OF all the campaigning groups forged in the febrile atmosphere of post-referendum Scotland, Time for Inclusive Education (TIE) has been one of the most effective.
Celebrating its 10th birthday a few weeks ago, it looked back on real achievements reflecting this country’s embrace of a more progressive future. Thanks to its efforts, LGBTQ school pupils are able to feel more recognised in our education system.
TIE has expanded from an organisation campaigning against the prejudice and bullying faced by [[LGBT]]Q pupils to one with its own staff creating resources and training for teachers on behalf of the Scottish Government.
At the heart of its success is a deep friendship between a young gay man and an older, straight trade unionist, which sparked the energy needed to power real change.
That friendship was rightly celebrated at TIE’s 10th birthday party, but the smiles were tinged with an unease over a rise in right-wing rhetoric, which has more recently threatened to undermine some of the advances TIE has made.
The National talked to TIE founders Jordan Daly and Liam Stevenson about their work, their friendship, their achievements, and the difficult challenges which lie ahead.
THE BIRTH OF A FRIENDSHIP
Jordan: I was 19 when I first met Liam, and an undergraduate student at the University of Glasgow. I was about a year out of school, and it was just after the independence referendum. So like most people of my age, that was the first seismic political event [we had experienced].
I think the thing that struck Liam and I was the Radical Independence Campaign’s slogan “Another Scotland is Possible”. A lot of the discussions around the referendum for me were very much about another Scotland that looks after vulnerable communities, that prioritises and enhances equality and addresses inequality.
I was really engaged by the referendum but none of my close friends were very politically engaged.
One of my mum’s friends told me about this guy who was involved in politics and was organising a food bank fundraiser.
When I contacted him, Liam and I clicked very quickly. We were both passionate about issues related to poverty. It was the start of a very fast friendship.
Liam: My activism at that time was trying to promote the message of what an independent socialist Scotland could look like, and what people should be striving for.
After the agonising defeat in 2014 I remember thinking that this isn’t done; there’s going to be another go at this in the future. For me, this was about a better Scotland. It was about an opportunity to try and wipe the slate clean and ask what would a new country look like, and how do we start going about building that?
After the referendum I accepted a random friend request from Jordan on Facebook. Back then I was really self-conscious, even more so than I am now. I was 36 years old, a petrol tanker driver and a trade unionist. But I wasn’t university educated. I firmly believed that was a huge barrier for me.
I had never read all these books. My political outlook and worldview have been shaped by my life, not by books. So when I met this impressive, bright, young guy, I’m thinking, this is going to be interesting. Jordan and I just clicked. Although there was a massive age gap, we had a lot in common: how we viewed the world, and what we thought a better world would look like.
I’m not a religious guy. I’m not a spiritual guy. But when I look back, I am absolutely convinced that we’ve been put together for a purpose.
Jordan: I was the first out gay person that Liam had as a friend. I often describe Liam, in a joking way, as the kind of GI Joe stereotype of masculinity. He’s got the shaved head, he’s quite buff … if you were to draw a masculine man from Scotland, you would draw Liam.
I used to say to him, “you’re the kind of person that I would cross the street to avoid, because I would have expected that someone that looked like you might be homophobic towards me.” But I was making stereotypical assumptions. What I found in Liam as a friend was someone who was deeply empathetic and understanding and prepared to stand up for me. I remember going down to Liam’s house one night for a drink and having conversations which in hindsight led to TIE.
THE ORIGINS OF TIE
Liam: I always admired most those people that were confident enough to be authentic and live their lives with their true identity. There were no out gay people in my school.
When I initiated some conversations with Jordan about what school was like for him, I was completely dumbfounded.
Jordan: If my objective was to do well in my exams and go to university, then I had a successful education. The challenging aspect for me was the extent of how normalised homophobia was from early on. I heard the word gay all the time. I heard words like lesbian all the time. But I heard them in the playground, and I heard them as insults and jokes and slurs. There was never any sensible education about what gay or lesbian meant.
That was my primary school experience. Everyone in my generation who grew up with that, hearing this really casual, normalised homophobic language and having it addressed, we all went into secondary school thinking that casual homophobia was acceptable.
Like any form of prejudice, it often starts with everyday language and escalates into more serious behaviours. It was probably about six months or so into my first year of high school that the bullying started. A group of boys that just assumed that I was gay decided to bully me for it.
Bullying is hard to speak to a staff member about, because you’re worried about consequences and that it will make things worse. You’re not quite sure how the school will react.
Liam: All this was absolutely surprising to me. I was shocked and disappointed.
I started looking online and pulling up data from surveys of young people in schools across the United Kingdom. I realised this was still a real problem. A homophobic culture was emanating in schools, which were failing to protect young people who were potentially lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.
Jordan: I think the friendship with Liam helped me process some of what I had experienced at school. He was the first person that I really opened up to and spoke to. Even some of my family members didn’t know about how serious things had become for me at school.
What I learned from Liam was that solidarity, support and friendship can come from quite unlikely sources. I think that was a really important lesson for me.
At school I learned about racism and how dangerous it could be, I learned about sexism and the unequal treatment of women and misogyny, the Suffragettes and Emmeline Pankhurst. And I learned about religious discrimination.
And I remember saying to Liam, why couldn’t I have also learned about the introduction and repeal of Section 28 [legislation which banned discussion of homosexuality in schools], or the Stonewall uprising, or LGBT history that I ultimately had to learn for myself when I left school? Why couldn’t we have learned about that at school?
Liam: I think it was me who first suggested creating an organisation to tackle this. I had no idea about the enormity of the task that was ahead of us. Had I known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have put my shoes on.
Jordan showed me a documentary, How To Survive A Plague, about the Aids epidemic. One of the things that struck me was that we’ve structured our society in a way that made these people feel shame instead of being immensely proud of the community to which they belong.
