Plan B Forum

The American School in London is Britain's most expensive day school, charging an astonishing £32,650-a-year in fees to the capital's loftiest bankers, corporate lawyers and celebrities.

At pick-up, parents rub shoulders with footballers Thierry Henry and Mikel Arteta, Hollywood siren Salma Hayek and the occasional plutocrat and oligarch.

To a certain breed of turbo-powered Londoner, having children at 'ASL' is a badge of wealth and privilege, denoting membership of an exclusive club where your child becomes what the prospectus dubs a 'lifelong learner and courageous global citizen', hopefully with top academic grades and a place at a major university.

Or at least it was.

For behind the secure walls of its state-of-the-art campus near Regent's Park — where famous alumni range from actress Kathleen Turner to NFL star Andrew Luck and Police drummer Stewart Copeland — you will today find a spiralling culture war.

Despite its rarefied status, this elite seat of learning is at the epicentre of a spectacular and utterly toxic dispute over claims that a cabal of Left-wing staff are seeking to brainwash impressionable pupils via ultra-woke 'identity politics'.

The row culminated last week in a group of concerned parents sending its headteacher, Robin Appleby, a 12-page complaint accusing ASL of 'institutional racism' and 'indoctrination' of children via the teaching of 'critical race theory', a 'controversial and divisive' ideology that revolves around the concept of 'white privilege'.

The parents argue that 'partisan' teaching has created a 'culture of fear' that is 'harmful to our children's mental health' and claim the school's treatment of race and gender issues breaks the Education Act.

The detailed letter also alleges that a recent decision by ASL to create racially segregated after-school clubs, in which pupils mix solely with peers of the same ethnicity, breaches the Equality Act.

'It feels like ASL has fallen into the hands of a woke cult,' says one of its authors. 'Every subject, from art to literature to history, is now being taught through a prism of race or gender, at times to very young children.

It's pernicious and divisive, and we think illegal. In the case of after-school clubs, they are operating what amounts to a system of apartheid.'

At this point, you may be wondering whether to care if 'wokeness' is, or is not, affecting the gilded education of some of London's most privileged children.

Yet the row currently playing out at the American School in London matters to all of us because, behind the scenes, similar disputes are under way in a cross-section of schools across the land.

Many parents caught in the crossfire fear a divisive, politically-correct agenda — focused to an almost obsessive degree on race, gender and identity politics — is being rammed down the throats of children, at the expense of both their academic attainment and emotional wellbeing.

The MP Robert Halfon, chairman of the Commons Education Committee, argues that the teaching of 'white privilege' has become widespread and has 'got to be stopped'. It is 'divisive', 'pits groups against each other,' he added.

His intervention last week came as the Committee published a scathing report into the reasons why white working-class children are dramatically underperforming peers from other ethnic groups.

It blamed, among other things, damage being done to the state-of-mind of underprivileged pupils by teachers who tell them they must assume 'collective guilt' for racism perpetuated by other people.

The scale of the problem was laid bare in an extraordinary dossier sent in April to the Department for Education by Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel to the Free Speech Union [FSU], which campaigns against cancel culture.

It contained a collection of teaching materials obtained from the concerned parents of children at no fewer than 15 English schools where the FSU alleges that teachers have 'failed to comply with their duties to forbid the promotion of partisan political views and to secure balanced treatment of political issues'.

The schools include a secondary in Peckham where 'persistently politicised teaching' recently saw teachers circulate Black Lives Matter petitions and encourage art students to produce work containing the slogan ACAB: All Cops Are B*******'.

Elsewhere in the dossier are details of how pupils at an academy in Wargrave, Berkshire, were handed 'a kid-friendly guide to social justice terms' that asserted the following definition: 'Police: workers chosen by, protecting and serving people in power.'

At a community college in the North-East, pupils were told during a presentation that 'disagreeing with black, indigenous, or other people of colour' was an 'example of covert racism'.

And at a secondary in London's Balham, students were asked: 'What is a police officer?', then immediately presented with the following key words: 'Colonies, racial profiling, juvenile, corruption, reform, accountability'.

The FSU argues that the examples suggest that both state and private schools are routinely ignoring their duty, under the 1996 Education Act, to 'prevent political indoctrination and secure the balanced treatment of political issues'.

Parents whose children are on the receiving end of such teaching complain a culture of fear prevents them speaking out at the risk of being labelled racist.

The American School in London provides a sort of case-study of the excesses of the new orthodoxy. Here, discontent stretches back to the protests and public debate that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota last summer.

During the holidays, parents were sent an email declaring that, in the wake of that unrest, ASL had decided to implement a 'detailed action plan' to improve its policies on 'diversity, equity and inclusion' as well as 'social justice'.

Pupils who 'identified' as belonging to a racial minority, or who believed that they might be gay, lesbian or transgender were to be invited to form 'affinity groups' or spend time in 'safe spaces'.

Parents were to be instructed in how to 'raise anti-racist children' and 'recognise their own implicit biases'. In other words, this exclusive establishment — whose assembly hall is a regular pit-stop for visiting U.S. presidents, from Reagan and Clinton to Barack Obama — was going woke.

Over the winter months, parents learned that PE lessons had been replaced by earnest debates about 'politics in sport'.

The curriculum was then 'decolonised' via a programme that saw the library vetted for potentially offensive material.

Teachers launched a 'queer and questioning affinity group' for 13- and 14-year-olds who were 'questioning their gender expression, gender identity and/or sexuality', or thought they might belong 'to the LGBTQI+ spectrum', or be 'non-binary or gender nonconforming'.

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