Classrooms cannot, and should not, be political vacuums. Under the guise of ‘impartiality’, right-wing forces are increasingly focused on controlling and restricting which materials, topics and perspectives young people have access to in educational settings – to the detriment of the most marginalised pupils.  

Earlier this week at the Conservative Party conference, shadow education secretary Laura Trott outlined the Tories’ seven-point pledge to parents to “keep political activism out of the classroom”, including vowing to give Ofsted more powers to investigate breaches of impartiality and making it easier for parents to report impartiality failures.