The real "Ghost Children"
"Progressive Eugenics" Part II
Part I examined The British Class system, genetic superiority and a history of able-ism.
Part II looks at the plight of SEND pupils prior to the pandemic and the failure to acknowledge CEV children during the pandemic demonstrates how easily policy makers and influencers can dismiss the lives of those whose real world circumstances are an inconvenience to them
Off-rolling in Education
A look at Michael Gove and Domonic Cummings education reveals the same groups disproportionately impacted as have been during the pandemic. The Education Policy Institutes’ 2019 study on educational off rolling using the National Pupil Database found over 50,000 students had disappeared from school registers, the study’s summary states;
Several vulnerable learner pupil groups are particularly likely to leave schools’ rolls for unknown reasons. Such moves are not accounted for by changes in care placements or changes of address. The following have been subject to an unexplained exit.
1 in 3 pupils in contact with the social care system
1 in 7 disadvantaged children (those ever eligible for free school meals)
1 in 8 pupils from black ethnic backgrounds
1 in 8 pupils with low attainment at primary school
1 in 3 pupils who have experienced an official permanent exclusion,or 1 in 5 of those who have experienced an official fixed term exclusion
2 in 5 pupils of all pupils who had experiences a high number of authorised school absences during their time at secondary school
Throughout the pandemic we have heard the same message when it comes to children, “children must be in school”, however many of those who have portrayed themselves as children’s champions have also opposed all measures required to cut transmission required to reduce disruption to education. We have been living through an SEND crisis for years, so once again it must be asked, where have these self declared champions been for the past decade? Where were they when campaigners were trying to raise our concerns about the increase in off rolling since the development of academy chains and the rationing of resources due to real terms cuts to funding per pupil?
“Ghost Children”
The Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza, appointed in March 2021 has coined the term “ghost children” to refer to students who haven’t returned to school since the pandemic began, estimating this was around 100,000. This has been blamed on students falling through the gaps during lockdown, and undoubtedly this will unfortunately occurred, however the data de Souza refers to is actually data on severe absence which the DfE data shows is predominantly caused by covid sickness.
It’s worth noting that before becoming Children's Commissioner de Souza was CEO of the Inspiration Trust chain of schools which was criticised for its disproportionately high off rolling figures, what also isn’t mentioned is the number of clinically vulnerable households who have felt unable to send their children back to schools that don’t have adequate measures to prevent transmission, no statistics have been released on how many children are in this position but campaign groups representing these families with thousands of members like Safe Ed For All have either been ignored or dismissed as overly anxious by the media. Their members have faced fines and court summons for refusing to send unvaccinated immunocompromised children into unventilated classrooms without masks where there’s been ongoing outbreaks.
SEND and vulnerable students only seam to be mentioned in the media as a reason for ending lockdowns or removing measures, the real world struggles and reasonable fears of these families haven't been raised by those advocating for “focused protection”.
“Enemies of Progress”
Cummings first entered Government as Gove’s main advisor in the Department of Education and played an important part in the development of academy school chains, changes to examination and course content, he also employed some of the narrative shaping tactics and sloganeering he would bring to future campaigns and politics in general. Anyone who opposed the reforms stereotyped as members of “The Blob”, loony lefties with low expectations who were “the enemies of progress.” This was backed up by the Tufton Street Hydra, a collection of astroturf groups whose members were closely linked to the Conservative Party (many of whom would end up being appointed to various positions by the Government) and a barrage of media reports missing important context.
This led to the involvement in education to libertarian contrarians like Toby Young and former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, opaque think tanks and Brexit backing donors, many with their own links to the think tanks were handed control of billions in state assets and funding, as covered in the Byline Times The Revolving Door.
The DfE Eugenics Dossier
In his various writings about genetics Cummings regularly quotes Plomin and Hsu who have written extensively on using large samples of DNA to start identifying complex traits such as diseases and intelligence, references a speech made by Hsu at a UK conference which I believe is likely to be one of the controversial invite only eugenics conferences.
The essay, a 237 page dossier for the Education Secretary Michael Gove claimed genetics plays a bigger role in a child’s IQ than teaching and called for giving “specialist education as per Eton” to the top 2% in IQ. How we define and identify the “top 2%” in a society of increasing inequality isn’t adequately explained. The paper was described as a “blatantly eugenic association of genes with intelligence, intelligence with worth, and worth with the right to rule” by Peter Shanks of the Centre for Genetics and Society.
The dossier also revealed Plomin, who was a key signatory of a statement defending the science behind the Bell Curve by Charles Murray that advocates the genetic inferiority of African-Americans, had been invited into the Department of Education “to explain the science of IQ and genetics to officials and ministers.” Plomin has also published papers with the American Eugenics Society and spoken at several meetings of the British Eugenics Society (the latter rebranded itself as the Galton Institute in 1989) – both of which advocated racial science.
