ofsted had to hire security for one of its regional offices that has been heavily involved in work concerning radicalisation. On another occasion it had to call in the police because staff at one unregistered school were so threatening — including calling inspectors “Britain First paedophiles”. Some people are willing to turn a blind eye to what is going on because they fear being targeted themselves. “You really notice that people who say to you privately that you’re doing absolutely the right thing very rarely want to stick their heads above the parapet on the sensitive stuff,” Ms Spielman says.
The chief inspector has no intention of being silenced. As she flicks through a dossier of material found in Islamic schools, she points to the cover of a book called Women Who Deserve to Go to Hell, filed next to a text on the “rights of beating women”. It is “absolutely” clear to her that misogyny is being drummed into children at an early age in such schools. “It flows very directly from some strands of religion,” she says. “Of course girls should be treated equally and I’m trying to make sure we surface the stuff we see.”
What horrifies her most is “the extent to which there are places in society that are very determined to have children not even knowing that there is any other way of thinking besides that which prevails in their particular group. There are people growing up in this country who . . . aren’t aware of the reach of equalities law and for whom British values are pretty meaningless. We are seeing separate or divergent societies developing.”
She is concerned by the number of primary schools that include the hijab as part of their uniforms. “Girls are made to think, ‘Am I immodest if I’m not wearing one?’ at an age when a child shouldn’t have to worry about being modest,” she explains. “We need to make sure that schools don’t sleepwalk into saying we must be accommodating and accidentally bringing problems into school that don’t necessarily need to be there.”
Most concerning is the teaching and treatment of children in illegal, unregistered faith schools. “The lack of visibility becomes frightening . . . With that level of segregation you simply don’t know what things might be happening to children.” Although many of the worst cases have been in Islamic schools, she insists: “We see these problems in Muslim, Jewish and the odd Christian school. This is not an attack on Islam.” An estimated 70,000 children have disappeared from the education system and the chief inspector fears that the freedom to home-school is being abused by parents who want to segregate their children in a parallel, religiously run system. “If people choose to educate their children at home once upon a time it would have been the Brighton and Totnes brigades doing their slightly homespun thing, but we are seeing the emergence of things that nobody ever contemplated . . . There are some [cases] where it’s about belief and insulating children from mainstream society. It feels as though we are in a place where we should rethink something that absolutely made sense 20 years ago but isn’t necessarily right for the society we now have.”
Ms Spielman does not want to close down all faith schools. “Most do a decent job — Catholic, Church of England, Muslim, Jewish, there are some really good examples of schools that do it very well . . . We are slightly fudging it if we say it’s about religion because it’s not. It’s about some very specific strands of religion.”
She does think that the Department for Education needs to do more to ensure that new religious schools are genuinely committed to promoting equality and human rights. “The registration of independent faith schools is an area where we have particular concerns,” she says. “The inspection outcomes are pretty shocking. The proportions of failing schools and ‘requires improvement’ are massively higher than in the system generally and the outcomes are getting worse.” The government has so far failed to act. “I think it shows why there’s a value in having Ofsted in the system because democracy is brilliant in many ways but the downside of it is that everybody has a constituency and nobody wants to upset their constituency. So having institutions that don’t depend on voters and can say the things that are difficult is important.”
She won’t link the hardline teaching material to radicalisation or terrorism but a failure to integrate has consequences, she says. “There is plenty of evidence that trust declines in very diverse societies. We don’t have to go very far across Europe to see countries that have been absolutely torn apart by religious wars that have grown up within populations, owing to divergence of beliefs over time. If you don’t have a set of values that people respect you’ve got a much greater likelihood of a deeply divided society.” At the same time, she points out that immigration has helped to raise standards in schools. “The people who emigrate are typically those with the most energy and determination to better themselves and they transmit that to an astonishing extent to their children. There is an extraordinarily powerful sense of responsibility the children feel to justify the sacrifices that their parents have made.” White, working-class children “just haven’t got that same sense of motivation”, she says. Too often disadvantage is used as an excuse for failure. “Instead of the conversation being about what’s the education that’s going to move them on, you can end up with multiple labels about special needs or pupil premium.”
Male and female labels, however, are being torn up, with gender fluidity on the rise among the young. Ms Spielman insists it is not her job to set the rules. “The law is the law and we inspect against it.” But with primary schools being told this week by one teaching union to put books about transgender parents on the curriculum and modify their dress codes, she admits: “My eyebrows rise slightly when I read some of the stories. Children don’t need to know everything at the age of five.” The case of a teacher who was sacked for calling some pupils “girls” was “a bit staggering”, Ms Spielman says. “The English language isn’t gender-neutral so trying to create an artificial language is extraordinarily difficult.”
There needs to be common sense applied to mental health problems in schools. “Understanding what is actual clinically diagnosable mental health and what is teenage angst is very difficult for non-professionals to separate out.” She worries about the pressure created by social media.
Of the French ban on mobile phones in schools, she says: “I could quite happily be very prescriptive on that but Ofsted won’t be. I was pretty strict on internet access with my children and sustained a regime until they were about 14 of half an hour of internet time a day at home.”
Ms Spielman, who has two daughters, aged 17 and 19, was educated at a convent primary school then sent away to a tiny rural boarding school in Dorset, before going on to the sixth form at the highly academic St Paul’s in London. “It was a very fine contrast,” she says. Now she wants to ensure that all children learn the importance of democracy, tolerance and the rule of law, as she did, by understanding British history. “My interest is in making sure in our inspections that we are really looking to see children learning enough to understand these values and to have respect for them.”