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children

The contest and clash of child rights and parent power

What does the U.S. election outcome mean for education here? One aspect is that while the ‘Christian right’ in the UK may not be as powerful as its US counterpart, it still exerts influence on public policy. While far from new, it has become more prominent in parliament since the 2019 election. But even in 2008, Channel 4 Dispatches broadcast an investigation into the growth of Christian fundamentalism in the UK. The programme, “In God’s Name” highlighted the political lobbying by pro-life groups behind changes to tighten abortion law in the Human Fertilisation Bill including work between their then key lobbyist, and the MP Nadine Dorries.

The programme highlighted the fears of some of their members based on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory of the rising power of Islam from the East, replacing Christianity in the West. And it also showed how the ADF from the U.S. was funding UK strategic litigation to challenge and change UK laws including the McClintock v Department of Constitutional Affairs [2008].

The work of Sian Norris today, highlights why this U.S. election result is likely to see more of all of that over here.  As we see the rights’ environment move towards an ever greater focus on protection and protectionism, I make the case why this is all relevant for the education sector in England, and we must far better train and support school staff in practice, to manage competing sources of authority, interests and rights.

Child rights supported by parent power

Over the last ten years, since I began working in this field, there has been a noticeable shift in public discourse in the UK parliament and media around child rights, shaping public policy. It is visible in the established print, radio and TV media. In social media. It is in the language used, the funding available, and the parliamentary space and time taken up by new stakeholder groups and individuals involved, to the detriment of crowding out more moderate or established voices. On the one hand it is a greater pluralism and democracy in action. On the other, where its organisation is orchestrated, are the aims and drivers transparent in the public interest?

When it comes to parents, those behind many seemingly grassroots small p “Parent Power” groups are opaque, often with large well funded, often U.S. organisations behind them.

The challenges for established academics and think tanks in this closed and crowded policy advisory space is that these new arrivals, astroturf  ‘grassroots’ and offshoots from existing groups bring with them loud voices who co-opt the language of child rights, who are adept in policy and media spaces that were previously given to expert and evidence-based child rights academics.

Emerging voices are given authority by a very narrow group of parliamentarians, and are lent support by institutional capture through an increasing number of individuals embedded from industry or with conservative religious views hired into positions of authority. There is a shift in the weight given to views and opinions compared with facts and research, and cherry picked evidence to inform institutional positions and consultations, as a result.

The new players bring no history of being interested in children’s rights —in fact, many act in opposition to equality rights, or access to information, and appear more interested in control of children than universal human rights and fundamental freedoms. The shift of a balance in discussion on child rights to child protection above all else is not only in the UK but mainland Europe, the U.S. and Australia which is the latest to plan a ban on under 16s access to social media.

Whose interests do these people serve really, while packaged in the language of child rights?

Taking back parent and teacher control

Parallel arguments made in the public sphere have grown: the first on why authority must be taken away from parents and teachers and returned to the State over fears of loss of parental control of children’s access to information and children’s ‘safety’ including calls for state-imposed bans on mobile phones for children or enforced parental surveillance control tools. And at the same time,  parents want fewer state interventions.  Arguments include that, “over the last few years the State has been assuming ever greater control, usurping the rights of parents over their children.”

The political football of the day seems to move regularly from ‘ban mobile phones in schools‘ or at all, to the content of classroom materials, ‘give parents a right to withdraw children from access to sex ed and relationships teaching’ (RSE not biology). But perhaps more important even than the substance, is that the essence of what the Brexit vote tapped into, a sense that BigTech and the State, ‘others’, interfere with everyday life in ways from which people want to ‘take back control’ is not going away.

Opening up classroom content opens a can of worms

The challenge for teachers can be in their schools every day. Parents have a right to request that their child is withdrawn from sex education, but not from relationships education. In 2023, the DfE published refreshed guidance saying, “parents should be able to see what their children are being taught in RSHE lessons. Schools must share teaching materials with parents.”

I often argue that there is too little transparency and parental control over what is taught and how, and that parents should be able to see what is being taught and its sources but not with regard to RSE, but when it comes to edTech.  We need a more open classroom when it comes to content from companies of all kinds.

But this means also addressing how far the rights of parents and the rights of the child complement or compete with one another, when it comes to Article 26 (3)(b) of the UDHR on education, “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” And how does this affect teachers agency and authority?

