Reform’s proposal for portraits and flags in classrooms raises a harder question than anyone running for office likes to admit
Reform UK has proposed what it describes as a patriotic curriculum for British schools, including portraits of the King and greater prominence for the English flag in classrooms, framed as a corrective to what the party argues has been a substandard curriculum undermining national identity in favour of what it calls a mass migration agenda. Whatever one makes of that specific political framing, the underlying question, what should schools actually teach about national identity, deserves a genuinely serious answer rather than a slogan on either side.
The Portrait Offer Already Tried, And Its Modest Result
A previous government scheme offering free royal portraits to state schools reportedly saw uptake of only around a third of eligible schools, a figure worth sitting with before assuming any similar future offer would automatically achieve dramatically different results. Voluntary symbolic gestures of this kind depend heavily on individual headteachers’ own judgment about what belongs on their classroom walls, and a one third uptake rate suggests this particular symbolic offer, however well intentioned, did not resonate as universally as its proponents might have hoped.
What Genuinely Divides People On This Question
The actual disagreement underneath this proposal, in my reading, is less about whether children should learn about their country’s history and institutions, which essentially nobody across the political spectrum actually opposes, and rather more about which specific version of that history and which specific symbols get privileged as the default, uncontested expression of national belonging in a country that has become considerably more demographically diverse than it was when many of the older, more established national curriculum traditions were originally written.
Teachers Are The Ones Who Actually Have To Navigate This Daily
Classroom teachers, who rarely get quoted at length in the political coverage of proposals like this one, are the people who actually have to manage a classroom containing children with genuinely different family histories, religious backgrounds, and relationships to British identity, all under a single national curriculum framework, a genuinely difficult daily balancing act that political slogans on either side of this debate tend to flatten into something considerably simpler than the reality teachers describe experiencing.
Other Countries Have Faced Similar Debates
Britain is far from alone in wrestling with how schools should teach national identity to an increasingly diverse population, with comparable debates having played out in France, the United States, and Australia over recent decades, each producing its own distinct compromise between honouring a shared national story and genuinely reflecting the diversity of the population actually sitting in classrooms, a comparative perspective that British policy debates on this specific question rarely draw upon as much as they probably should.
What A Genuinely Thoughtful Curriculum Might Actually Look Like
My own instinct, offered for whatever it is worth from a columnist rather than a curriculum specialist, is that the most durable approach probably lies somewhere between the two extremes currently on offer in this debate, teaching British history and institutions with genuine seriousness and pride where pride is warranted, while being honest enough about the more difficult chapters that the resulting national story feels credible rather than merely decorative to the full range of children actually being taught it.
Why This Debate Will Not Resolve Quickly
Curriculum debates of this kind rarely resolve cleanly within a single political cycle, since they touch on genuinely contested questions about identity and belonging that outlast whichever specific government or party happens to be proposing changes at any given moment, meaning I expect some version of this argument to keep resurfacing regardless of what happens to this particular proposal specifically.
What I Would Actually Want To See
Rather than another symbolic gesture debated primarily in press releases, I would genuinely welcome a proper public conversation involving teachers, historians, and pupils themselves about what a shared national story that feels honest to the country’s full population might actually contain, a considerably harder and less photogenic project than a portrait offer, but one I suspect would produce something more durable.
Further detail on the proposed curriculum is available via this coverage of Reform’s proposal, and further background on national identity attitudes is available via the British Social Attitudes report.