Does the curriculum really need ‘decolonising’?

Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ education spokesman, has written to Gavin Williamson urging him to do something about ‘systemic racism’ in schools. ‘Changes to the history curriculum, such as learning about non-white historical figures and addressing the darker sides of British history honestly, are a vital first step to tackling racism in our education system,’ she wrote. ‘This chasm in information only serves to present students with a one-sided view of the events in history.’ …

As for the ‘darker sides of British history’, my own kids have been taught about little else, including Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. The ‘chasm in information’ is all on the other side I’m afraid, with children not being taught that many more Europeans have been enslaved throughout history than Africans. What’s unique about the British Empire isn’t that it participated in the slave trade — that’s true of every empire. It’s that it committed blood and treasure to abolishing it.

Listening to the politicians and activists urging schools to ‘decolonise the curriculum’, you’d think children were being taught about the ‘white man’s burden’ and re-enacting Gordon of Khartoum’s defence of Sudan in the playground. Even in the Tom Brown’s School Days era, I doubt the curriculum was ever as pro-Empire as these people would have us believe. At the last general election, 85 per cent of teachers voted for left-of-centre parties. Do the Black Lives Matter protestors really think these hand-wringing liberals are getting children to measure skulls in biology classes? …

There’s one small problem with these attempts to make schools more diverse and inclusive — they’re already among the least racist institutions in the country. Layla Moran takes it for granted that black and minority ethnic (BME) children are doing much worse than their white counterparts and concludes it must be due to ‘systemic racism’. In fact, they’re doing better. The lowest performing ethnic group in England’s secondary schools are whites. According to the new Progress 8 measure, which assigns a score to GCSE entrants based on how much progress they’ve made between the ages of 11 and 16, Chinese pupils do the best, with a score of 1.03, Asians are second (0.45), then blacks (0.12), mixed race (-0.02) and, bringing up the rear, whites (-0.10).