February 1, 2025 - 3:30pm
“The children of tomorrow must not grow up with the prejudices of today,” according to the Scottish Government-funded charity TIE (Time for Inclusive Education). The charity, which specialises in “LGBT-inclusive education”, has been instrumental in shaping aspects of the Scottish educational curriculum and is now launching a new resource for teachers, the Digital Discourse Initiative, focused on tackling online misinformation and misogyny.
The charity cites the rise of young people being targeted by the “manosphere” and what it calls “the memeification of hate” online, where “forms of prejudice are being promoted as funny or countercultural.” It has consulted both the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank specialising in online disinformation and extremism, and Zero Tolerance, a charity dedicated to ending male violence against women, for their insight into the “radical misogyny” boys and young men are consuming in gaming and social media circles. Zero Tolerance, it should be noted, claims that “trans and non-binary rights are integral to, and contribute to, feminism.”
However, TIE is an organisation that for some parent groups, notably SUE (the Scottish Union for Education), raises red flags. In 2024, its guidance for schools on how to tackle “anti-LGBT” bullying and promote an “inclusive” education was heavy on rhetoric yet light on substance. It held that “homophobia, biphobia and transphobia are continuing issues within education settings.” Yet the guidance didn’t go into detail about how to deal with teachers or pupils who do not subscribe to the unfalsifiable notion of “gender identity”. According to the SUE’s most recent newsletter, parents are not able to withdraw their children from LGBT-inclusive education.
The introductory video to the Digital Discourse Initiative project states that “children don’t yet have the cognitive tools to tell the difference between factual and false information […] they are still forming their own sense of identity.” If this is the case, then it is proper to ask whether kids who say they are transgender and wish to socially transition know fully what they are doing. Yet the charity’s guidance indicates a fully affirmative approach, in which “staff should be aware of the potential consequences for a young person if their identity is shared without their consent.”
It is vital that Scottish schools — indeed, any schools — are not hostile places where children bully each other. But social education is only part a school’s responsibility — and in almost all other parts of education, Scottish schools are failing. While TIE worries about the children of tomorrow growing up with the prejudices of previous generations, they say nothing about the children of tomorrow having noticeably poorer literacy and numeracy skills than those who came before. In December 2023, it was reported that one in four primary school children were not meeting literacy standards and this has shown few signs of improving. There remains a shameful attainment gap between children growing up in the most and least deprived areas. School absence and truancy statistics are also glaring, with 40% of secondary school pupils reported as persistently absent, meaning they miss at least 10% of classes.
Scottish education, once globally respected, has been in decline since the introduction of the “Curriculum for Excellence” system in 2010, which prioritises skills over knowledge. Spending per pupil in Scotland is at least 18%, or £1,300, higher than elsewhere in the UK, yet Scottish pupils have fallen behind their English counterparts in both maths and science. Then there’s the crisis in behaviour: the extent of disrespect and aggression from pupils and lack of support from senior management has resulted in teachers taking industrial action.
Of course, some factors are outside institutional control. A child’s home life and parental support will impact greatly on their relationship with education, and we have still not recovered from the disaster of school closures during Covid-19.
If the SNP government is serious about tackling the decline in Scotland’s education system, perhaps it should give fewer resources to ideologically-driven lobby groups and return to a knowledge-based approach. The dangers online and the corrosive content on the internet are undoubtedly affecting young people globally. But unlike educating Scottish children, that is something Holyrood has almost no control over. It urgently needs to reassess its priorities.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI’m not sure I can take four more years of this.
What is the point of moaning about Woke? Non-stop moaning.
Keep moaning! Its incredibly amusing!
The only thing you can do is join a political party that promises to legislate all Woke away.
As there is zero chance of any party doing that in Scotland just stop moaning. Woke is not going away. Just as your short dark winter days are not going anywhere.
I beg to differ. Reform UK appear on track to win seats in Scotland. Support is slowly but surely building north of the border. Some excellent conversations and debates ongoing in surprising places (e.g Wings over Scotland). Of course, some of the usual bollocks being projected as well but the SNP bubble has well and truly burst. Wither go Ecosse? Hopefully common sense and pragmatism will prevail once more…
I think we can all agree on this one. Where we disagree is on just what the “prejudices of today” are.
Quite so! LGBTQ++ prejudices for starters!
