Temper tantrums should be the preserve of toddlers, not mothers. But one Friday night, when my eldest son was seven, I came close to bawling. I had hoped to end a tiring week with fish and chips for supper but my ever-diligent son had a problem with this plan. “We can’t do that!” he cried, aghast. His homework for the week, he explained, was to keep a food diary.
Every morsel that had passed his lips over the previous five days had been recorded and colour-coded, red or green, to show whether the food was “good” or “bad”. He was not prepared to taint his all-green chart with a smidgen of red, while I wanted a glass of wine, not an imagined teacher silently tut-tutting my decisions.
Having worked as a teacher, I knew things had changed since I was a child. My primary school had a thick yellow line painted across the playground which parents were meant to stand behind when dropping off or picking up their children. Its significance was clear: teachers and parents, school and home — the two were not supposed to mix. Not that this line was particularly needed. Back in the early 1970s, almost nine out of ten children walked to school unaccompanied by an adult. Most parents would have rarely come into contact with their child’s teacher.
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Three decades later, when my own children started school, things could not have been more different. Parents were welcomed into the classroom, not merely the playground. Exchanging words with my sons’ teachers became a pleasant daily ritual. Being presented with a “home school agreement” was more disturbing. The formal list of rights and responsibilities made me feel like a signatory to a legal contract regarding my own child. The friendly chats had misled me: the school set the rules and I needed to obey.
As I have explored in a report for the think tank Civitas, the boundaries between school and home have become increasingly blurred as teachers have gradually taken on more of the responsibilities that were once the remit of parents. Take getting to and from school. Far fewer children walk to school today than a generation ago and even fewer walk unaccompanied by an adult.
There are undoubtedly many reasons for this but one significant shift is in who gets to decide when a child is ready to walk home alone. In the past it would have been parents who weighed up the risks of the journey versus the maturity of their child. Now, although independent travel is not illegal, many primary schools have policies that prevent children leaving school alone.
Such documents often state categorically that children under ten must be collected from school by an adult. For children in the final year of primary school, teachers advise parents how to assess the risks involved in travelling independently. The very existence of this advice sends a message to parents that they are not solely responsible for their children, even outside school hours. They must instead defer to the greater authority of teachers.
The learning company Pearson advises English teachers to analyse exam texts such as Lord of the Flies through an LGBTQ+ lens
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A similar dynamic exists around food. Many parents send their children to school with a packed lunch and assume they are responsible for its contents. After all, it is they who know their child’s tastes and their household budget. But the Department for Education (DfE) instructs schools to create “a culture and ethos of healthy eating”, while local education authorities provide schools with “template packed lunch policies”.
The result is increasing numbers of primary schools dictating to parents which foods are, and are not, permitted. Rules can be strict. Cherry Orchard Primary School in Birmingham is one of many which tells parents that children must have “dairy food such as milk, cheese, yoghurt, fromage frais or custard every day”, while chocolate and sweets are prohibited. Parents are warned that staff monitor the contents of lunchboxes and flag up concerns.
When schools dictate travel arrangements and the contents of lunch boxes, they assume responsibility for children’s health and wellbeing. They send a message that parents cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of their own children without rules and expert advice. This chips away at the authority of parents.
Yet schools take on ever more of the responsibilities once left to families. The DfE expects all schools to support children’s mental health. Common classroom practices include mindfulness, meditation and yoga. Some schools go further and carry out “emotional registers” or “temperature checks” where children observe and report on their feelings at various points during the school day.
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Meanwhile, “circle time” can involve children in more open-ended discussion about their emotions, with the teacher taking on the role of group therapist. When children are expected to discuss their emotions in the classroom, it is often their home lives, and intimate details of family relationships, that are exposed to public scrutiny.
Sex education is another area where teachers step on parents’ toes, often to comply with national government directives. Schools have long since moved beyond teaching children the facts of biological reproduction and lessons now cover relationships, sexuality and gender identity. Schools have in recent years been criticised for allowing children to “change gender” without their parents’ knowledge, using age-inappropriate or sexually explicit resources and teaching contested gender ideology.
Many schools, perhaps fearful of making mistakes, have found activist groups such as the School of Sexuality Education all too ready to supply lesson plans and resources — effectively hijacking lessons to pursue their own agenda. Despite the previous government announcing guidance to stop such practices, this is now under review, as is the whole curriculum. Labour’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has said “children’s wellbeing” should be “at the heart” of any new curriculum and that parents should not be able to stop their children attending lessons on relationships and sex education, as they currently can under specific circumstances.
The lessons children are taught in school about their identity, sexuality and relationships can clash with the values of their parents, extended family and community. In 2019, parents demonstrated outside primary schools in Birmingham in protest at lessons they said were not “age-appropriate” and went against their Islamic faith.
The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education recommends Who’s Your Real Mum? which challenges assumptions about same-gender parent families
Last year, similar protests occurred in Manchester and parents threatened to withdraw their children from a primary school in Kent after it announced plans to introduce terms such as transgender, non-binary and “assigned sex” into lessons. Clearly, some parents think it should be down to them, not schools, to impart values about sex and relationships.
Then there is the politicising of the curriculum. Angus Mackay, head of the UN’s Climate Change: Learn secretariat has claimed the “classroom is the new frontline in scaling up the response to climate change”. More than 3,000 UK teachers have taken the UN’s climate change course to become certified “climate change teachers”.
