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Anderton Park Primary School, LGBTI-inclusive education, and Eshter McVey

Amidst ongoing protests at Anderton Park Primary School in Birmingham, England, former cabinet minister and current contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, and thereby future Prime Minister, Esther McVey, has thrown her support behind those protesting against LGBTI-inclusive education at the school.

“I believe parents know best for their children and whilst they are still children then really parents need to have the final say in what they want their children to know,” says McVey,  “People shouldn't be protesting outside of primary schools. That's young children going into school there. Everyone has to be a bit more adult, a little bit more grown up in what they do outside a primary school.  I'm being very clear. The final say is with the parents and if parents want to take their young children out of primary school, out of certain forms or sex education, relationship education that is down to them.”

Despite her fine words that people should not be protesting outside schools, Esther McVey could not be more wrong, and has effectively thrown the head teacher and staff at the school, as well as parents with no problem with the lessons, under a bus.

First the background.  Anderton Park School is a primary school in Birmingham, England, which has introduced LGBTI-inclusive education into their curriculum, as has been sanctioned by the UK government.  The form it took was an award-winning programme called No Outsiders, formed by local teacher Andrew Moffat.    The No Outsiders programme teaches the realities of LGBTI+ people at age-appropriate level, without any mention of sexual activities.  It merely teaches that LGBT+ people exist, that some children have two fathers or two mothers, that some men like men, some women like women, and that some people identify with a gender which differs from their biological sex.  The aim of No Outsiders, like all LGBTI-inclusive education, is to teach respect and acceptance of others, and thereby reduce the incidence of homophobic and transphobic discrimination, harassment, and bullying.  This is particularly important to children who may identify as LGBTI, in that it aims to foster acceptance from their peers, reduce prejudice and bullying, and teach those children that it is perfectly normal and natural to be who they are, and to own their identity with pride.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?  And great it would be, were it not for homophobia, transphobia, disinformation, and propaganda to raise their ugly heads.  The school happens to be in a largely Muslim community, and many children attending the school come from Muslim families.  No sooner had the No Outsiders programme started than there were a small group of Muslims objecting to it.  This formed a protest outside the school gates, which has since snowballed.  The protestors are objecting to children being taught about same-sex relationships, transgender people, and “gay sex”.  The protests started with a small group of parents, but since then others have become involved.  The self-appointed leader of the protests, Shakeel Asfar, does not even have children at the school, but is an uncle to two children attending.  The increasing protest has started to involve others who do not have children at the school, and even those who are not parents at all.  Numbers have increased as other anti-LGBT Muslims, Christians, and even extreme right-wingers – who otherwise are prejudiced towards Asians and Muslims – have joined in.  There are also now signs of the protest spreading to other schools in England.

Were their objections to harmless LGBTI-inclusive education not enough, some of these protestors have started spreading lies and propaganda about the No Outsiders programme.  Protestors are claiming that the programme teaches about gay sex, it does not, that is sexualises children, and worst of all that it is teaching paedophilia.  Abdullah Bahm, an Islamic preacher from Batley, Yorkshire – not even with no relationship to the school, but from a completely different county in England – shouting through a PA system at the protest, held up images including a near-naked couple, which he falsely claimed came from No Outsiders literature, and proclaimed “There are paedophiles in there. There are paedophiles in there.” and claimed that to teach equality is to teach a “paedophile agenda”.

A Christian preacher from Bournemouth – hundreds of miles from Birmingham, again, in another county -  following Mr Bahm, then took the microphone, insisted that teaching about “gay equality” was confusing children, and related an anecdote (which almost certainly never happened) of a little girl being afraid to pick up a friend who had fallen, “in case she was called a lesbian”.  He then went on to rattle off a number of alleged statistics about gay relationships and sexually transmitted diseases – which of course are completely irrelevant to LGBTI-inclusive education.

