College preparatory school

A diverse and historic London state-funded school in London is refusing to release details of lessons on gender and far-left concepts like “white privilege” to parents.

Haberdashers’ Hatcham College, known as Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College until Robert Aske, the 1600s-era merchant and haberdasher who served as its benefactor, was deemed problematic for having once invested in a trading company with links to the slave trade, hosts some 1,400 pupils.

Clare Page, the mother of one pupil, has complained along with her husband that pupils at the school are being “indoctrinated” and subject to politically charged material, citing online lessons in which they were asked to produce posters in the wake of the Black Lives Matter unrest following George Floyd’s death and played a rap song featuring the lyrics “our prime minister is a real racist”.

The parents also say pupils were lectured on so-called “white privilege” and “discriminatory systems of power”, according to The Times , and that sexual education lessons sourced from a company that linked to for-profit website promoting pornography until recently.

The school is refusing to show parents some of the teaching materials it is using, however, claiming they are “commercially sensitive” and thus not subject to the Freedom of Information (FOI/FOIA) Act.

“It is unacceptable for schools to hide behind commercial confidentiality in refusing to disclose curriculum resources. There is a clear public interest in parents knowing what their children are taught,” lawyer Paul Conrathe has said of the refusal, which is being appealed to the Information Commissioner, who regulated FOIA requests.

‘White Privilege’? Working-Class White Kids MOST Disadvantaged in UK Schools as System Prioritises Minorities https://t.co/94S0uEmAyt

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) September 20, 2020

Britain’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, often offers tough talk on far-left ideology in state schools, with a black female minister for the government even offering a viral speech insisting that the Black Lives Matter movement is political and that teaching far-left concepts like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and “white privilege” as fact is against the law.

In terms of concrete action, however, the government has done essentially nothing, and ideology on so-called “whiteness” is pushed not only in schools but by other state-funded institutions such as National Health Service (NHS) trusts , with the government — including the aforementioned minister — declining to even comment on it when contacted by Breitbart London.

Indeed, it is a Labour Party parliamentarian, Baroness Morris of Yardley , who is now putting forward an amendment to the Schools Bill currently being guided through Parliament by the government to give parents the right to see the teaching materials used to educate their children.

“I want it established that parents have a legal right to see what their child is being taught. This must be resolved,” said the baroness, who was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer by Tony Blair after having previously served as Secretary of State for Education and Skills in his government from the House of Commons.

“There is a lot of contested information about sex and gender. It is not unreasonable for parents to say to the school: ‘Let me see what you are going to show my child.’ The race issue has also been brought to my attention,” she added.

Struggle Session: NHS Seminar Attendees Lament ‘Burden’ of ‘Whiteness’, ‘Shame and Guilt’ https://t.co/xeeGlTeVaD

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 19, 2021

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REMEMBER when the priority of our schooling system was supposed to be “education, education, education”?

Today it’s “indoctrination, indoctrination, indoctrination” schools seem to be in the business of.

There is too much focus on race , too little reading and writing — and when it comes to lesson plans, too much gender on the agenda.

Parents increasingly find themselves locking horns with teachers turned social-justice activists.

It emerged this week the parents of a London teenager are at loggerheads with teachers at their daughter’s school after being barred from seeing lesson plans.

They are fighting for the legal right to see “secret” lessons their daughter has been taught on issues such as white privilege — the idea that people with white skin are born with social and economic advantages over those who are not.

Failed in the basics

This comes after the school, Haberdashers’ Hatcham College in South East London, reportedly denied the parents access to the materials used to teach their daughter.

So, let me get this right.

You’re forced to pay exorbitant taxes to prop up our bloated, ineffective education system, you then send your children off to school, at risk of prosecution if they don’t turn up, and you don’t even get a right to see what the predominantly lefty teachings are feeding your children?

You couldn’t make it up.

I see two major problems here.

Firstly, teachers should not be using precious learning time to brainwash kids about nonsense US theories on race and gender gibberish as if it is sacred truth.

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has said as much.

Last October he warned: “Schools should not teach contested theories and opinions as fact and this includes contested views about white privilege.”

This came after he was given a dossier by the Free Speech Union warning that the teaching of things like white privilege and micro-aggressions was “rife” in schools.

With identity ideology running rampant in classrooms, you would think we had already mastered every other core topic that teachers are supposed to be teaching, like — oh, I don’t know — reading and writing.

Wrong. Last September, Government figures showed 200,000 pupils would be entering secondary school unable to read properly.

Maths is no better. One in five leave primary school without having reached the expected standard.

Under these dire circumstances, not a single second should be dedicated to dubious race and gender theories when children are being failed in the basics on such a massive scale.

DANGEROUS IDEAS

And don’t get me started on the idea that kids should be taught that white children are endowed with some special, mystical privilege.

