NEW Education Policy
The Heritage Party has updated the Education section of the manifesto, that was previously titled Self-Sufficiency in Skills.
Our new principles and policies on Education are:
Education
Education in the UK has been run down and dumbed down. It needs a complete overhaul to tackle the Cultural Marxist activists who have infiltrated and corroded our educational establishments at every level.
Self-Sufficiency in Skills
The UK must become self-sufficient in skills rather than relying on importing skilled and unskilled labour from abroad. Education needs to be re-focussed onto fostering excellence and teaching pupils and students the skills they need to be self-reliant. We must train enough of our own young people to succeed and thrive in professional and technical careers, particularly as nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, construction workers and IT professionals.
Parents as Primary Educators
Parents have always been considered as the primary educators of their children and we will affirm this in legislation. We will repeal laws infringing the family unit’s fundamental right to be primarily responsible for its children. We oppose the disempowerment of parents by the state, whereby its institutions are increasingly dictating the norms and values children learn and supplanting the role of the parents and their right to pass on their own values and beliefs to their children.
Schools
Schools need to be re-focussed on ensuring that every child is proficient in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic and fostering excellence so that no child is held back from reaching their full potential. Teachers must be free to concentrate on what is important without being overloaded with bureaucratic assessments and appraisals or political schemes and requirements that are superfluous to education.
Schools should foster the desire and capacity of young minds to think freely for themselves rather than seeking to indoctrinate them in Cultural Marxist ideologies. Teacher training courses need to be given a radical overhaul and re-focussed on training educators to use successful traditional teaching methods that focus on facts and excellence rather than post-modern, deconstructive and relativistic methods.
We would end political correctness in schools with a specific Act to prevent the promotion of gender ideology, climate alarmism and anti-white racism by activist teachers. Subjects that seek to indoctrinate children with politically correct ideologies will be removed from the statutory National Curriculum, specifically Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Citizenship.
Schools are there to serve families and not the other way around. We will end fines for taking children on short holiday breaks during term time.
Ofsted
Ofsted is an unelected quango with no accountability to anyone. It should be abolished and the responsibility for inspecting schools placed with the Department for Education. School inspections should focus solely on teaching and learning. Schools should not be judged on subjective criteria relating to the ‘progressive’ left-wing ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’ agenda.
Secondary Schools
The re-implementation of a tripartite system at secondary school level is a top priority. There should be grammar schools for the academically talented, technical schools to train young people with an aptitude for practical and vocational skills, and general schools to ensure that all children of all levels have the personal skills, entrepreneurial skills and employability to succeed in the world of work if they leave formal education at 16.
We will once again allow new grammar schools to open and push for there to be a range of different types of school, including grammar, technical, vocational, general, special and specialist secondary schools within every geographical area.
Faith Schools
We support faith schools, 97% of which are Christian schools. We will scrap the cap on faith-based selection in faith schools.
Independent Schools
We recognise the great contribution that Independent Schools have made to our nation over many centuries and continue to do so today. We will scrap VAT on school fees at Independent Schools which is a spiteful and destructive policy by the current government.
Home Education
We support the rights of parents who wish to home educate their children. There has never been a requirement to register home educated children in the UK nor to report on the nature of home education activities to any authority. We oppose the introduction of any registration or reporting requirements for home educated children and we will repeal any legislation to that effect at the first opportunity.
Parents must be allowed to begin home educating their children at any time they wish without restrictions. We will scrap all regulations that prevent parents from de-registering their children from a school.
Assisted Places
We will seek to work with Independent Schools to restore the Assisted Places Program which helped over 80,000 poorer children to go to private schools but was scrapped under Tony Blair.
Universities
Universities need to become lean and mean again and focus on delivering high quality academic courses. Universities are not for everyone, particularly those who are talented in practical fields who would benefit more from following a non-academic route and would be better off getting a job at 16 or 18 and learning a trade.
Universities should be for the 20% or so of people who will benefit from rigorous, high-level academic courses. We will drop the artificial target of 50% of people going to higher education. Many University courses are effectively either useless debt-traps for young people or immigration scams and should be scrapped.
Poor quality courses and Universities which do more harm than good and are of little use to employers should be defunded, and failing universities should not be saved from going out of business. Too many academic institutions seem to believe that their role is to force-feed left-wing ideology and divisive identity politics, while stifling debate. Such institutions should not receive government subsidies or grants to continue their corrosive activities.
It is insanity to impose a cap on places to study in Medicine and Dentistry at University while there is a huge shortage of doctors and dentists. We will scrap these caps and allow Universities to expand the number of places available for young British citizens to train to be doctors and dentists.
We would cover student loan repayments of British students who have graduated in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, Medicine) subjects so long as they work in their field of study in the UK.
Technical Skills
For those who are more gifted in practical and vocational fields, we will invest in apprenticeships and bring back the Polytechnics which should never have been closed or converted, so that young people can learn high-level technical skills to succeed in practical trades. Our aim is to return to an era characterised by high levels of employment, wide ranging skills sets and British manufacturing, where we as a nation are self-sufficient in skills, British youngsters are trained to do skilled jobs so that they can all earn a good living, and there is no longer a need to depend on an unsustainable flow of cheap labour from abroad.
We will scrap the Apprentice Levy which is over-complicated and counter-productive, and had a detrimental effect on many tailored courses and apprenticeship schemes by imposing ‘one size fits all’ rules on apprenticeship training.
Our full manifesto is available to read here