These clashes are starting to overlap in a troubling lack of ethical oversight in intrusive national pupil data gathering exercises in England and in Scotland both of which have left parents furious, to the data grab planned from GPs in Wales. Complaints will without a doubt become louder and more widespread, and public trust lost.

When interests are contested and not aligned, who decides what is in a child’s best interests for their protection in a classroom?

When does the public interest kick in as well as individual interests in the public good from having children attend school, present to health services, and how are collective losses taken into account?

In the law today, responsibility for fulfilling a child’s right to education rests with parents, not schools. So what happens when decisions by schools interfere with parents’ views? When I think about children in the context of AI, automated decisions and design in edTech shaping child development, I think about child protection from strangers engineering a child’s development in closed systems.  It matters to protect a child from an unknown and unlimited number of persons interfering with who they will become.

But even the most basic child protections are missing in the edtech environment today without any public sector standards or oversight. I might object to the school about a product. My child might have a right to object in data protection law. But in practice, objection is impossible to exercise.

The friction this creates is going to grow and there is no good way to deal with it right now. Because the education sector is being opened up to a wider range of commercial, outside parties, it is also being opened up to the risks and challenges that brings. It can no longer be something put in the box marked ‘too difficult’ but needs attention.

The backlash will only grow if the sense of ‘overreach’ continues.

Built-in political and cultural values

The values coming over here from the U.S. are not only coming through parents’ grassroots groups, the religious right, or anti-LGBTQ voices in the media of all kinds, but are coming in directly to the classroom embedded into edTech products. The values underpinning AI or any other technology used in the classroom are opaque because the people behind the product are usually hidden. We cannot therefore separate the products from their designers’ politics. If those products are primarily U.S. made, then it is unsurprising if the values from their education and their political systems are those embedded into their pedagogy. Many of which seem less about the UNCRC art. 29 aims of education, and far more about the purposes of education centred on creating human capital via, “an emphasis on the knowledge economy that can reduce both persons and education to economic actors and be detrimental to wider social and ethical goals. ”

This is nothing new.

In 2013, Michael Gove gave a keynote speech in the U.S. to the National Summit for Education Reform, an organisation set up by Governor Jeb Bush. He talked about edTech too, and the knowledge economy of education and needing “every pair of hands” to “rebuild our economies”. Aside from his normalisation of the acceptance of ‘badging’ children in the classroom with failure (32:15) (“rankings of the students in the test were posted with the students name with colour codes… and some of the lower performers would wear a sticker on a ribbon with the colour code of their performance“) he also shared his view with echoes of the “great replacement theory” that, “the 20th century may be the last American Century we face the fact that the West and the values that we associate with it, liberalism, openness, decency, democracy, the rule of law, risks being eclipsed by a Rising Sun from the East.” We could well ask, whose flavour of ‘liberalism’ is that?

The fight for or against a progressive future

Today, anti-foreign, anti-abortion, and pro-natalist pro-conservative Christian values all meet in a Venn diagram in organisations pushing to undermine classically liberal aspects of teaching in England’s education system. And before this sounds a bit extreme, consider how these conspiracy theories and polarised views have been normalised. Listen (25:00) to the end of discussion on “the nation state” at the 2023 NatCon UK Conference co-badged with the Edmund Burke Foundation.  Becoming a parent is followed by discussion on housing pressure *from migrants* as well as a more-than-slightly eugenic-themed discussion of longevity, and then in passing, AI.  At the same event, fellow MP Miriam Cates claimed the UK’s low birthrate is the most pressing policy issue of the generation and is caused in part by “cultural Marxism” as reported by the Guardian. Orbán in Hungary in 2022, claimed he was fighting against “the great European population exchange … a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilisations – migrants”.

These debates are inextricably linked in a fight for or against a progressive future. We have a Westminster Opposition now fighting for its own future and the ‘culture wars’ have been routinely part of its frontbenchers’ media discussions for some time. Much of it that is likely to continue to be played out in the education system, starting with the challenge to the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act 2023, which always seemed to me more about the control of content on campus than its freedoms.

In today’s information society, Castells arguments that cultural battles for power are primarily fought in the media, where identity plays a critical role in influencing public policy and societal norms, where politics becomes theatre and, “citizens around the world react defensively, voting to prevent harm from the state in place of entrusting it with their will,” seem timely. (End of Millenium, p.383). Companies and vested interests have actual power, and elected leaders are left only with influence. This undermines the spirit of a democratic society.

The future of authority and competing interests

After the U.S. election result, that influence coming from across the Pond into UK public policy will not only find itself more motivated and more empowered, but likely, better funded.