That gave me the absolute urgency to say we need to be teaching young people this, because we need to give young people that confidence to know that just because you’re gay or bi or lesbian or trans, you shouldn’t be ashamed. You should be proud of that because you come from a really rich tapestry of resistance, people fighting literally for their lives.
TIE: THE FIRST STEP
Liam: The first-ever donation to the TIE campaign came from my branch of petrol tanker drivers at Unite. I didn’t ask for it. Another member asked for it. Jordan was crying when they gave us 500 quid to produce a booklet to send to every MSP in the country containing stories of people who had a really difficult time at school. That donation was very important to me.
Jordan: We were talking about things we could do and I said I learned at school about petitions. We found out that the Scottish Parliament would accept petitions from the public. So the very first thing we did was to draft up a petition calling for LGBT education to be included on the school curriculum.
Liam: We walked Buchanan Street asking people to sign the petition. Our first press coverage was an interview with The National.
Jordan: I wasn’t quite sure what people’s responses would be, but it was really positive. A lot of people were surprised LGBTQ education wasn’t already happening. People assumed that education was up to speed with the modern world.
THE NEXT STEPS
Jordan: I remember the first time we gave evidence at the Scottish Parliament. I had only ever been there on a school trip when I was in primary seven. Liam had never been there. Both of us were terrified.
We were only supposed to be there for 15 minutes. They extended the session to an hour, and I remember being quite emotional at the end of it.
The petition ended up getting rejected on a technicality. We don’t have a statutory curriculum in Scotland, so they couldn’t include it.
Liam: I think we were supposed to have just gone away after the petition was rejected. When I was asked for a statement on the petition being closed, I said: “That’s a setback, nothing more.” And that was the spirit that we adopted. We went away. We thought about a new strategy and came back with it.
THE FIRST BIG SUCCESS
Liam: When the door opened for us to speak to government officials, they asked us how to progress. Jordan and I, always the pragmatists, said: “We need a working group with every stakeholder in education on it, because we need to get it right first time.” It reported in 16 months with 33 recommendations.
Jordan: Simultaneously, we were meeting with MSPs and support was really building. The trade union movement was coming out in support; the National Parent Forum of Scotland came out in support.
I remember when we walked into the first working group meeting. [[Education]] Scotland were there. So were the National Parent Forum and the Scottish Catholic [[Education]] Service, the Scottish Human Rights Commission and Cosla. We both had real impostor syndrome.
Liam was still working nightshift as a petrol tanker driver. I was working part-time in a bar at the time. I would finish there at 1am and work in my car outside my house because my little sister had just been born, so I couldn’t go in and wake them up.
Liam would be working nightshift and he would have a phone call on his headphones and we’d talk about what we would do, what we could ask for at a working group meeting the next morning.
Nowadays we laugh about conspiratorial ideas suggesting that TIE is a quango that’s been propelled along the way and been given all this money. The reality genuinely was two people who had to prove themselves time after time.
Thirty-three quite detailed policy recommendations were agreed unanimously by every stakeholder on that group, which, in hindsight, was a quite remarkable achievement. And those recommendations were then accepted in full by Scottish ministers.
TODAY’S CHALLENGES
Liam: There seems to be a culture just now that has shifted back in time, when it’s cool to be cruel again. The rise of the so-called “manosphere” online and normalisation of hate has had an impact on young people for example. I can remember the 1990s as a young guy growing up, when we were often encouraged to display our masculinity in very different ways from the way we did five years ago, when it was encouraged to be better men and softer, kinder men.
I feel as if things started to shift in a different direction due to some of the influences on social media targeted at specific groups of people. Some of the political narratives that have been introduced and normalised are really distressing.
Jordan: We’ve had the Me Too movement, which rightly and accurately called out men’s violence against women. We had equal marriage. And we had Black Lives Matter. I think that quite a lot of what we’re seeing now culturally is the kind of last-gasp backlash to that progress.
That’s impacted us as an organisation in that we’re seeing US culture war rhetoric imported here. In 2018 it would not have been normal or acceptable to target an education organisation – one that is working on a daily basis to address homophobic bullying in schools, that employs teachers to deliver those education services – to call their staff groomers, and yet that is now a normal experience for us.
Even doing this interview, we have to prepare not only ourselves but our family and staff for the online harassment that will come from that. I think we’re seeing LGBT topics and education initiatives like ours being weaponised and misrepresented to distract from decades of consecutive economic failure that have made people’s lives harder.
In the United States, we see the impact of that disinformation and false claims such as “children are being told to transition in schools”.
We had that with Section 28. We’ve had that censorship. It’s dangerous and it’s damaging, and I think that we have to be very careful not to give credence to that type of rhetoric, to this idea that there’s inappropriate or extreme teaching happening in schools.
The reality of the situation is children are learning about same-sex families alongside lots of other types of families. They’re learning about the impact of homophobia that they already see and experience at school, and they’re given factual information about historical events.
We have to challenge these false narratives, these lies, with the truth.
Liam: Allyship is also very important, where people who are not members of minorities stand up against those who attack them.
We’re currently living in a period in which truth doesn’t matter. Before truth has brushed its teeth, the lies are two times around the world. People are using slurs that we thought we left in the 1970s and 1980s and maybe at the start of the 1990s about LGBT people being predators and being paedophiles and being people who can’t be trusted to be positive influences around young people.
Some of this stuff leads to people like me and Jordan having rapid response alerts on our properties for the police so that if we dial 999 and give an address, every officer in the vicinity has to drop their stuff and get to a property, because we are viewed by the police as vulnerable to harm simply because we want all children to go to school and to learn in an environment where they’re safe, respected and protected.
