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.
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.