Why all this matters for schools is that we are likely to see more of its polarised values-sets imported from the U.S. and there is no handbook for school governors nor staff of all backgrounds, to manage parents and the strong feelings it can all create. Nor does the sector understand the legal framework it needs to withstand it.

Having opened up classrooms to outside interests on classroom content, some families are pulling children out of school because of these fundamental disagreements with their values and the vehicles for their delivery—from the contents of teaching, to intrusive data surveys, and concerns over commercialisation and screen time of tech-based tools without proven beneficial outcomes. Whose best interests does the system serve and who decides whose interests come first when they are in conflict? How are these to be assessed and explained to parents and children, together with their rights?

How do teachers remain in authority where they are perceived as overstepping what parents reasonably expect, or where AI manages curriculum content and teachers cannot explain its assessment scoring or benchmarking profile of a pupil? What should the boundaries be especially as edTech blurs them between school and home, teachers and parents. We need to far better train and support educational staff in practice, to be prepared to manage competing sources of authority, and the emerging fight for interests and rights.

change, choice, family, health, pupils

The Universal Free school meal Programme applied. Free, but what will it really cost?

I have children who are entitled, come September, to the universal free school meal programme. Department of Education advice came out last week. See here >>universal infant free school meals.

I wonder whether this will bring back a national treasure to benefit those who need it most, or is it just a Pandora’s box of problems?

I must admit to feeling ignorant. How much evidence is there, that FSM for all, benefits those who need it more than a means tested system? There is certainly evidence of need, but how do we best address that need?

All the average parent can know well, is how the new system will affect our own child’s experience of school meals.

NetMums did a survey of lots of us. There are simple practical things which policy ignores, such as 4 year-olds starting school usually start on packed lunch only for a half term to get to grips with the basics of school, without having to manage trays and getting help to cut up food. The length of time they need for a hot meal is longer than packed lunch.

But it raises common concerns too which perhaps need more attention, many of which seem to be coming in, in drips of similar feedback: reduced school hall and gym access because the space will need to be used for longer due to increase in number eating hot meals, lack of good kitchen facilities, fears over cooked food quality.

The theory that a nutritious, hot meal at lunch time for all infants, is not what will be delivered in reality. All are valid concerns, over which parents have little control.

How will this change the standards and quality of food compared with today, What considerations have been made for food waste and Is it the wisest way for state money to be best spent to help all who really need it?

Firstly, let’s take to task the nutritional decision making. New standards are now mandatory again, after having been, and then not been – instead left at heads’ discretion. Swings and roundabouts.

There is a blanket ‘low fat’ approach. The trouble is,  this often also means ‘replace all fat with fake stuff for flavour’. It fails to recognise that not all fats are nutritionally equal. Cholesterol is often branded a villain, but is a necessary building block for the body. Whilst parents are lambasted for creating obesity in our children and that we don’t understand enough about food, I don’t know that I agree the Government does either.

Whilst I fully understand the popular and State-driven drive for cutting down obesity levels, cutting out fat across all the food groups may not be the key to achieving it, and improving national health. This ‘low-fat is good’ approach is controversial, and low fat in particular in dessert, replaced with artificial sweeteners, also potentially harmful, is a false choice. I believe that a gentle paleo approach to food, back to basics, is a better choice. Throw out artificial things, and eat almost everything that is natural, in moderation. Not all fats are the same. Children who are growing, need the kind of fat that is in milk. It’s not the same as chips. Sugar, yes, cut it out, but don’t replace with artificial sweeteners. Not everything served on plate should be classed food.

The whole programme of child health in school is based on sweeping generalisations, but they’re not made to apply to all schools equally.  We can be told an awful lot of twaddle of how our kids should eat and exercise by state-sent leaflets in book bags. Add to that, the fact that the BMI comparison is flawed, and its communications to parents method is fundamentally flawed. (Letters saying your perfectly healthy, well proportioned child is obese, or underweight, partly due to its tool as an average cross group measure, in the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) anyway. But that’s another, longer story.) It’s no wonder parents are confused, not knowing the best thing to do on these school meals or not.

“On 17 June 2014 the department announced a new set of simplified standards. The new standards are designed to make it easier for school cooks to create imaginative, flexible and nutritious menus. They will be mandatory for all maintained schools, academies that opened prior to 2010 and academies and free schools entering into a funding agreement from June 2014, and will come into force from January 2015.
One significant change in the new standards is that lower fat milk or lactose reduced milk must, from January 2015 be available for drinking at least once a day during school hours. The milk must be offered free of charge to pupils entitled to free school meals, and to all pupils where it forms part of the free school lunch to infants.”

