In mid-December, the annual report by the schools’ regulator Ofsted, noted that it would try to give its ‘British values’ drive a new lease of life, despite it being mired in controversy for the last three years.
It also suggested that home-schoolers should have to register with the state. There is no requirement under law to do so at present. Ofsted appears to want a change in the law so that families who home-school have to register and be subject to inspection.
Key priority
The spreading of ‘shared values’ is to be one of Ofsted’s key priorities in the coming year. The report raises the discredited idea that holding socially conservative values places people on a conveyor belt to ‘violence’. In 2017, former Cabinet Minister Liam Byrne warned that this idea – at the centre of the government’s extremism strategy – needs to be ‘reset’. Byrne told BBC Radio 4: ‘We have got to drop what’s at the heart of the government’s policy, which is this notion that there’s a conveyor belt between religious piety and violent extremism.’
