Using Licensing Boards to Silence Truth

How a panel of bureaucrats in the modern age can become an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth'

Joshua Sutcliffe has been prohibited from teaching schoolchildren throughout England.

Joshua Sutcliffe was a mathematics teacher at The Cherwell School in Oxford, England. One might expect such an environment to be void of controversy, and a rather safe career in which one would never agonize about his ability to support a family. In the modern age though, jobs that match such a description are scarce. Joshua just lost his legal ability to teach schoolchildren anywhere in England.

While most probably presume that such an aggressive measure must have been precipitated by accusations of abuse or similar egregious behavior, Joshua’s only ‘crime’ was misgendering a student.

“Well done girls,” he had said to a group of students. They were all girls, but one of them was identifying as a boy. His phrasing was actually accidental, for he apologized immediately thereafter. The girl claims being misgendered on other occasions by the same teacher, which Joshua denies, though he has stated that he thinks it harmful and dangerous to affirm gender transitions. Joshua is a Christian, and moreover, he is capable of reason, and thus he doesn’t want to lie to a child by referring to a girl as “him” when the opposite is true. He had tried to avoid using pronouns altogether, however, so as not to be antagonistic.

There’s something perverse even in the language that we are using to describe the issue. “Misgendering” is the modern description of failing to recognize the gender that someone is pretending to hold, but in a society that valued truth, misgendering would be failing to recognize the inherent, unchangeable sex of a person.

The student’s mother lodged formal complaints against the teacher, first getting him fired from The Cherwell School, and then escalating to the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), whose license is required to teach students in England. The TRA investigation was highly ideological and wrought with Orwellian phrasing. For instance, the official report states:

“The panel found Mr Sutcliffe had some level of insight and remorse as regards the effect of his actions on pupils. However, this was limited and fell significantly short of the level expected by the panel.”

The panel was gauging his level of remorse and found it to be inadequate. We can only speculate on how many tears he was required to shed, and what his atonement was supposed to look like.

Perhaps most interesting is the claim by the TRA that a prohibition order (from his ability to teach) is necessary for “the maintenance of public confidence in the profession”. Fundamentally, that depends on what the profession is. What is it to teach? If teaching is the instruction in the truth, as it ought to be, then this decision by the panel certainly did not build public confidence.

After all, this is a punishment that was given for speaking the truth, and it seems clear that it is meant to dissuade others from doing similarly. It is meant to send a ripple of fear throughout the profession. Ironically, this is happening in a country that is at the same time shutting down its gender clinics for children, after acknowledging the harm that was done.

The TRA report against Joshua ominously clarifies:

“This means that Mr Joshua Sutcliffe is prohibited from teaching indefinitely and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England.”

One of the overlooked aspects of this case is the financial terrorism that is implicit therewithin. By prohibiting him from teaching — even at institutions that might wish to hire him — they have jeopardized his ability to provide for his family, and have invalidated the years he spent in academia learning to become a teacher. This manner of financial control seems to be the direction of the future.

The act of starving cultural opponents is one of the biggest dangers of centralized licensing boards, whether in education, medicine, or elsewhere. While it is easy for anyone to see the potential benefits of easily ousting truly problematic staff using such boards, the real cost is immeasurable. It gives such panels the power to effectively prohibit the practice of the Faith, to prevent criticism of systemic or institutional problems, and to keep out ideological adversaries. In the case of education specifically, it means maintaining strict dogmatic control of what is taught to children throughout an entire nation.

As the culture war rages on and the young are so often lost spiritually in the academic battleground, we must be ever-mindful of attempts to prevent independent institutions and educators from teaching that which is true to the next generation.