The decision to shelve No Outsiders lessons at Parkfield community school (Parents force primary school to shelve anti-homophobia project, 5 March) flies in the face of recent comments by the chief inspector of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, strongly supporting the programme, and allows free rein to those who wish to depict the Muslim community as blinkered and intolerant.
I was particularly struck by one of the placard slogans as reported in the article: “Education not indoctrination”. It is precisely the former that No Outsiders is about.
Students of all ages need to be made aware, through age-appropriate lessons at all key stages, that there are different theories, opinions, beliefs and lifestyles present in our society. If parents wish to promote one particular lifestyle as superior, that is their absolute right, and the home is the place in which this can and should be done. It is a school’s duty to teach students about the world as it is, not as some might like it to be.
Rev Stephen Terry
Chair, the Accord Coalition for Inclusive Education
• It would help if news organisations stopped describing No Outsiders as an “anti-homophobia project”. The title of the course says it all. It is designed to promote respect, tolerance and equality regardless of gender, race or lifestyle. This is its ethos, not the specific promotion of “LGBT equality”, an ethos much needed in a UK plagued by knife crime and discrimination.
Roy Boffy
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands
• Muslim parents at Parkfield school in Saltley are brandishing banners saying: “Education not indoctrination.” Under which of those two categories does the teaching of religion come?
David Redshaw
Gravesend, Kent
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