Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, today is Wear Red Day, the annual fundraising day for Show Racism the Red Card, of which I am the national vice-president. It is an educational charity specifically working in schools and increasingly in workplaces on anti-racist education and anti-racism. It also helps to train teachers, specifically in Wales, but we hope in England too.

Individual worth, as envisaged in the Bill, must mean the promotion in schools of anti-racism—of challenging racism of all types. Prejudice, or ignorance-based behaviour, as my noble friend Lord Mann sometimes describes it, is not acceptable. Show Racism the Red Card has programmes to challenge the background to racism as well as its contemporary manifestations, and to look at hate crime and how to challenge it.

A report out this week, A Portrait of Modern Britain, paints a somewhat rosier picture of the state of our country than some might recognise, but it rightly asserts that racism and discrimination have not been eliminated. I think we are all well aware of that. If the Bill provides an opportunity to look again at the curriculum and how we challenge islamophobia, anti-Semitism and all forms of racism—to be explicit, how we teach anti-racism—it would be a very good thing. It seems to me that individual worth adequately covers the notion that we should be teaching anti-racism.

Finally, I would like to say a word about the Prevent strategy. I was still engaged in education full time at the time of its introduction, and I am all too well aware that there were very big problems with it. The National Education Union, then the NUT—my union—believed that we should be taking a child protection approach to the issue of children being groomed into extremism. That is all the more true because according to Amnesty International, 87% of referrals of under-15 year-olds through the Prevent strategy do not meet the criteria for an intervention. It seems to me that there is something not helpful about the Prevent strategy. Certainly, decoupling it from the teaching of values and citizenship would be a profoundly good idea.