As a teacher I refuse to remain politically neutral – my students will be encouraged to protest climate change

On the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated to the White House, a group of my students flooded into my classroom at lunchtime in the inner-city London academy school I was working in at the time to ask my advice.

They had heard there was a demonstration in central London that evening, and united in their horror that a man who they perceived to be a virulent racist was about to become the most powerful man on earth, they wanted to attend the protest and make their voices heard.

Without hesitation, I whipped out my hidden collection of coloured marker pens, ripped up the cardboard boxes that were storing exercise books in the back of my classroom, and helped them design placards with eye-catching slogans to carry on the demonstration. When the group of 20 students who had gathered left to travel to Westminster after school that day, I was proud to join and march alongside them.

Not long after, I was called into the headteacher’s office to be reprimanded. Did I not realise that it might have been “dangerous” for students to attend a political demonstration? Did I not understand that teachers were required to present themselves as politically neutral to their students, regardless of how grotesquely unjust the political issue at hand may be?

As school students prepare to engage in the latest round of climate strikes this Friday, these same spurious accusations are being volleyed at teachers and school leaders who support their students’ political action once again.

But it is clear that the existential threat posed by climate change is too profound for teachers and their students to watch dispassionately from the sidelines as the planet burns. And suggesting that students might be in danger by attending demonstrations wilfully disregards the history of peaceful political protests in this country undertaken by school students whose actions have been fundamental in shaping national political debates.

From the mass school walkouts over the Iraq War in 2003, to the sixth form students who joined the tuition fees protests in 2011, young people have shown time and time again that the greatest danger they face is at the hands of our political elite. After all, it is their warmongering, their relentless austerity cuts, and their failure to radically tackle climate change that most profoundly impacts students’ everyday lives, and their futures.

It is also little wonder that Theresa May was quick to condemn the student strikes, arguing that students will miss “valuable learning time” by attending. This only reaffirms how narrow the Tories’ vision of education has become.

The legacy of Michael Gove’s national curriculum means that schools and students are now prescribed to disconnected, abstract facts that can be regurgitated in examinations, with little connection to anything meaningful in the real world.

Education should be so much richer and more purposeful than this. I became a teacher because I wanted to ignite a passion in young people to commit themselves to fighting the many injustices that exist in our troubled world today. Students should be equipped with an armoury of powerful knowledge, and an understanding of how to use their voices effectively, in order to effect fundamental social and political change. With this vision for education, taking part in the student climate strikes would only serve to enhance what students learnt in the classroom, rather than detract from it.

If politics remains confined to the corridors of Westminster, Theresa May’s zombie government can lumber on. That these young people have forced climate change on to the agenda, at a moment when all political airtime is being taken up by the government’s Brexit chaos, demonstrates that mass political action is impossible to ignore.

Teachers and students everywhere should unite in solidarity with the climate strikes, because when this happens, the anger and frustration of millions of people in this country at our current shambolic government will be far harder to contain.

Holly Rigby is a teacher working in an inner London secondary school. She is a Labour Party member and National Education Union activist, and writes mostly about education and politics