There is conflicting information about milk consumption and asthma for example, so I’d like to see more information around this, on expected benefits overall. The milk given to them to drink often is UHT, skimmed and processed. If you take all the good stuff out of the milk, is it doing the kids who drink it any good? I’d like to know. We should know the general standards and calorie and nutritional content of their meals in both the theoretical guidelines and ask at practical local level on the ground, because one hot meal at lunchtime, a balanced diet does not make.  We need to know what the kids are getting, in order to try and fit it into the bigger picture of their whole intake.

Secondly, we haven’t talked much about waste.

Currently, my children every week, eat both hot lunches and packed lunches from home. I pay the school’s private provider, for regular, hot lunches three days a week, and I provide packed lunch on two. (I can see ahead of time online, what’s on the provider’s menu, and I can plan and coordinate with the rest of what and how we eat, according to our family schedule.)

From September, I will no longer be able to choose to book and pay for those meals myself. And I will no longer be able to choose for some days and not others. It’s all or nothing.

The local provider will also no longer permit parents of  Reception-Year 2 children to book meals and pay for them, so even if I am fortunate enough and wanted to, I can’t opt out of the state system and pay for only those meals my children will actually eat.

The result is, if I want to continue the mix of hot and packed lunch choice I make for them, based on our family life, schedule and the nutritional content of what I want them to eat, I am required to sign them up for all five days, and either they get the imposed routine and eat more hot dinners – or carry on with our current set-up and two days a week the other hot lunches will go to waste.

However having spoken to my local school meal service today, they confirmed that after 4 weeks they plan to have a review of waste, and cut back on food provided. They won’t be paid less.

The net result, the local private provider will receive more money from the State, for my children’s hot lunches, than I pay myself now. And likely as not, there will be food wasted as well, because the providers will need to allow that some children may take it up all days.

I understand that to administer detailed choices would potentially be costly. But already we have moved admin cost back from parent to school. From September, schools will need to administer how many children are taking up the meals, and any changes in numbers week on week. Until now, I could manage it with the provider online.

However, it need not increase the admin cost to schools or state, if I could continue to book for my children, as I do now, selecting their days and meals in advance, there would be a more cost effective use of our State money, without any change in administration. It would be up to the provider to bill as used, not blanket. Surely in these days of electronic charging, not hard, and could be made without manual intervention by the state, except for regular audits, which will need to happen anyway in any well governed accounting system.

Is this the wisest use of helping those in real need?

It feels as though the Government simply doesn’t trust us to feed our children properly. I think most I know do a fairly good job. And before anyone has a go at making it a class or wealth issue, I fundamentally disagree. You get good and bad parenting and cooking skills across the board. No one is perfect. I know families who are well off but their nanny takes them to McDonalds more than one night a week for tea. Families in poverty and moving out of poverty should get support in school meals for children, but I dislike the sweeping TV benefits-hype notion that ‘poor people can’t feed their children properly.’ As if somehow, wealth is an indicator of capability or ‘doing a good job’. I do believe that parents will always try and do the best to feed their children. There are of course the rare and horrific Daniel P. exceptions whose whole care was failed by parents and State alike. They will always exist and we as a society and State need to think how they can be best addressed. But is a rushed and inflexible system of school meals going to really address those exceptions? I don’t think so. That’s not what this is about and we shouldn’t let genuine individual cases, as well as media hype of individual suffering railroad discussions.

How was it done in the past? Some were granted the support of free school meals, so if they were then, and still are now what has driven the need for change? Is this new system, in fact a huge political admission that  welfare support is not enough for the many, many families where both parents work hard and still find each month a stretch to get good food on the table every day of the month? I believe so.

{ Sept 5th 2014 update confirms: 4 in 10 children are classed as living in poverty – but may not meet the welfare benefit criteria according to Nick Clegg, on LBC. That’s a scandalous admission of the whole social system failure. He believes working parents can’t afford to feed their children properly? So fix the overall income levels, welfare, social housing balance. Not FSM. The statement that schools ‘have to manage lunch anyway’, shows a failure to understand what an average primary is like. Not the best political collected response to a flagship policy which he should expect to be quizzed on in ‘Back to School’ week. Hats off to the nine year-old who nailed it.}

I welcome anything that will help families feed their children well. However, school dinners does not necessarily mean good nutrition. I remember friends who got FSM vouchers and chose chips as a main course and chocolate brownie for pud. The work by the Trussel Trust and others, shows what desperate measures are needed to help children who need it most and simply ‘a free school meal’ is not necessarily a ticket to good food, without rigorous application and monitoring of standards, including reviewing in schools what is offered vs what children actually eat from the offering.

