Teachers will be given legal protection from blasphemy complaints under plans being drawn up for the Conservative Party manifesto – the move follows several recent incidents in which people working in or visiting schools have been targeted and harassed for opinions and intent ascribed to them by radical activists and protesters, typically on ideological or religious grounds (GB News, Evening Standard, Times).
Speaking to the Times, a senior government source said the new legal guarantees were necessary to protect teachers from intimidation or threats following a series of recent blasphemy cases in Britain that have been inappropriately handled.
“A commitment to freedom of speech is at the heart of what it means to be British,” the source said. “No religion is immune from criticism. We do not have blasphemy laws. And we must resist any attempt to impose them on our teachers through intimidation or threats — including through statutory guidance if necessary.”
One such incident of intimidation occurred in March 2021, when Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire school became the focus of angry demonstrations and a vicious online campaign after a teacher used a cartoon of Islam’s prophet as a teaching resource during a lesson on free speech.
Local activists circulated messages on social media that named the teacher and urged people to turn up “to fulfil our duty of defending the honour of SasoolAllah [the prophet of Allah]”, provoking several days of demonstrations outside the school gates.
In response, the school swiftly suspended the unnamed teacher pending a formal investigation. Gary Kibble, the headmaster, then issued an “unequivocal apology” for the teacher’s use of what he described as a “totally inappropriate image”. Footage on social media showed police reading out the head’s apology statement to the protesters.
The teacher was put into police protection after receiving death threats and now lives with his partner and four children under an assumed name in a secret location outside Yorkshire.
Speaking to the media earlier this year under condition of anonymity, a family member said that the man, who is in his early 30s, remains in hiding, has to be cautious about contact with his relatives, and is unlikely ever to return home.
According to the government source, schools will be issued with new statutory guidance upholding teachers’ rights to freedom of expression. Head teachers will be barred from automatically suspending staff or pupils in response to blasphemy complaints from religious groups.
The guidance will also make clear that schools have no obligation to consult parents on content that may insult certain religious groups nor do they have a duty to consult religious or community groups.
The proposal follows recommendations published last week by Lord Walney, the government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption, who said that protesters “are intimidating schools and teacher when children are taught things they disagree with”.
In a section of the report addressing the targeting of education settings and academics, Lord Walney writes that in recent years “teachers and even pupils have faced abuse, either on account of their political positions or for opinions and intent ascribed to them by protestors, typically on ideological grounds”.
“For some protesters,” he says, “it is no longer enough to disagree with academics or teachers; instead, students and pupils must be protected from their (allegedly immoral or dangerous) views.”
In a statement on Lord Walney’s report to Parliament last week, the security minister, Tom Tugendhat MBE, told MPs he was “particularly struck by the section on protests at school”.
Teachers must be free to “teach our students how to think, not what to think,” he said, before making clear that “it is not their job to appease pressure groups, self-appointed community activists or religious institutions”.
Last November, a YouGov survey of more than 1,000 teachers conducted for Policy Exchange found that 16% of them admitted to self-censoring to avoid causing religious offence.
The think tank’s report found that a worrying proportion of teachers believe that – regardless of a teacher’s intentions – images of the prophet Muhammad should never be used in classrooms, even in the teaching of Islamic art or ethics.
As many as 55% of teachers said they would not use an image of Muhammad anyway – higher for teachers of art (64%) and citizenship (60%) – and a further 9% would not do so as a result of the Batley Grammar School protests.
Alarmingly, only 36% of teachers polled said that their schools have guidance to avoid causing offence from teaching materials or lesson content. As many as four in ten teachers (40%) indicated that their schools do not have any such guidance.
