Mary Bousted, co-secretary general of the National Education Association, said she was working with the Runnymede Trust and others to monitor changes in the history curriculum announced by the government as part of its response to the Sewell report on racial and ethnic inequalities. “We want to ensure that the history, cultures and perspectives of blacks are properly recognized on all issues and all year round. “And that should focus on the prospects of those who colonized or their descendants,” Bousted told delegates at the NEU’s annual conference in Bournemouth. The Ministry of Education plans to develop a pilot history curriculum for use by schools by 2024, with the help of “specialists, historians and school principals”. Ministers tried to reassure critics that the curriculum would be varied in a “meaningful, not symbolic” way. Bousted said she had been “monsterized” by the right-wing media and endured “rage doors” on social media after saying she was not interested in a curriculum consisting exclusively of works by dead white men. “All this shows me, personally, and all of us, politically, that cultural wars are raging and continue to rage and that they are consuming anyone who dares to challenge the narrow, monocultural basis on which the current national curriculum, with all its assumptions, is based. strong knowledge, “Bousted said. Collaborating with the Runnymede Trust and other education experts will “serve as a point of critical inquiry” into the government’s planned changes, Bousted said. At its annual conference, union representatives earlier voted on proposals calling for a campaign to decolonize school curricula. The UK Statistics Authority has said it is investigating DfE’s use of statistics in its school white paper after NEU leaders announced that the association had lodged a formal complaint. Kevin Courtney, the NEU’s co-secretary general, said the union had complained to the statistical service “about this shameful, deliberate misuse of statistics and the deliberate concealment of relevant data” in DfE documents to support its claim that conversion of local government schools into academies improved their Ofsted grades. Bousted vowed to defeat the government’s goal of turning all public schools in England into academies by 2030, calling the White Paper “the final crushing of zombie education ideologues with zombie education policies”.
