The Times Educational Supplement has revealed that teachernet - the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF)'s own in house training and resource centre for teachers - has been promoting a series of lessons whose activities included encouraging children to imagine that they were one of the 7/7 London bombers. The course called 'Things do Change' was developed by Calderdale Council seemingly in response to a 'toolkit' on how to prevent violent extremism sent by Schools Secretary Ed Balls to all schools last October. The 'imagine you are a terrorist trying to blow up London' lesson is according to the TES now being used not just in West Yorkshire schools but also in other schools and madrassas (Islamic theological schools) in the UK...
So there we have it, the government department responsible for our schools is promoting lessons that encourage vulnerable young Muslims to pretend to be terrorists...
In several respects the responsibility for this catastrophic failure goes right to the top of the DCSF - Ed Balls the Schools Secretary and Jim Knight the Schools Minister:
1. Ministerial oversight: These two ministers were responsible for overseeing the department that promoted these lessons - they clearly failed in this duty.
2. A dangerous degree of muddle and confusion in the advice these ministers gave to schools on how to prevent violent extremism: Ed Balls and Jim Knight cannot simply claim that they didn't know what was going on in their department. It was very specifically their muddled policy on how schools should prevent violent extremism that directly led to Calderdale Council developing these lessons.
Last October, in a blaze of publicity, Ed Balls published what he called a 'toolkit' to help schools prevent violent extremism. At the time I voiced grave concerns on Centre Right that this toolkit was dangerously muddled. I raised two concerns in particular. First, it promoted as 'good practice' at least one example of something that risked actually increasing the drift of vulnerable Muslim students into extremism - inviting imams into schools to hold 'confidential' lunchtime discussions on subjects such as sharia and British foreign policy. Secondly, and more fundamentally, it was muddled because it did absolutely nothing to help schools identify the historic British values that schools should encourage their students to cohere to. Instead, the 'value' - and indeed the ONLY value it promoted was 'diversity'.
In fact, promoting 'diversity' has been something of a dominant theme during Ed Balls' time at the DCSF. It was Mr Balls, remember, who last autumn required schools to send out an ethnic identity questionnaire to parents that conspicuously dropped the term 'White British' - replacing it with a diverse range of alternatives such as 'White and Pakistani' and 'White Cornish'! The government's 'toolkit' to help schools prevent violent extremism was similarly - and in this instance dangerously - muddled.
3. The government's promotion of 'diversity' as the central value with which school's are expected to prevent violent extremism is fundamentally flawed: It is basically holed below the waterline because when you do this, some of the 'diversity' you get may include for example, injustice - as in the inferior legal status accorded to non Muslims and women in sharia. You may also get views that are wholly incompatible with a free democratic country - as the Islamist views of the 7/7 London bombers clearly were. Now whether Ed Balls thought this through properly or not, he chose to make the promotion of 'diversity' the central plank of the government's strategy to help schools prevent extremism. In fact, he made it the ONLY value that the 'toolkit' produced by his department encouraged schools to promote. So, Calderdale Council in producing the 'Things do Change' course that included the 'imagine you are a terrorist' lesson, was simply following the advice that Ed Balls had sent out to them four months ago in his 'toolkit' on preventing extremism i.e.: promoting the full range of 'diversity'.
4. The DCSF specifically promoted the 'imagine you are a
terrorist' lesson as an example of good practice in using the
government's toolkit: Ed Balls and Jim Knight were not simply the
inspiration behind the 'imagine you are a terrorist' lesson. The
material for this lesson was placed on the government's own teachernet
website right next to the government's 'toolkit' for preventing violent
extremism...as an example of good practice for other schools to follow
(although the DCSF have hurriedly removed it, if you put the title of
the Calderdale course - 'Things do change' - into the teachernet search facility it will still list this as its location).
In other words, Ed Balls' schools 'toolkit' not only inspired the
'imagine you are one of the 7/7 London bombers' lesson, his
departmental officials at the DCSF also clearly understood this lesson
as being both inspired by and an example of 'good practice' of the
'promoting diversity' approach that Ed Balls himself has both
established within the DCSF and was the central theme of the 'toolkit'
to help schools prevent violent extremism that Mr Balls commissioned,
published, praised and wrote the forward to.
So, in an area with a large Muslim population from which three of the 7/7 bombers came (Siddique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain) lessons are developed that encourage students to imagine that they themselves are the 7/7 London bombers. Moreover, the trail of responsibility for this goes right back to the cabinet minister responsible for schools, Ed Balls and the schools minister Jim Knight. These ministers not only inspired the 'pretend you are one of the London bombers' lesson with their fatally flawed 'promoting diversity' approach to preventing extremism, but their own officials at the DCSF approved it as a 'good example' of what ministers intended schools should do with their 'toolkit' to prevent violent extremism.
Should Ed Balls and Jim Knight resign? During the last Conservative government Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and his entire ministerial team resigned when the Foreign Office misjudged Argentine intentions towards the Falklands. By inspiring and promoting a lesson taught to amongst others large numbers of Muslims, on the theme of 'imagine you are a terrorist trying to blow up London transport' ,Ed Balls and Jim Knight have equally put the nation's security at risk.
