The government’s new cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive and resilient United Kingdom’, has attracted attention because of its introduction of an ‘anti Muslim hostility’ code, its erasure of the English as an ethnic identity, and its quite confused and bizarre messaging. What has so far gone unremarked is its Mussolinian energy regarding education.
This goal is clear. A whole raft of new rules will apply to schools. There will be obligatory citizenship classes, including a promise to ‘raise awareness of threats to democracy’. This takes on a rather more sinister tone when you realise that elsewhere the document redefines patriotism to mean agreeing with the government’s policies on diversity and multiculturalism, and being opposed to those who are ‘pining for some imagined past’. The report goes even further, describing the idea that the English are an ethnic group as an idea of ‘the extreme right’, which ‘the vast majority of people reject’.
The Communities Secretary, Steve Reed states in his foreword that those ‘who want to divide us’ are ‘hostile actor[s]’ who the state believes it has to ‘protect our country from’. So we can expect children to be taught that those who repeat the actual history of these isles and their people, or who oppose multiculturalism, are ‘threats to democracy’.
Similarly the promise to ‘strengthen the national curriculum…to ensure high quality teaching of our nation’s history’ which would pass unremarked, were it not found in a report which advances such nonsensical history, including the suggestion that England has always experienced significant migration.
Even worse, the government intends to keep more dangerous children in schools. The paper includes a promise to ‘work with schools to tackle racist abuse and understand disparities in exclusions.’ It’s worth recalling that Axel Rudakubana’s headteacher was accused of racially profiling ‘a black boy with a knife’ when she labelled the future killer as ‘sinister’. Anti-racism like this kills, and the government wants more of it.
Universities aren’t safe either. The state is going to produce a ‘Cohesion Charter’ which will be ‘tackling extremism’ as well as define ‘principles relating to civic participation, environmental responsibility, and other areas’. We are told that ‘once agreed, universities will be strongly encouraged to incorporate the principles into their own student codes of conduct’, meaning that students will face sanction or expulsion if they express the wrong ideas.
Many parents, especially those who have more robust views on migration, climate change, multiculturalism or any other government policies may find themselves considering other options. Private schooling is increasingly unaffordable, especially after Labour introduced VAT on school fees, resulting in 13,000 children leaving private education. Another option is homeschooling, which the government calls ‘elective home education’. This is growing, with 126,000 children homeschooled during the Autumn 2025 term, up 14,300 on the previous year. It is popular with parents whose children struggle in mainstream schools, those who know they can do a better job than a struggling, violent state school, and those who wish to teach their children their own values, not the state’s.
Now the government has homeschooling in its sights. They will create ‘local authority registers of children not in school’ and require ‘local authority consent before the most vulnerable children can be withdrawn from school for home education.’ Given 13 per cent of homeschooling families ‘say they made this decision because of…lack of support for special educational needs…and school bullying, and 14 per cent attribute the decision to their child’s mental health’, it is likely that many currently homeschooled children would be caught up by this rule.
The will be a pilot, and a threatened ‘national roll-out’ of ‘mandatory local authority meetings with parents… before children can be withdrawn from school for home education’, and those local authorities will be required ‘to consider the child’s home and wider learning environments… [including] whether the education enables sufficient socialisation and supports the child to participate fully in life in the UK.’
Much of this might sound inoffensive. Of course we all want children to socialise and be able to participate in life in the UK. But remember that this is from a government which has defined those Brits who disagree with it as ‘threats to democracy’. It would be the easiest thing in the world for them to deny homeschooling rights to parents who aren’t willing to teach their children the state’s approved values and history. For after all, Labour believe there are ‘hostile actors’ amongst us who threaten their ‘cohesive’ utopia. All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, indeed.
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