There are parents who have no problem with their children being taught about equality, and some who have bravely spoken out about it.  However, when these said parents attempt to take their children to school, they are being confronted by protestors, usually outside the school but some have reported being accosted streets away, and being told “If you send your children to that school, you are not a Muslim, and you will burn in Hell.”  Parents, with little children, are constantly jeered as they go into the school.  Teachers at the school, including the head teacher, have been verbally abused, jostled, threatened, and have even received death threats.  The head teacher, Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, described in an interview on LBC Radio, how even in what are supposed to be discussions with the protestors, hardliners have shut down debate by shouting over her and other staff any time they attempted to talk.  There is one reported instance of one man slamming his fist down on a desk and declaring that he was a general in the Kashmiri Liberation Army.  The aforementioned Mr Asfar has no intention of speaking civilly with Ms Hewit-Clarkson, whom he wants to resign, but instead in a speech denouncing her, and in which he threw in completely off-topic various ‘atrocities’ committed upon Muslims around the world, insinuated that she was probably having a sexual relationship with a “biased” female journalist.  Not that it should matter, but the sexuality of Ms Hewit-Clarkson is not known.

Worse still was to come.  A counter-protest of pro-LGBT people, who had gained permission from the school, arrived on the evening of 19 May, and started hanging rainbow flags, pom-poms, and messages of pro-LGBT support on the school railings.  The counter protest had non-violent intentions, and even arrived with cupcakes to hand out and share with the protestors, whom they hoped to have a reasoned discourse with.  Instead, as they were hanging their messages, they were pelted with eggs, shouted and screamed at, cars full of men turned up and told them to “get out of our community”.   But even when they did try to leave, some of the protestors, all women, found their way blocked by a large group of men.  Due to a distraction, they managed to escape.  By the morning, nearly all of the messages had been torn down.

Shakeel Asfar blamed the counter-protestors for the confrontation.  He claimed that the flags and messages were “inflammatory”, and accused the group of provoking residents were about to mark Ikfar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast.   It is not at all lost on me that Mr Asfar is attempting to turn this issue into a wider “Islamophobia” one, when that is patently not the case.

Even at the lower end, there are protestors objecting to what is being taught, chanting “Our children, our choice”, and maintaining it is ‘their’ school.  Yes, it is, but only up to a point.  And this is where Esther McVey is wrong to support them.

Yes, it is their school; every school is part of the community it serves, and parents should indeed be able and even be encouraged to interact with the school, for the benefits of their children.  However, it is not their curriculum and when a curriculum, or part thereof, is accepted by that school, by the local authority, and by central government, that is where the individual input of parents has to end, for the greater interests of all children at that school.  If that were not the case, then every school would have their hands tied, and not be able to teach anything, because of objections from individual parents.  Besides which, there are now a number taking part in this protests who do not have children at that school, some who have come hundreds of miles to protest a school they probably never heard of until this year, and some of whom do not even have children at all.  It is not Shakeel’s Asfar School, far less some Islamic preacher from Bradford, or a Christian preacher from Bournemouth.

If some parents are unhappy with the No Outsiders programme, then they have the freedom to remove their children from the school, which sadly, some have done.  However, when they attempt to prevent the teaching of the programme altogether, spreading lies, disinformation and propaganda, are trying to enforce the resignation of the head teacher, are harassing, bullying, jostling, and threatening staff and other parents, scaring their children while doing so, when they send death threats to staff, when a non-violent group of women with the best intentions are intimidated and threatened by a gang of men, and when they are pelted with eggs, it becomes a different matter.  

This again is where Esther McVey is wrong.  Do parents really know what is best for their children, in every case?  I sincerely doubt it.  To quote an auld Scots saying, “Bairns and fuils speak at the cross whit they hear at the ingleside.”  In other words, bigotry is never learned, but begins in the home.  Even to this day there are few parents who teach their children tolerance of all, but most will still instil, either deliberately or inadvertently, their own prejudices into their children.  Likewise, very few parents are education professionals.  They have never gone to university to learn to be teachers, and they have never had experience of dealing with classes full of children, or all the work which being a teacher entails.  The simple fact is that if parents knew what was best for their children, there would be no schools, because there would be no need for them.  The overwhelming majority of people send their children to school because they know what is best for their children is to learn from teachers whom they know have a far better education than they shall ever have.

What McVey is saying is downright dangerous, and we need not look far to see the results of her thinking.  Indeed, we need only look across the North Atlantic to the USA, where religious maniacs who do not want their children taught in “Godless” schools home teach their children.  And the result is another generation of cretins coming up who are going to be laughed at throughout their lives for believing that the Earth was created by their god in six days, 6000 years ago, and who are going to have poor future employment prospects as a result.  Until they in turn in their dead-end jobs, bring up the next generation who are brainwashed believing that every word in the Bible is the unerring and factual word of their god.

