Teachers will be given protection from claims of blasphemy by religious groups under proposals set out in a government-commissioned report.
As reported by the Times, legal guarantees upholding teachers’ rights to freedom of expression should be introduced, according to the recommendations. Schools would also be barred from automatically suspending staff or pupils in response to blasphemy complaints. The report continues:
New guidance to all schools would also make clear that unlike sex education, 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 recommendations form part of a long-awaited independent review into political violence and disruption in the UK. The report, expected to be published next week, covers a wide-ranging area of public life that has been affected by intimidating, violent and disruptive protests and will deliver more than 40 recommendations for government and public bodies.
They are designed to address growing evidence that teachers are censoring their lessons to avoid potentially causing offence over issues surrounding race, gender and sexuality.
Ministers and officials in the Department for Education (DfE) are understood to be already drafting new guidance that could be issued to schools before the next academic year in September.
The report, written by Lord Walney, the government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, is understood to have emphasised the importance of making the new guidance for schools statutory as that would place a legal duty on schools and local authorities to comply with it unless there were exceptional circumstances.
The report has been influenced by a series of recent blasphemy cases in Britain that have been inappropriately handled, according to government sources familiar with its findings.
They include the 2021 protests against a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who received death threats and is still in hiding after showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a religious studies lesson.
Another incident understood to have informed the report’s recommendations was the controversy last year in Wakefield, also West Yorkshire, after a copy of the Quran was slightly damaged at a high school. West Yorkshire police recorded it as a “hate incident,” which led to concerns that officers were being pressured into imposing de-facto blasphemy laws by conservative faith groups. It led to Suella Braverman, the home secretary at the time, introducing a new code of conduct for the police to protect freedom of expression.
A third example was the intimidatory tactics of campaigners outside a school in Birmingham in 2019 who attempted to stop LGBT-inclusive education. Parents and activists claimed that teaching children about LGBT relationships at Anderton Park Primary School contradicted their Islamic faith and was not “age-appropriate”.
The controversy caused by the incidents has led teachers to censor content in the classroom for fear of causing offence, according to research.
Walney’s report will recommend that the DfE issue schools with statutory guidance on how to manage blasphemy-related incidents.
The guidance would state that teachers’ freedom of expression should be upheld and make clear that schools should not automatically suspend teachers involved in blasphemy-related incidents.
This isn’t the first report in recent months to warn of the rise in intimidation and threats of violence against those perceived to have insulted Islam in the UK.
Earlier this year an independent research report commissioned by the government’s Commission for Countering Extremism found that protests condemning acts of apparent blasphemy have become more frequent and radicalised, and that “some of the most prominent voices” involved “have links to violent anti-blasphemy extremists in Pakistan”. It concluded that “a new generation of activists is trying to make blasphemy a key issue of concern for British Muslims”.
A separate report from Dame Sarah Khan, the government’s adviser on social cohesion, issued a damning indictment of the policy force, school leadership and local council involved in the Batley Grammar School scandal. The Khan Review highlights how the type of abuse experienced by the teacher in that case, termed “freedom-restricting harassment”, is forcing individuals, institutions, academics, councillors and professionals from all backgrounds to self-censor and make changes to their daily lives.
