As a teacher, I encourage children to question the hate that some of them are taught at home
This article written by secondary school teacher Paige Horsford is part of our Voices series on how to fight hate, from the Autumn 2026 issue of New Humanist. To read the rest of the series, subscribe now.
I’ve been teaching English for nearly a decade at an academy in Kent. At our school, we do a Results Day after our Year 11s sit their first round of mock exams in November. They get an envelope with results. There are tears and smiles, admonishments and praise. Then they go around and discuss with teachers what went right, or what on earth went wrong. Parents and carers wag their fingers, both at the kids and the staff.
Last year, I saw that a line was forming. Not to see a teacher, as is often the case, but instead to see a photo on one of our students’ phones. Nigel Farage had just bought a second home in our backyard and is now sometimes seen out and about. The boy in question had taken a selfie with good old Nige, and the parents were queuing up to see it and to find out “what he’s really like”. They threw question after question at this kid. It was like he had a photo with Harry Kane, not someone who has made a living from peddling hatred.
We’re a Reform UK-led local authority. They do the Lord’s Prayer and the national anthem at council meetings now, which is great, I’m sure, but doesn’t help supporting children with special educational needs, or meeting the cost of social care. At a mock election at our school, Reform UK won in a landslide. We know that some of the parents are Reform councillors, and that some were at the Unite the Kingdom march. How do we combat that?
We do assemblies educating about different cultures; we have an extra-curricular diversity, equity and inclusion group; we have staff who volunteer in refugee camps and share their experiences with our students; we have taster language classes where children of different heritage can share the basics of their language and feel some ownership in the classroom.
The hate problem clearly isn’t coming from the kids. We can educate and be the change we want to see, but that becomes infinitely more difficult when our students go home and then are told they’re wrong. We’re wrong. Those “leftist, woke” teachers are “poisoning their minds”.
It comes from the home or from toxic algorithms that feed aggressive and hateful content – made by people like the misogynistic Tate brothers or Tommy Robinson, who tell the kids that only they really care, only they are on the side of right. Only they and their hate will save them. And when we try and teach them about love and tolerance, they are instructed to fear and mistrust us.
Don’t give up hope. I am not saying that it’s futile. In fact, I believe that every time I challenge, query, wonder aloud, engage in conversation or fact check, I am making a difference.
I know this to be true, because I was once one of those children. I grew up in a family like that. I didn’t know any different. I repeated the offensive jokes. Everyone laughed when I said it, so it must be funny. An adolescence spent in grassroots football only embedded the attitudes further. The more you are surrounded by it, the more you believe you are right.
I am embarrassed now to look back on some of my behaviour as a young person. Through hindsight, I know I should have been better. But you only know what you know, right?
Only one thing changed me. Education. Every time an educator challenged or engaged me, I inched a little bit more towards compassion and acceptance. It didn’t happen overnight. It certainly wasn’t easy. But the more educated I got, the less the hate made sense.
Working in education is now a Sisyphean task. Education spending, under a Labour government, is lower than it has been since 2010. Between 33 and 40 per cent of teachers leave education within five years of qualifying. They are burned out. Society expects them to be everything to everyone.
Educators need to love what they do and feel like they are making a difference. They need to be able to stop and talk to the kids – not walk past them because they’re trying to complete the 17 tasks they have nine minutes to do. We have some of the world’s unhappiest teenagers. No wonder they’re turning to figures who promise to fix the world.
To be able to keep on educating, while encouraging compassion and celebrating each other, teachers need to be taken seriously. Schools need to be funded properly. Especially when what kids are getting outside the classroom is hate.
Hate is a learned behaviour, but so is love. That’s what we need to be teaching.
