A UK primary school teacher has been sacked and banned from working with children after telling a Muslim pupil that Britain is still a Christian country.
The teacher in question was suspended, fired, and is now being investigated for a possible hate crime after scolding boys for washing their feet in the washbasins.
He was referred to his local child protection board over comments made to the pupil at a school in London.
A senior detective from the Metropolitan Police’s child abuse investigation team also became involved… fueling fresh concerns that child protection rules are being twisted to target right-wing view
The Telegraph reports: The teacher, who does not wish to be named, was suspended and sacked for an incident in which he allegedly admonished students for washing their feet in the sinks in the boys’ lavatories. Police were also called in to investigate an alleged hate crime.
According to the child who made the complaint, the teacher told them the school was not a religious one but that there was an Islamic school a mile away if they wished to attend it instead. He also told them: “Britain is still a Christian state” and pointed out that the King was head of the Church of England.
After the feet-washing incident, the teacher tried to explain to the year six class the importance of British values of tolerance. It was claimed he reminded the children that Islam remained a minority religion in the UK.
In his legal claim against the local authority, lawyers for the teacher pointed out the school was a non-faith school and that prayers had been informally banned from the playground – and, by extension, that included washing feet in the sinks – and confined to a prayer room set aside for the purpose.
But the school suspended the teacher in March last year and subsequently sacked him. A month later, in April 2024, he was informed he was being referred to the safeguarding board as well as to the Metropolitan Police. The police inquiry was subsequently dropped. …
The teacher, who is now suing the local authority with backing from the Free Speech Union, was banned from working with children after the safeguarding officer concluded he had made hurtful comments about Islam and that the child had been subject to emotional harm.
The teacher succeeded in appealing the ban and is now understood to be working part-time at another school outside London.
Lord Young, the director of the Free Speech Union, said on Monday: “This teacher lost his job and almost ended up being barred from the profession for life just because he pointed out to a class of Muslim schoolchildren that the national religion of England is Anglicanism.
“Things have reached a pretty pass in this country if a teacher can be branded a safeguarding risk because he says something that’s incontestably true. If he’d claimed that Islam is the official religion of England, even though that’s not true, I doubt he would have got into any trouble.”
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