The government should have done its homework before bombarding schools with An Inconvenient Truth, says Nicholas Hancox
When the government decided to distribute Al Gore’s partisan film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, wholesale and free of charge to every secondary school in England, its civil servant advisers must surely have mentioned their own inconvenient truth; that biased political propaganda is illegal in maintained schools.
Why would politicians decide to distribute a DVD to thousands of schools, if they did not want to influence the opinions of the pupils who would watch it? Their objective must have been political; they must have wanted the film to change the opinions of the pupils—not about the science of climate change, but about the desired political response to the science of climate change.
Sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996 (EA 1996) were first enacted during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in 1986. Section 406 bans political indoctrination in maintained schools. Section 407 requires a balanced treatment of all political issues in those same maintained schools.