It is pointless moaning about the consequences of Woke if you are not prepared to analyse what it is. You won’t even have any idea what it even is or why it is being taught.
Call it out. Say what it is. Then legislate it away.
Children may not be fully aware, but they know when they are being force fed rather than educated. And of course they rebel. Especially if they are boys and being told they are toxic and the source of the world’s problems.
If this gets turned up another notch, it will become even more obvious, and even more pupils will look elsewhere for the truth. And they may find it. But they may also find another set of untruths that they find more conducive than the stuff they are being fed at school.
Education (kindergarten, primary, secondary, tertiary) has been corrupted into a process of telling pupils/students what they must know, rather than the traditional aim of teaching them to think critically. It has mutated into a coercive as distinct from didactic process.
You have to hand it to the post-modernist cultural marxists. Their total capture of the education system has guaranteed gigantic cultural change that has upended Western civilisation. This is rapidly consolidating the collapse our social norms and traditions from within, through ever expanding and maturing cohorts of younger adults, brainwashed from the moment they arrived in kindergarten until their graduation from compliant universities – themselves replete with so-called ‘academics’ who’ve embraced the Marxist paradigm and abandoned all pretence at scholarly objectivity. It is akin to a social cancer that infects and spreads within the democratic body politic from deep within, slowly and imperceptibly at first then expanding with increasing rapidity, leading ultimately to cultural death. Only in democratic states is it possible for the Woke Revolution to succeed, as democracy itself throttles the rights of the majority by promoting those of minorities under the Marxist guise of the oppressed (‘victims’) throwing off their oppressors.
Marxists failed miserably in their original revolutionary goal to unite the workers of the world and overthrow the bourgeoise. Instead, they latched on to the institutions of democracy, education in particular, as the perfect framework within which to achieve their world revolution.
Their patient and persistent ‘long march through the institutions’ is paying revolutionary dividends!
Quite so. Schools have a duty to help students pass the exams that allow them to access employment; help kindle interest is science,mathematics, history, sport etc and to ensure that they are safe while in school.
It seems to be a dreadful thing for a child to be bullied because they are gay or have a stammer or wear glasses. Children can find any excuse for bullying. I’m not sure why some bullying needs to be stopped with any more vigour than any other. The authorities do have a duty to step in when schools fail in their duty to protect children whatever the form of victimisation.
These groups with agendas are destroying education (I’m glad to be at the end of my career). Competent teachers can fulfill the three duties I’ve listed pretty well but distraction from these helps no-one.
This is why the emphasis is on “safety” and “prejudice” rather than truth and critical thinking. Imagine some smart Alec kid pointing out the above in class! When all they are supposed to do is put their brains on autopilot and accept all the woke, feminist bromides.
“TIE is an organisation that for some parent groups, …, raises red flags.”
Im sure they do, of the Neo Marxist/Maoist variety.
We know all too well that the SNP is a Maoist party au fait with the CCP’s policy to divide and weaken Western societies through the use of platforms like TikTok and the identity politics stance they engender in public servants like teachers and state education administrators.
But the real question is: *why* LGBT education over more fundamental life skills like reading and math? Can’t the age-old adage, “treat others as you want to be treated?” apply and just stop at there? Has anyone noticed that the introduction of identity politics has coincided with the decline of the quality of education?
I was homeschooled and scored high in STAR tests every year for reading, writing and math. No one died just because I didn’t learn about the joys of gay sex. Scotland is really going down the toilet.
It’s a front for the Scottish Govt. A real charity with modest income until 2020/2 when it received £390k from the Scottish Govt (of total £400k income), then in 23, £321k of £358K and in 24, £324 of £350k.
How could a tiny charity go from modest income to spending nearly £400k in a year?
Who authorises this level of grant? Why? Why doesn’t it go through the Education budget?
any thoughts about education interest me asaretiredteacher and the NYC and US schools are turning out kids that know that this country was founded on theft of land…the American Indians …… but otherwise can’t read or write …but all are shepharded to college. when I was a kid my dad would tell me of the superior British education system and that’s why the Caribbean kids were so advanced as compared to American Black kids….so what happened if Scotland pupil scores are so low? As one former student said to me, he’d enjoyed Macbeth but he never read a word of it.
“If the SNP government is serious about tackling the decline in Scotland’s education system, perhaps it should give fewer resources to ideologically-driven lobby groups…”
Who? the “jail men in women’s prisons” party?