The Blog

2020-

2020-12-28 b
THE ETON CHRONICLES
"So something many colleagues and parents considered an excellent stimulus for debate is also terrorism?"

Eton College attempted to refer dismissed Master under Prevent duty

School contacted Local Authority Designated Officer to report concerns about Will Knowland's controversial lecture

Eton College attempted to refer a dismissed Master under the Prevent duty for advocating male superiority and the glorification of violence, The Telegraph can reveal.

The £42,500-a-year school contacted the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead’s Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) to report its concerns about Will Knowland's controversial lecture.

The school is understood to have told the LADO, responsible for managing child protection allegations in the borough, that the lecture advocated male superiority and female subservience, glorified violence and promoted far-right and alt-right extremism.

Eton has been engulfed in a free speech row following Mr Knowland's dismissal for gross misconduct earlier this year.

The video lecture, entitled the "Patriarchy Paradox", questioned "current radical feminist orthodoxy" and was part of the Perspectives course taken by sixth form students to encourage them to think critically about subjects of public debate.

But Mr Knowland was banned from giving the lecture to students and then sacked after a dispute over his refusal to remove it from his personal YouTube channel.

Eton has maintained that the dismissal was "not a matter of free speech" but one of "internal discipline" and that the video fell foul of equality laws.

Simon Henderson, the Head Master at the 580-year-old boarding school, said Eton makes "no apology" for teaching pupils to respect each other's differences.

But it has now emerged that Eton also tried to argue that the lecture posed a safeguarding threat to pupils since it risked drawing them into extremist ideologies.

Since 2015, when the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act was passed, schools have had a statutory duty to prevent children from being drawn into terrorist acts, known as the Prevent duty. Schools need to report any concerns they have about pupils who are at risk of radicalisation, which can include Islamist terrorism, far-right terrorism and Northern Ireland-related terrorism.

However, the LADO found that the lecture did not meet the threshold for the Prevent duty and referred it back to the school to deal with internally.

Mr Knowland told The Telegraph that the school's attempted Prevent referral was "laughable", adding: "So something many colleagues and parents considered an excellent stimulus for debate is also terrorism?

"The video has over 40 academic references, including work published by Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale. Are these the kind of ideas considered akin to terrorism in Henderson's safe-space Eton?"

In the lecture, Mr Knowland explores the biological differences between men and women, stating that as well as being physically stronger men are also "more violent by temperament".

But he denied that the lecture argues for male superiority or glorifies violence, adding that it points out that men can "afford to treat their lives more cheaply" since they are less necessary to society when it comes to reproducing and nursing infants. (read more)

(previous blog entries about Eton here and here)

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