Primary School Introduces Rewards for Kids Who Report “Sexist” Language Such As “Lets Go, Guys”

Children at a primary school in Birmingham have been taught to vilify teachers and fellow students for using “sexist” language. 

Children as young as three years old at the Anderton Park Primary School have been instructed to hold up posters rejecting the use of “sexist” language, which includes banned words and phrases such as ‘let’s go, guys’, ‘man up’, ‘grow a pair’ and ‘boys and girls’. 

As reported by The Times, children who challenge “sexist” language are rewarded with one of two certificates handed out weekly to pupils who produce the most notable examples. Children are also taught to monitor their reading books and worksheets for sexist stereotypes and look out for language such as calling an assertive girl “bossy” or saying “boys don’t cry.”

According to The Times, one member of staff at the 500-pupil school was summoned to a professional conduct meeting for telling pupils that “boys don’t skip.” 

“The children ran into my office one playtime and said, ‘Miss, Miss, something terrible has happened,” reported the school’s headteacher, Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson. “One of the supervisors has just taken a skipping rope off a boy and said boys don’t skip.’ They were rightly absolutely horrified. It was brilliant that they ran in to tell me.”

Hewitt-Clarkson, who invented the so-called Anti-Sexism Programme at Anderton Park, stated:

“The phrase ‘Good morning boys and girls’ is not used in this school. Instead all teachers say, ‘Good morning everyone’. Girls have posters they hold up every time one of the teachers says, ‘Come on guys’. The posters say, ‘Sir, I am not a guy.’ Sometimes the teacher still forgets and it slips out, but our training here shows that if you are resolute you can stamp this out.” 

The headteacher, who has trained more than eighty teachers across England in the same programme, described the usage of the posters as “a fun way of making a point.” She asserted that “stereotypical language has power,” and described sexism as a spectrum “which extends from a teacher using the word ‘guys’ to the rape, torture and murder of women.” 

“So many people use ‘running like a girl’ and think that is funny,” said Ms Hewitt-Clarkson. “But no one would say ‘running like a black’. If you say ‘man up’, you are saying there is one way to be a boy and you are not following it. ‘Guys’ is an interesting example of how a word that signifies men has come to be used for everyone. We teachers must put a stop to sexist language. All these things are part of a jigsaw that suggests girls are lesser than boys. We have to unpick all the ways that this idea is drip-fed into our consciousness.”

As reported by The Times, Hewitt-Clarkson decided to speak out about the policies she had put in place after the murder of Sarah Everard last month. The headteachers anti-sexism programme, which encourages vigilance about behaviour as well as language, requires boys and girls to be mixed in assembly lines and sports teams. 

“Suicide is the highest killer among young British men,” said Hewitt-Clarkson. “We would not expect any teacher here to say that boys don’t cry. Those harmful stereotypes are part of the reason for the very high male suicide figures. When we interview anyone for any job in this school we always ask, What would you do if a boy said, ‘I am not using that pink highlighter pen because pink is for girls’?”

Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson herself has historically been subject to controversy. In 2019, she requested Birmingham High Court for an order banning protests by parents and activists after she ran a “no outsiders” LGBTQI+ education programme in which the notion of families with “two mummies or two daddies” was normalised through the schools teaching materials. Opponents of the programme accused Hewitt-Clarkson of “sexualising” the children, and said that the school’s teaching about LGBTQI+ rights conflicted with their religion. A 2019 survey found that 81.5% of the 674 pupils at the school did not speak English as their first language, and a large section of pupils were from Muslim backgrounds. 

In relation to the controversy, Hewitt-Clarkson said some parents “started freaking out” about the words “compulsory” and “sex.” She added that “genuine fears and genuine confusion were fuelled unforgivably by people who are homophobic.”

“When I see those pictures of two-hundred to three-hundred people in one afternoon standing outside my school,” Hewitt-Clarkson said, “I look at that like I’m an observer from a foreign land. That’s not my city. That’s not my school. This isn’t an extension of home. It’s not a place of worship. It’s different. And many things will be similar and some things will be different, and that’s the way it should be.”

In 2019, the school became the first in the UK to be surrounded by an exclusion zone, within which demonstrations are banned. Hewitt-Clarkson was subsequently added to a police fast response scheme in the event of an incident at her home after she received death threats on social media, and she was made the Times Educational Supplement’s person of the year for “the way she led her school - becoming a leading voice in promoting the importance of equality in schools.”