Edith is the Director and Co-Founder of Be Her Lead. In the first of this 2-part blog post, she imagines an unashamedly feminist school system. Read Part 2 or return to blog

@edithjohnson100

Introduction: feminism in schools, or feminist schools?

The original stimulus for this blog, which originated as a talk for Teach First’s women’s network, was ‘Why we need feminism in schools’. I am an English teacher by training, and so my first instinct was to mess around with the syntax. Instead of feminism in schools, I’d like to argue that we need feminist schools - schools which identify as feminist institutions, and a curriculum and education policy which embraces feminist values and goals as foundational, not an optional add-on. 

This might sound bold, but this is the right time to be bold. In the current COVID-19 crisis, schools and other institutions will strip everything down to the “bare essentials” of education, and in our schools that still means reading, writing and arithmetic. Conversations about feminism and gender in schools, which happen too rarely anyway, are in danger of being pushed aside entirely for the next few months at least. But this crisis is a gendered one, disproportionately affecting primary caregivers and victims of domestic abuse. The ways in which our society is unfair are going to be brought into harsh relief over the next few months. We should be talking about this in schools, and more importantly using education as a tool for building a fairer future.

The wider context

Feeling a little overwhelmed as well as excited, I started my prep for this blog by dipping my toes into some research. The facts I collected are just a few of the grim army of reasons why schools need a feminist leg-up at the moment. I’d like you to quietly observe your own reactions as you read them, as honestly as you can.  

• 1/3 of 16-18 year olds have experienced unwanted sexual touching at school, and only 14% of those who experienced harassment reported it to a teacher.

• 36% of female students in mixed-sex schools say they have been treated differently on account of their gender at school, compared to 15% of male students.

• Over a quarter (27%) of secondary school teachers say they would not feel confident tackling a sexist incident if they experienced or witnessed it in school.

These stats demonstrate the extent to which sexism in schools is an institutional problem. During the Be Her Lead teacher training, we offer space for the women on the programme to share their stories of sexism in their schools, and the stories that provoke the most anger are usually those where other members of staff are perpetuating sexist attitudes themselves. Or remaining silent - and a teacher is always teaching, even when they are silent. Do we want to teach our students to be silent when they witness sexism?

• A quarter of girls aged 14 self-harmed last year

• Half of girls aged 6-8 feel they should be thinner

The mental health crisis affecting young people of all genders is a complex problem, with multifarious causes. But it’s scary how many girls and young women in particular are attacking their own bodies, with problems like eating disorders and self-harm disproportionately affecting them. And no wonder - our culture does attack female bodies, relentlessly and viciously but often oh so subtly, if they don’t conform to a patriarchal and racist ideal. As they are with sexual harassment, schools are largely silent on this issue, especially as students (mainly girls) who develop eating disorders or self harm, are often high-achieving perfectionists who don’t pose a threat to schools’ Ofsted results. I was one of those girls who developed an eating disorder in my teens, and now I wish my school had done more to protect my mental and physical health.

So, how did reading those stats make you feel?

To be honest, my reaction was a lack of surprise, and a depressing sense of boredom and fatigue. It’s clear that we have a huge gender inequality problem on our hands, and our school system is not tackling it effectively enough.

But what do we mean when we say we need ‘feminism in schools’, practically as well as theoretically? We all know that “healthy school meals” could refer to a seasonal menu cooked on-site using fresh produce from the school vegetable patch, but it could also refer to a fruit bowl shoved in between the turkey twizzlers and doughnuts. In the same way, “feminism in schools” could mean churning out the same boring International Women’s Day assembly every year and delivering the odd history lesson about the suffragettes, or it could mean something more radical - and this is what I’d like to propose and explore. I think we need feminist schools.

Imagining a feminist school system

So what could feminist schools look like? Well, they could look like schools in Sweden, where gender equality is central to policy making and resource allocation, because the government itself identifies as feminist. The school curriculum “urges preschool teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers” to help combat gender stereotyping. (If your initial jolt is “Social engineering? Creepy! Run!” take a moment to consider your own education, and acknowledge that it’s all social engineering of one form or another.) In 2016, every 16 year old in Sweden received a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book We Should All Be Feminists. I’m struck by the boldness of this campaign, how unashamed this is as an official endorsement of feminism. The choice of book title means that even the kids who chucked it straight in the bin still got the message. 

And this was a few months after the UK government made a move to drop feminism from Politics A Level. It was later reinstated, but as an optional extra, of course. As is often the case with the perspectives of the marginalised in our society, feminism is all-too-often included in our education as a curiosity, an add-on, a take-it or leave-it extra. And this approach is arguably counterproductive because it reinforces the idea that these perspectives are not as important or essential as the white middle class male stuff at the “core”. 

This is definitely the case with our current school curriculum in the UK - feminism is not mentioned in the core framework documents, and is shunted to the edges of some subjects. Usually this takes the form of focusing for one or two lessons a year on the experiences and achievements of 50% of the population - (“Look, women in STEM exist! Okay, now back to work.”) - or occasionally acknowledging gender inequality and its related struggles, but rarely in a way that will make students sit up and look around at their own unequal society. 

In History, for example, we place a huge focus on the suffragette movement and then the discussion of gender peters out. If we discuss the suffragettes without mentioning the other struggles of 20th and 21st century feminism, without exploring the equalities we have yet to win, and just as importantly, without acknowledging the classism and racism which infected the women’s suffrage movement, we send out the message to our young people that feminism is a battle led by white women and already won. So we can give ourselves a pat on the back and brew a cup of tea.

Conclusion: a feminist overhaul

Rather than skirting around issues like gender inequality, which affects the fabric of our society and therefore every student’s life experience, we need to embrace feminist values and thinking as important tools in the re-shaping not only of our curriculum, but of our whole education system. This includes:

• Our teacher recruitment and training methods; Be Her Lead was founded by four teachers, and we view teacher training as one of the most effective ways to empower students and bring about change in schools

• The measures by which schools are held to account, the ways in which hierarchies of power are structured in schools

• A different narrative for education; telling our students a different story about what - or who - their education is ‘for’. Shifting the emphasis from exam results, and instead using education as a tool for building a fairer future. Re-shaping our system to be more focused on our young people’s own life stories - including their present and future wellbeing.

This is what I’d like us to mean when we ask for feminism in schools, and this is what I mean when I suggest that schools proudly identify as feminist.

In the second part of this blog, I problematise the idea of feminist schools, using Be Her Lead’s mission and my personal experience to illustrate. Read Part 2 or return to blog