Teachers are being urged to ignore the government’s drive on promoting fundamental British values in schools, amid claims that it is “ill-considered, ill-defined and counterproductive”. The policy, introduced after the so-called Trojan horse plot in which hardline Islamists were accused of trying to take over a small number of Birmingham schools, was “totally out of proportion” and vulnerable to misinterpretation, a conference was told.
Robin Bevan, headteacher at Southend high school, told delegates at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ conference in Liverpool on Monday that the government’s response to a small number of isolated incidents was a “headline-grabbing act of political posturing”.
He said no one would argue against schools and colleges promoting personal morality and a sense of civic duty among pupils, but the move to require schools to promote British values was ill-considered. “There is the well-publicised issue of the radicalisation of a very small number of students. But the solution being proposed is totally out of proportion. It’s the wrong approach, at the wrong scale, with the wrong model of learning and the wrong method of assessing its effectiveness.”
He told colleagues: “When it comes to the new requirement of promoting fundamental British values, including the role of law, here is one law that I would actively encourage you to disengage from.”
A motion passed by the conference said the government’s drive on British values was a “knee-jerk national policy ‘solution’ to localised governance issues” which risked “becoming the source of wider conflict rather than a means of resolving it”.
ATL delegates voted in favour of monitoring the policing of the government’s British values requirement and called for “a more sensible, reasoned approach to values” in schools and colleges.
Bevan, who proposed the motion, warned that what constitutes a core British value can change over time, and raised concerns at how these ideas may be interpreted by a “future right-wing government, or a partner in that government”.
“If these fundamental British values change with time, then they are hardly fundamental. And let’s face it, they have changed with time. We now allow women to vote. We no longer chemically castrate homosexuals. And if you think that’s way in the past, it wasn’t until the 1990s that marital rape was made a criminal offence.”