Tell that to the white working-class boys who perform worse in British schools than almost any other ethnic group.

As inconvenient as this is to lefty victim-mongers, this is irrefutable fact.

I know this because I’ve spent years poring over the stats, not least when I recently sat on the Government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.

Publicly paid teachers squandering finite classroom time on woke drivel is not only misleading and pointless, it’s perverse and downright wrong.

The second problem is this: While parents are allowed to ask to see their children’s lesson plans, schools are not legally obliged to provide them.

Schools can hide behind the cloak of legal immunity when they are subjected to accusations of “secret lessons”.

How can this be right?

You should not have to write a softly worded letter to kindly request knowing what your own kid is being taught when you drop them off at school.

Schools should be completely at the mercy of parents when it comes to demands for transparency around teaching.

Teaching materials and lesson plans should be dished out speedily and without contest any time a parent requests one — and that should be enshrined in law.

That is why it is right that Baroness Morris of Yardley, a former Labour Education Secretary, has tabled an amendment to the Schools Bill to give parents the legal right to see what their children are being taught.

Mr Zahawi has made it clear that teaching children disputed ideas as fact is completely unacceptable.

He should go even further and confirm the law will be firmly on the side of parents who are concerned about identity politics propaganda in schools .

If he doesn’t, the infiltration of these dangerous ideas in classrooms will continue to be spread by the army of ever-more woke teachers.

The irregularities in appointments by the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) is turning out to be an embarrassment for the Trinamool Congress government.  Along with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is probing the scam as per the instructions of the Calcutta High Court, the Enforcement Directorate has also started looking into money laundering allegations in the case. There are protests in Kolkata almost on a daily basis.

For the past several weeks, the police are having a difficult time warding off protests near the offices of State Education Department in Salt Lake. On Friday, members of the student and youth wings of the Left parties, under the leadership of DYFI State president Meenakshi Mukherjee, tried to gather in front of Acharya Bhawan – the headquarters of the WBSSC – protesting against the alleged irregularities in recruitment of teachers and non-teaching staff in State-run schools.  Several student and youth activists were taken in custody by the police.

Two Ministers of West Bengal – Minister of State for Education Paresh Adhikary and Industry and Commerce Minister Partha Chatterjee – have been questioned by the CBI over the past one week.  On Wednesday, Mr. Chatterjee, also secretary-general of the Trinamool Congress, was questioned for almost eight hours.  The Central agency has registered four FIRs – two in April and two in May – on the instructions of the Calcutta High Court.  Officials of the WBSSC and members of an advisory committee set up by Mr. Chatterjee have been named in the FIRs.

An examination of the FIRs points to cheating and criminal conspiracy to appoint candidates who were not selected on the basis of merit. For instance, an FIR on May 20 by the CBI states the accused “collected the vacancies of Group C in an unauthorised manner after the expiry of the recruitment paneI on 18.05.2019 in violation of provisions of School Service Commission Rules, 2009, and then issued recommendations of unsuccessful candidates to those vacancies by issuing fictitious memos of the regional commissions and by using scanned signatures of the chairpersons of the regional commissions in the absence of their knowledge”.

Santi Prasad Sinha, a senior WBSSC official, handed over fake recommendation letters to another official Kalyanmoy Ganguly after the expiry of the panel, according to the FIR. Kalyanmoy Ganguly, in turn, gave instructions to Rajesh Layek, the technical officer of the Board, for preparation of appointment letters on the basis of fake recommendation letters, “bypassing the normal chain of hierarchy and without sending those recommendation letters to the appointment section of the Board of Secondary Education, West Bengal”, the document added.

Earlier, as per instructions of the Calcutta High Court, a committee headed by retired Judge R.K. Bag had carried out an investigation into the appointment of Group C and Group D staff in State-run schools.

In the FIR pertaining to Paresh Chandra Adhikary, the agency stated that the merit list prepared for appointment of assistant teachers (political science) in classes Xl-Xll on the basis of an advertisement published in the year 2016 “was altered to accommodate and appoint Ankita Adhikary, daughter of Paresh Chandra Adhikary, West Bengal Minister, demoting other candidates in the list”.

What is surprising that the Trinamool Congress leadership, which has been vocal against any probe by Central agencies, has not come forward to defend Ministers whose name surfaced in the scam. The only reference Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee made was alleging irregularities in the WBSSC appointments during the Left regime and threatening to open a probe. Since the irregularities are so evident, the ruling party is not trying to stand with the accused.  Even former officials of the WBSSC have come out in the open alleging political interference in the irregularities. The issue has given a handle to both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Left parties to not only target the State government but also stage protests.

Over the past few weeks, the irregularities in recruitments by WBSSC has had a cascading effect on other job seekers. Protests have been organised by nursing students, job aspirants who have appeared for the West Bengal Public Service Commission examination and job seekers in colleges alleging irregularities in appointments.