Teaching white privilege “as a fact” is against the law, the equalities minister has warned.

Kemi Badenoch also said that teaching critical race theory as a fact without providing “balanced treatment” of other views would be breaking the law.

She said yesterday: “Lots of pernicious stuff is being pushed, and we stand against that. We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt.

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“Let me be clear that any school that teaches those elements of critical race theory as fact, or that promotes partisan political views, such as defunding the police, without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”

Tackling racism: Black Lives Matter ‘is political’

Ms Badenoch also described the Black Lives Matter movement as “political”.

During a parliamentary debate yesterday, Labour MP Abena Oppong-Asare urged the government to develop a task force to diversify the curriculum.

She said:  “We want all our kids - all our children, black and white, in every single corner of this country - to better understand our history, so that our children have a true sense of belonging within British culture and British history, because at the moment it does not reflect that.”

She mentioned a study by Teach First, published at the end of September, showing that AQA did not include a book by a black author in its English literature specification.

She said: “Let me break that down: that means pupils can complete their GCSEs and leave secondary school without having studied a single literary work by a non-white author.”

Last week, an academic claimed that teaching the concept of “white privilege” to white working-class pupils is “nonsensical”.

Matthew Goodwin, a politics professor at the University of Kent, said that white working-class communities face a “status deficit” as the national conversation has become “much more consumed” with other groups in society.

But Dr Zubaida Haque, former interim director of racial equality charity the Runnymede Trust, responded to the claim saying that it seemed doubtful that schools in deprived white communities were actually teaching extensively about “white privilege”

She said: “Where is the evidence that they have to apologise for white privilege? In which school?”