The influence that teachers have over their students - and the views they adopt - is something that has long made governments nervous. In February the UK government felt the need to remind teachers in England, through new impartiality guidance, that they needed to avoid being “partisan” in how they talked about issues and instead ensure that any topic covered was done with a “balanced presentation of opposing views”.
Scottish teachers will be under increased pressure to get this balance right following the announcement yesterday by first minister Nicola Sturgeon that 19 October 2023 is the proposed date for a second independence referendum.
It would be ill-advised for teachers to march down corridors proudly displaying a “yes” or a “no” sticker, says EIS general secretary Larry Flanagan. And indeed, last time around - during the 2014 independence referendum - some councils explicitly banned school staff from wearing badges.
But it is questionable whether such bans were ever necessary, given that most teachers will be all too familiar with the tightrope they must walk at times like these. After all, schools engaging with elections is nothing new, and even referendums have become a more regular occurrence in recent times.
Perhaps a greater danger than teachers seeking to influence their students, then, is that they won’t talk about the real world at all - that they will shy away from engaging with the government’s plans for another independence vote because they don’t want to find themselves accused of bias and promoting the views of one side over the other.
English teacher Kenny Pieper wrote for Tes Scotland in 2017 that this was exactly what happened in the run-up to the first independence referendum.
Schools striking the right balance over the Scottish independence referendum
At the time, there was a sense that the stakes were higher for teachers, given that the 2014 referendum, which took place in September, marked the first time that 16- and 17-year-olds were allowed to vote in the UK. So teachers weren’t just preparing their charges to exercise their right to vote at some point in the future - they were addressing people who would influence the outcome of the ballot.
This prompted councils to send out guidance reminding teachers about the importance of neutrality, and some local authorities were deemed to have taken a heavy-handed approach. There were also concerns that while debate had been encouraged in some schools, it had been stifled in others.
Immediately after the referendum, in October 2014, a Scottish Parliament committee wrote to council education directors in a bid to ascertain how much discussion of the referendum had been permitted or encouraged in schools, amid concerns that this had “varied considerably”.
The committee found that “almost all local authorities permitted, encouraged or actively supported schools to hold debates” on the referendum - but it also found that in one council “schools were not encouraged to hold debates on the premises and within school hours”. Instead, Renfrewshire Council told the committee it organised husting events “at which parity of access to the new school-aged voter constituency by the two campaigns was ensured”.
According to Pieper, all this tension around impartiality led many teachers “to avoid discussing what was the most important day in our recent political history, missing an opportunity to teach our young people about debate in a healthy democracy”.
He argued that Indyref2 would provide teachers with an “opportunity to do it better”.
Flanagan also urges teachers to make the most of the curiosity that yesterday’s announcement will spark in students. He says: “Schools should not shut themselves off from the fact that a major democratic process is taking place - they must look to capitalise because there will be a level of interest and curiosity. It’s definitely a teaching opportunity.”
In the wake of yesterday’s announcement, teachers on social media pointed out that they hadn’t really stopped teaching about the different views on an independent Scotland - and many were enthusiastic about the prospect of continuing to do so, and clear about their role engaging students “as fully as possible” at the same time as giving both campaigns equal opportunity “to make their case”.
That enthusiasm about helping young people to navigate what is to come should be encouraged and nurtured. Instead of fearing teacher bias, we must get to accept the reality that teachers are our best hope that young people will go into indyref2 - if and when it comes - having explored the issues, knowing where to find reliable information, having done their research and ready to vote.
