Mario Ledwith, Monday November 20 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Times
A fifth of teachers are censoring their lessons to avoid potentially causing offence over issues surrounding race, gender and sexuality, a survey has found.
One in six said they had curtailed teachings on religion after a teacher was forced into hiding for showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad.
The Policy Exchange think tank, which commissioned the survey by YouGov, said the findings showed that a “de facto blasphemy code” had been introduced in classrooms.
Despite only a minority of teachers saying that they had limited their comments or materials used in lessons, the organisation said that all teachers should be able to express themselves freely within the law.
The survey of 1,132 teachers across the UK, conducted in March, largely focused on teachers’ reactions to the furore that unfolded at Batley Grammar School in Yorkshire in 2021.
A teacher was forced into hiding because of protests and threats against him for showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a religious studies lesson.
The teacher, who was named online by a local charity, had to leave his home with his partner and four young children and was still living under a new identity this year.
He was initially suspended from his role but these restrictions were lifted when an independent investigation commissioned by the school trust found that he had not meant to cause offence.
Just 9 per cent of teachers who took part in the survey said they were less likely to use an image of Muhammad in lessons following the episode. A further 55 per cent said that it had made no difference to them as they would not have used an image anyway.
Policy Exchange, an influential conservative think tank that has extensively investigated radical Islam, claimed that the proportion of teachers self-censoring was “small but significant”.
Of the teachers who took part, 20 per cent said they had self-censored in the classroom over concerns about causing offence around gender and sexuality, with 21 per cent saying they had done so concerning race.
Although the report focused on the apparent adverse impact of criticising Islam in educational settings, it referred to only three examples of this occurring in the UK. Instead, the report pointed to sporadic instances spanning the past decade when offence had been generated by the portrayal of Islam in the UK.
One of the education examples included an incident at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield this year in which police were called after a 14-year-old autistic boy caused minor damage to a copy of the Quran. Four boys were suspended over the incident. West Yorkshire police found that no crime had been committed but recorded a hate incident.
The report also drew upon the case of Samuel Paty, a secondary school teacher murdered in France in 2020 for showing images of Muhammad. The report stated that “France’s battle with Islamist extremism is one shared with the UK”.
Dr Damon Perry, the report’s author, claimed that although there was no law of blasphemy in the UK, he was concerned about a new “kind of blasphemy” defined as a “perceived act of symbolic violence against Islam”.
In a foreword to a report on the survey, Nadhim Zahawi, the former education secretary, said that teachers “must not feel the need to self-censor out of fear”.
He added: “Head teachers, who set school policy, should not be bullied by de facto blasphemy codes.”
Zahawi said the report highlighted the need for statutory guidance around the use of potentially offensive images in the classroom and freedom of expression.
He said the case of the teacher in Batley who was forced into hiding was a “national disgrace”.
In the survey, 36 per cent of teachers said their schools had guidance on how to avoid causing offence through teaching materials or the content of lessons.
Half of respondents said they would perceive a risk to teacher safety if protests that were happening outside a school over allegedly offensive religious material were being led by activist or advocacy groups.
Following the Kettlethorpe incident, Suella Braverman, then the home secretary, used an article in The Times to say that she would work with the Department for Education to develop guidance on alleged blasphemy in schools.
However, the department later said that it had no plans to do so and that existing guidance was apt.
Policy Exchange said guidance should be prioritised, committing schools to uphold teachers’ freedom of expression as long as it was within the scope of the law, even if offence was unintentionally caused.
It said the government should consider how to hold to account organisations that name teachers accused of sharing allegedly offensive material, either through the Charity Commission or the criminal and civil courts.
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