Literacy classes become a vehicle for exploring attitudes towards race and gender, with books chosen for the messages they convey rather than for the story or language used. The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education recommends Who’s Your Real Mum?, a picture book that “challenges assumptions about same-gender parent families”, while the National Literacy Trust recommends Becoming by Michelle Obama for secondary school pupils.
The English and Media Centre, an organisation dedicated to supporting English teachers, highlights “approaches to diversity and anti-racist pedagogy” and suggests books that explore “identity” and encourage pupils to engage with “real-world issues”. Pearson, “the world’s leading learning company”, advises English teachers to analyse exam texts such as Jane Eyre, Journey’s End and Lord of the Flies through an LGBTQ+ lens. It is teachers, not parents, who are giving children a values framework and political perspective.
None of this has ever featured in any election manifesto, yet over the past 50 years schools have gradually taken on responsibility for children’s physical, mental and emotional health, moral values and political views. In the process, parents have been left increasingly sidelined. The LGBTQ+ Primary Hub, a group that works with primary schools, advises teachers to “be open to the idea that a child might not be heterosexual and/or cisgender” while Stonewall encourages schools to ensure “that LGBTQ+ families, people and themes are embedded throughout the curriculum”. Many children come to see their parents as being behind the times or simply wrong about crucial aspects of life such as gender roles and relationships.
The Sunday Times revealed in 2021 that a primary school in Birmingham had co-opted children into policing members of staff
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When teachers assume that the values they promote are superior to those of the home, parents are not only viewed as inadequate but in need of re-education. Pupils are encouraged to challenge the prejudices of their parents and to get them to adopt expert-approved views in a process the sociologist Frank Furedi has termed “socialisation in reverse”. In other words, rather than parents socialising children into acceptable values, norms and ways of behaving, children play this role in relation to their own parents.
It is not only with parents. The Sunday Times revealed in 2021 that a primary school in Birmingham had co-opted children into policing members of staff. Pupils were taught to be on guard for any adult in school who “mis-spoke”, for example, by referring to a group that includes girls as “guys”. Having identified miscreants, pupils held up posters highlighting the particular speech crime that had been committed. Each week, the two children who pursued this task most enthusiastically were rewarded with a certificate. Furedi says this reversal in authority has “dramatic consequences for intergenerational interaction”.
This does not seem to concern campaigning groups that are simply keen to exploit weaknesses and further their own agenda. Groups from Christian Aid to the World Wildlife Fund and, more controversially, transgender advocacy groups such as Gendered Intelligence, all provide speakers and resources for school assemblies. The aim of one environmental group is to get children to “tell off” their parents “for not making an effort with recycling”.
This role reversal is damaging to both children and adults. Children are left rudderless and burdened with responsibilities they cannot understand — whether that is to decide on their gender identity or lecture their parents about household waste. And the collective authority both of parents and teachers is undermined. When the Friday night food diary scuppered my plans for fish and chips, I swore — and, in doing so, revealed to my young son that I disagreed with his teachers. The adults in his life were divided and, in that moment, he had to pick a side. But when parental authority is undermined, it is harder for teachers to call up Mum or Dad as disciplinarians of last resort.
Restoring authority requires us to understand how we arrived at this point. A useful place to start is the century-old child-centred education movement launched by the American educationalist John Dewey. Within three decades of the publication of his groundbreaking book Democracy and Education, the idea that schools should follow the natural development of the child had become almost universally accepted in American schools and was on its way across the Atlantic.
Significantly, promoting the natural development of the child did not mean trusting parents; it meant teachers needed to be trained in a new science of pedagogy. Teachers, not parents, were to be experts in childhood. For children’s natural development to occur, children needed to be removed from the influence of the home environment and placed within schools where teachers had attained the moral and intellectual resources necessary to socialise them correctly.
A focus on children rather than knowledge shifts education away from the legacy of the past and orients it towards the future. Schools were, in the words of George S Counts, another American educationalist, to “become centres for the building, and not merely for the contemplation, of our civilisation”. Teachers are no longer simply to transmit existing knowledge for children to later, as adults, interpret and use as they see fit. Instead, teachers must determine the shape of a better society and fit children for its demands.
Teenage pregnancy is just one of the social problems that some parents want “put on the curriculum”
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Underpinned by this philosophy, it is hardly surprising that, in the intervening decades, “put it on the curriculum” rapidly became the answer to every social problem, from climate change to teenage pregnancy. In the process, learning for its own sake was replaced by socialising children as the goal of schooling.
Moving schools away from the transmission of traditional bodies of knowledge robs children of their intellectual birthright and ruptures the intergenerational contract that should be at the very heart of education. This breach with the past — explicitly championed by campaigners who want to “decolonise the curriculum” — breaks the thread that once connected children to their parents, grandparents, community and nation.
When my children were small, one of my greatest pleasures was reading to them the stories I had enjoyed as a child. It created a strong bond between us, building on shared imaginary lands, adventures, heroes and villains. Plans to stop publishing or to rewrite work by authors such as Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl strangle those connections. Children instead learn that the past was definitely backward and probably bad — a lesson reinforced in their history classes. If that’s the case, they might reasonably ask why they should respect anyone older than themselves.
Blurring the responsibilities of teachers and parents is bad for education and disastrous for family life. Yet the government seems intent on going further still, with proposals for schools to teach children how to spot fake news and the correct way to brush their teeth. To restore trust between teachers and parents, we need to take politics out of schools. Without going back to lines on the playground, we need a clearer demarcation between school and home. Teachers need to get on with teaching and leave parents to raise and nurture children.
Joanna Williams is the author of Teachers or Parents: Who is Responsible for Raising the Next Generation? published by Civitas