Parents know what their children like and will eat. There is a risk some children will simply eat less if they don’t like what’s on offer.

The entitlement is also not applied to all primary children equally, but infants only. So within a family some children are entitled and others are not. Will this reshape family evening meals, where now one has ‘had a hot meal already today’ and others have not? Feedback so far seems to indicate that there are great unknowns, and that the practical application of this policy will not live up to the nice theory.

It feels like we’re being distracted, with a pretty sticking plaster on a gaping social wound.

A personal perspective

I know our family will be happy to save any money we can, having just taken on a mortgage for our first home. But we are very fortunate, and to be honest, I just feel like we’re not entitled to it. I want the funds to go where most needed. I’ll be glad to have extra money at home, but we manage without it and I’ll still send them some days with packed lunch. Yes if  it were only about cash and ‘entitlement’, we could choose to give any savings to school funds or another charity, but I also hate food waste.  I worry that the quality of food standards will fall, for everyone. Why will this time be different compared with standards which were so poor in the past?

Why impose this method on all without rigorous planing and evaluation and a transparent communication of that to parents and schools? My school certainly doesn’t feel that has happened or been communicated, and has had a ‘a couple of emails”.  And they are a great primary school who care about things being done well. At the end of summer term,  ‘it’s a bit of an unknown.’ And as for parents, we got an SMS and asked how many might be interested back in March I think. Nothing since then. If this is such a key initiative and so important for the future well being of our kids, why are parents should be being well informed.

I now have to decide, to keep my kids in hot dinners, take them out, or keep our as-is preferred mix but feel wasteful.

Where do you draw the line between support  and interference in our family life?

You could say don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but it’s what is going into the mouths of our children that matters most. Jamie Oliver did his darnedest to educate and bring in change, showing school meals needed improvement in quality across the board. What has happened to those quality improvements he championed? Abandoned in free school & political dogma. There is clearly need when so many children are growing up in an unfairly distributed society of have and have-not, but the gap seems to be ever wider. Sheffield in 2012 had a 22% child poverty rate. Where is the analysis for true quality change, rather than change for a point of policy?

Is our children’s health a political football, which is being given as a concession in this Parliament, now rushed through to get checked-off, without being properly checked out first?

I’m not sure I trust the state imposed food standards to do a good job if the funding should be reduced in future, quality will fall again, back to the bad old pre-Jamie days.

Quality must be paramount if we are now expecting to see a larger portion of society, starting out with school meals, fed by State defined standards.

It seems there were pilots and trials but we haven’t heard much about them. There is plenty of history, but where is current discussion? I agree with David Laws, on the closure of school kitchens, but this mother believes current infrastructure and education should be fundamental to this programme, not coming in later as a secondary support measure. I wouldn’t normally choose to link to the Mail, but no other broadsheet seems to have covered it since the Department for Education guidance was issued last week.

Mr. Laws MP said,

“It is going to be one of the landmark social achievements of this coalition government – good for attainment, good for health, great for British food, and good for hard working families. Ignore the critics who want to snipe from the sidelines.”

I don’t want to be a critic from the sidelines, I’d like to be an informed citizen and a parent with choice. [and please, stop using hard working families, it indicates some sort of value judgement, which is borrowed from the coalition partners and not in a good way]

This is a consumer choice and health issue, having an effect on a practical aspect of my parenthood. It’s not a tenet of education substance.

Like these people and their FOIs, I want to ask and understand. I have questions: How will it affect the majority? Will this have a positive effect on the nutrition children get, which may be inadequate today? What guarantees are there that adequate food safety and quality issues are properly and independently governed? Will it be overall less costly and beneficial to children and parents? Will it reduce stigma? Will it increase hot dinners consumed and reduce packed lunch intake? (So much less healthy, we are told.) Is the cost worth the benefit for a minority or even for the many? Will it benefit the health of all our children?

Free, but what will it really cost?

Honestly, I don’t know. But that’s my main concern. It’s being done in such a rush without due transparency and communication, I don’t think anyone knows.