It’s the duty of every parent to ask what’s REALLY going on in our secretive schools

WHATEVER do they teach them in these schools? How do we find out? How can we change it if we do not like it? In the past few years it has become clear that the schools of this country, state and private, have been invaded by Left-wing dogmas, dogmas it is dangerous to challenge. For they are enforced, hard, with the backing of a supposedly Conservative government.

For example, you do not need to like or agree with the former Oxford state school teacher Joshua Sutcliffe. I think he may be a bit of a pain. Brave people often are a pain. But every civilised person must be scared by the fact that he is now forbidden to teach at all – by a body called the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), which ought not to exist in a free country.

The decision to ban him from teaching was made on behalf of Tory Education Secretary Gillian Keegan by the TRA’s decisionmaker, Alan Meyrick.

This is not just because Mr Sutcliffe supposedly ‘misgendered’ a pupil. It is also because he let slip some deeply unfashionable opinions about homosexuality and masculinity.

He first ran into trouble at The Cherwell School, which serves the Rich People’s Republic of North Oxford, the densest concentration of wealthy, self-righteous Leftwingers outside Hollywood. But I suspect he would have faced the same problem in Barnsley or Cowdenbeath, because a vigilant thought police are ever watchful in all our schools and universities.

The schools I attended in my prehistoric childhood were run by conservative men, often military or naval types who had served in the Second World War. But also teaching alongside these Captains, Commanders and Majors were men and women with heretical, Left-wing ideas.

They didn’t keep quiet about them and nobody tried to stop them. On the contrary, they greatly added to our knowledge and understanding of the world, bless them all.

Most of us were tiny Tories in those days but we would never have thought of snitching on them. And if we had, I suspect we would have been told sharply to go away. For all those Navy and Army officers might have been crusty reactionaries but they had recently fought in the cause of freedom and this meant a lot to them.

I am myself hugely uninterested in the transgender debate and all that goes with it. It looks to me like a ruse to tempt moral conservatives into a battle they are bound to lose. I am more interested in the use of what was once sex education to promote the new morality and abolish the old Christian one. But what most concern me are the harder politics of what is being taught – and how it is being done.

In a fascinating new pamphlet by think-tank Civitas, called Show, Tell And Leave Nothing To The Imagination, Jo-Anne Nadler has tried to get to grips with this problem. She concludes that there has been ‘a revolution that has been delivered largely by stealth’.

She says it has ‘injected political ideology into schools, both organisationally through the adoption of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies relating to hiring, admissions and the wider school culture, and directly into the classroom through curriculum initiatives’. This has replaced education as we once knew it with an ‘illiberal, uniform worldview on contentious social issues’.

Of course teachers are not openly urging their charges to vote Labour or Green. But beyond doubt the effect is to create a Left-wing consensus, reinforced outside school by broadcasting and social media.

In my experience, schools are among the most secretive institutions in the country. There is no formal means by which a parent can find out what really goes on inside most of them. The new fashion for ‘academies’, whatever they may be, has made schools, if anything, less accountable than ever.

Many of the worst propaganda schemes are run by outside companies which claim that they will endanger their copyright by letting us know what is in them.

And a lot of children aid this by clamming up the moment parents ask them anything about their school lives.

But unless we ask, we won’t find out. My advice is this: Ask and keep asking until you find out. And if you do not like it, find others who agree with you and protest, systematically and doggedly, until it stops.

Education remains a Secret Garden in which things are done that we would not support if we knew.