Faith schools must promote “British Values” such as gay rights and other religions.
The Equality Act, effective last week, gives inspectors the authority to censure schools that do not “encourage respect for lesbian, gay and transgender people, and other religions and races.”
Inspectors will look for schools that are intolerant of same-sex “marriage” or engage in practices such as forcing girls to sit at the back of the classrooms.
These new rules were inspired by Michael Gove, MP for Surrey Heath, in response to the “Trojan Horse” incident in Birmingham, which revealed that extremist views were being taught in state schools.
In response to news about the policy, the Department of Education tweeted: “Nonsense to say schools ‘must teach gay rights’. We want schools to teach broad curric based on British values.”
The tweet, which was later deleted, offended many people because it seemed to make a distinction between promoting gay rights and “British values,” which many believe are the same thing.
Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt responded: “LGBT rights are British values. The Department for Education must back compulsory sex and relationship education, including LGBT rights.”
According to Andy Slaughter, the Labour MP for Hammersmith, the DfE needs to clarify whether it considers gay rights to be “British values.”
Christians have opposed the new policy, fearing that it will threaten their religious liberty. The DfE says that teachers who disagree with gay “marriage” are allowed to express their opinions in class, but they must respect gay children or parents and not discriminate against them.
Antonia Tully, national coordinator of Safe at School, a parents’ rights campaign of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, called Morgan’s announcement an “attack on every parent in the country.”
Tully said in a statement that “it’s quite clear that the new rules for schools actively to promote so-called ‘British values’ are all about indoctrinating children with a homosexual ideology. The prospect that schools will have to champion homosexuality or risk being downgraded by Ofsted strips all parents of their right to educate their own children about sexual morality.”
She added, “It is misleading to suggest that same-sex issues must be embedded in the school curriculum in order to protect children. Parents will be left powerless to keep their children safe from harmful sexual lifestyles. Nicky Morgan’s zeal to further the gay agenda is undermining every parent in the country.”
However, Nicky Morgan, secretary of education who succeeded Michael Gove, told the Sunday Times that it was “crucial” for Christian and Jewish schools to follow these rules as well as Muslim schools, despite the fact that the schools targeted in the Trojan Horse Plot were not faith schools.
Already an all-girls Jewish schools was punished last week and downgraded from good to adequate ratings for not meeting the new standards. According to inspectors who visited the school, there were “major gaps in students’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Students are not provided with sufficient opportunities to learn about or understand people of other faiths or cultures. The school does not promote adequately students’ awareness and tolerance of communities which are different to their own. As a result, the school does not prepare students adequately for life in modern Britain.”
Despite this development, the DfE claims that faith schools are not being forced to teach gay rights, a notion that one spokesman declared was “complete nonsense.” Commenting further, he said that “Ofsted are rightly ensuring that schools do not indoctrinate pupils about gay people – or any other people – being inferior. The same goes for schools that do things like make girls sit separately at the back of the class. Both are practices which go directly against the fundamental British values of tolerance and respect.”
Morgan will soon begin a consultation suggesting that students taking GCSE religious education must study more than one faith, exposing students to views other than their own and offering them a more well-rounded education.
The question many parents will want to ask is this: Where will inspectors differentiate between upholding Christian beliefs, on the one hand, and teaching students intolerance, on the other? Contrary to popular belief, many Christians do not want to discriminate against others when they teach their views in faith schools. There is a big difference between teaching about other views and condoning them. Unfortunately, Nicky Morgan seems to be leaning toward making schools enforce the latter.
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I think that Antonia Tully’s fears are exaggerated, to say the least.
“schools will have to champion homosexuality”. No, not champion it as better than heterosexuality. Merely suggest it should be tolerated (and it is, after all, illegal to discriminate against it, so this is pretty sensible advice to give the young people ).
“Parents will be left powerless to keep their children safe from harmful sexual lifestyles. Nicky Morgan’s zeal to further the gay agenda is undermining every parent in the country.”
This is only true if Antonia Tully thinks that homosexuality is so appealing that every parent in the country is going to find their children drawn into it as a result of being told about it. That just isn’t so. The majority of older teenage boys and girls have always been quite difficult to keep apart from each other so as to avoid “damage”, as it were, and this will continue to be the case. Only a hapless minority is affected by a temptation of mature homosexuality. Their schoolmates will continue to find the very idea extremely unpleasant, just as much as most Christian Vocalists do. Divinely inspired instinct will win, you can depend upon it .
But in the meantime, those ‘hapless’ boys and girls will find their transient temptations endorsed by the state and end up in practices which in a more Godly age they would not even have known about. So their lives will be altered, set on a course sadly damaging for them and society. In short, boys are being groomed for older men and girls for older women to take advantage of them. It’s a pretty sick society that would encourage that.
The evidence suggests otherwise – during my 11 years contact with secondary schools as a parent, there has been a big increase in the number of teenagers ‘self-identifying’ as ‘LBGT’. The whole point of Nicky Morgan’s indoctrination is to STOP teenagers finding the idea ‘extremely unpleasant’.
So British values = cultural Marxism!
And all this from a “Conservative” government!
The creators of the 1923 Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism must be cheering from their graves–they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
“Ofsted are rightly ensuring that schools do not indoctrinate pupils about gay people – or any other people – being inferior. ”
This is what really annoys me. Proper British schools were not indoctrinating children about ‘gay people’ – they did not talk about the subject at all.
I cannot speak for Islamic schools; maybe they do teach their pupils to hate homosexuals as well as Christians. This would certainly explain that strange alliance; the gay lobby loves Islam because it gives it an excuse to bash Christianity, by lumping all religion together. Islam loves the gay lobby as they are ‘useful idiots’, easily got rid of once their job of destroying Christianity is done.
The new school standards were pushed through Parliament in response to problems in Muslim schools – why isn’t OFSTED prioritising Islamic schools for inspection in that case? Anyone would think it was little Jewish and Christian schools that had been producing extremists! The ‘School Standards’ are the real Trojan Horse – a crafty way to destroy all faith schools.
no wonder Muslims dont want to integrate and Bible believing Christians are persecuted. It also explains why the established church is dieing.
Pr 14:12 There is a way that seems right to a man, But in the end it leads to death.
1Ti 1:10 for fornicators, for sodomites, for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers, and if there is any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine,
1Ti 4:1 Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons
Re 21:8 “But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
I think there’s a clear distinction to be drawn between treating homosexuals with fairness and decency and either lionising them or demonising them. If conservative Christians stick to fairness and decency I think that many problems with this contentious issue will be dealt with.
There are a number of Conservative and Liberal politicians who treat homosexuality and heterosexuality even-handedly with such fairness that they practise both, and they try to cover this up to preserve their “decency”.
Seriously, though, I agree with Michael Glass on this.