In December 2013 Plomin even got to share his fringe views as an “expert witness” at the Education Select Committee where he told the Government their focus should be on the heritability of educational attainment. Fortunately it seems David Cameron’s government at the time didn’t share Cummings enthusiasm for all encompassing big tech projects, afterall one of their lines of attack in the 2010 General Election had been aimed at Labour’s much delayed and vastly over budget NHS digital reform. Once Cameron left office there was increasing interest in healthcare data and AI use, with Cumming’s project becoming Government policy once Johnson entered Downing Street. With multiple other projects we are seeing public services integrated into private military intelligence organisations.
Throw “social mobility” in the bin
After returning from a Silicon Valley conference in 2014 Dominic Cummings wrote a blog suggesting genes for high IQ could be identified in the future and proposed that people be allowed to select their babies based on perceived intelligence; the same “progressive eugenics” argument advanced later by Toby Young and Fraser Nelson in the Spectator.
In his blog on 21 February 2019 Cummings set out how “The UK could become the world leader in genomic research by combining population-level genotyping with NHS records.” He argued “The NHS has the right incentives, the necessary scale, and access to a deep pool of scientific talent. The UK can lead the world into a new era of precision genomic medicine.”
Suggesting the UK could “push the frontiers of a rapidly evolving scientific field - genomic prediction - that is revolutionising healthcare,” if we offered free genetic sequencing as part of a shift to genuinely preventative medicine.
He claimed “A useful heuristic is to throw 100% of what you read from social scientists about ‘social mobility’ in the bin. Report after report repeats the same cliches, repeats factual errors about genetics,and is turned into talking points for MPs as justification for pet projects. ‘Kids who can read well come from homes with lots of books so let’s give families with kids struggling to read more books’ is the sort of argument you read in such reports without any mention of the truth: children and parents share genes that make them good at and enjoy reading, so causation is operating completely differently to the assumptions. It is hard to overstate the extent of this problem.”
Disproportionate impacts known
The UK Government can’t plead ignorance to the impact of their policy choices, be it Covid, austerity or Gove’s education reforms. A leaked policy discussion document published by the Guardian in August 2019 noted police and crime commissioners “worry about rates of exclusion driving knife crime” and acknowledged concerns policy choices would disproportionately impact on children from some ethnic minority backgrounds, in particular black Caribbean boys, and those with special educational needs.
While 15,000 support staff jobs have been cut, the bulk of these being Teaching Assistants with over 4,000 SEND pupils having gone without a school place for more than a year due to lack of appropriate provision the document showed Downing Street and the Treasury were more concerned that there may be too many Teaching Assistants rather than too few. “No 10 and the Treasury have been keen to publicly express concerns about the rising number of Teaching Assistants and set out the government's commitment to more effective use of school spend.” The document advised against going public with this line, warning “it would undermine the ‘hearts and minds’ aspect of the announcement with the numerous audiences we know value Teaching Assistants - parents, teachers, heads and the SEND lobby. This needs to be handled very sensitively if we are to protect the positivity of the announcement.”
“Inferior Stock”
Coming from a government that has let the minions of opaquely funded think tanks like those residing at Tufton Street and the Atlas Network into the heart of government, it’s deeply offensive to know they described parents who just want appropriate school places for their children as “the SEND lobby”, viewed as a nuisance they were willing to mislead regarding the intentions of their policies.
This isn’t eugenics, but it its marginalising and discriminating against vulnerable groups, and the treatment of the disabled has been dehumanising, people have a right to living in dignity and many have been deprived of this. However, this isn’t the endpoint, these are markers in a direction of travel towards further social injustice.
In the UK it's more complicated than prejudice towards certain ethnicity and able ism, class superiority is hard wired into the country, the dividing lines might be a bit more fuzzy than they were for previous generations but they still exist, but how far does it permeate? Do those within politics and the media believe that some lives have less value, that sections of society are inferior and others are inferior, are there elements of those who have grown up in privilege who believe success is mainly based on genetics and that some of us are of inferior “stock”?
“Inequality is essential for the spirit of envy”
Johnson himself has his own long list of questionable views but one of the most relevant to the subject of eugenics is a speech he made in 2013 to the Centre of Policy Studies (one of the older opaquely funded think tanks which works alongside the Tufton Street Hydra).
“Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85% while about 2% of the population have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top. I stress - I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.”
“No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequalities that it inevitably accentuates, and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.”
“Progressive Eugenics” Part III will cover attempts to re-brand eugenics in the UK media.