Indeed, we see exactly the same thing in Muslim majority countries, and that includes the few countries where they are even allowed to attend school, girls are enforced to cover up completely, and that the best they can hope for is to have a good husband chosen for them, to whom they must be good and loyal wives.  And quite scarily, teaching like such has been exposed in some Islamic schools in the UK.

Amidst all this, we have the teaching in these religious communities that anything which detracts in the slightest from the cisgender heteronormative is an “abomination” to their god, from whence the protest at Anderton Park School has sprung.  In some interpretations of both Christianity and Islam, followers are taught that LGBTI+ people are at best to be shunned, at worst to be chased down and killed.  A 2016 ICM poll found that 52% of British Muslims polled believed that homosexuality should be illegal, and 47% said that that gay people should not be allowed to become teachers.  And of course, among this, as we have seen, some castigate all LGBT+ people are paedophiles, when in fact the LGBT+ demographic have the lowest incidence of paedophilia in society.  This smear is common to both Islamic and Christian fundamentalists.

As long as parents are filling the minds of their children with this bigoted filth, does Esther McVey still want to claim they know what is best for them?

But then, Ms McVey is equally wrong when she states “if parents want to take their young children out of primary school, out of certain forms or sex education, relationship education that is down to them”, for no part of LGBTI-inclusive education includes sex education.  Some of the protestors have jumped on the sex education bandwagon, claiming that the school is “sexualising” their children, when they are doing no such thing.  In fact, if there were any school teaching children as young as 5 any type of sex education, be it straight or gay, I too would object to that.  But the simple fact is that is not happening, it actually cannot happen under the law (either in England or Scotland), and anyone who claims that is what LGBTI-inclusive education is doing is either misinformed, or an out-and-out liar.  As far as those leading the Anderton Park protest are concerned, I know which of the two I am more likely to believe.

Certainly, there is mention of relationships in LGBTI-inclusive education, but that is only to explain same-sex relationships, which are simply a fact.  One mother at Anderton Park asked a reporter if they knew how difficult it was to explain to her little one “why some children have two mummies”.  What is she going to do?  Ignore it and hope that it will go away?  So when her child does actually encounter a child with same-sex parents, or sees a gay couple with a child, and asks questions, what is she going to say then?  Pretend they don’t exist and they never saw them?  What indeed is she going to say if her daughter turns out to be gay?  How about letting professionals in the field of education instead quietly explaining that love is love, and some people are attracted to the same gender?

Likewise, a Christian father recently phoned LBC Radio claiming that little children are too young to learn about any relationships.  Are they really?  So, Dad, I take it you’ve never told your kids fairy stories about women being swept off their feet by dashing, handsome princes?  Of kids being cruelly treated by their wicked stepmothers, or being rescued by beautiful princesses?  Of course you have.  Every parent has.  And in fact, I’d be more worried about instilling young minds with stereotyped perceptions of what is and what is not ‘beautiful’ – and the perceived roles of women – than the relationships within those stories.  But then, one wonders if the said father has any qualms about teaching his children about Adam and Eve, or even the relationship of Mary carrying the child of God for that matter?

Joking apart, there is an important point here; children are actually much more switched on and accepting of the lives of others than many adults give credence to.  And when they do see or hear of a child with same-sex adults, or hear of or encounter someone who comes out as gay, transgender, or any other aspect of the LGBTI+ spectrum, and ask questions, they deserve honest answers, and will more than likely be very accepting of that.  Likewise, as far as gender goes, science has proven that children as young as 3 are capable of expressing their gender; and that goes for all genders, including cisgender.  

It is not the children who are hating others at Anderton Park, or anywhere else.  It is the adults doing that, and brainwashing the children with their hate.

But if the protestors at Anderton Park Primary School are in the wrong, if Esther McVey is in the wrong, then they are nowhere near as in the wrong as the Westminster Government, who have been constantly asked by Sarah Hewit-Clarkson, and other head teachers across England to give clear guidance on LGBTI-inclusive education, and have remained steadfastly silent upon the matter.