The Three-Year-Old Bigot

The Bellend of the Month for January 2015 is not a person, but rather political correctness gone mad. It's happening in the UK, where children as young as three are being branded racists, homophobes, and bigots over playground taunts. Thousands of pupils are being reported for so-called hate crimes after using innocuous words such as ‘Chinese boy’, ‘Somalian’, or ‘gay’. Teachers also log insults like ‘doughnut’ and ‘fat bucket of KFC’. Even calling a pupil a ‘girl’ can be classified as abuse. Schools file the incidents for local education authorities. The details are also passed to Ofsted inspectors who are required to assess how teachers deal with bullying. Records of a child’s ‘prejudice-related’ behaviour can be passed to their next school, potentially casting a shadow over their secondary education. Alleged offences by more than 4,000 pupils were logged in just 13 council areas – meaning the national total may stretch into the tens of thousands. Civil liberties campaigners warned the practice could have serious consequences for any children labelled as bigots. Particularly worrying is the expansion of incident recording and reporting to ever-greater categories of prejudice, which seem limited only by the strange imagination of education officials. One primary school pupil calling another a girl suddenly becomes a sign of gender image prejudice, subjected to recording requirements more thorough than accompanying most burglaries. A reality check is urgently required. Schools should record such bullying, but they should record and share details of bullying by type, without identifying the children or young people involved. This helps tackle bullying in the most appropriate way and to develop assemblies or programmes about specific issues if required. Recording types and rates of bullying and prejudiced-based incidents is good practice for schools and is data that Ofsted is interested in. Identifying the pupils should be used for disciplinary purposes only.