Teachers terrified of committing micro-aggressions, head of a top private school warns

Teachers are becoming "incredibly anxious" of being accused of micro-aggressions by their pupils, the headmaster of a leading private has warned.

Nicholas Hewlett, of St Dunstan’s College in southeast London, told the Sunday Times his staff are facing "a righteous generation of children looking for their teachers to trip up, who are looking for the micro-aggressions."

Micro-aggressions are defined as subtle acts or remarks that are perceived to be discriminatory against minority groups, either intentionally or by mistake.

Hewlett, who came out as gay to his pupils in an assembly, said:

“We cannot have in schools everyone walking on eggshells terrified of using the wrong word..."

"What I am seeing starting to emerge as part of the huge national backlash against wokeness... is young people entrenched in a culture of outrage."

"We have young people coming through the system who because of hateful rhetoric have decided they are going to dig into their positions of outrage.”

One of the country's leading sporting schools, Millfield, in Somerset, is seeking to hire 50 teachers from Kenya and India to meet its quota of ethnic minority staff.

Gavin Horgan, the school's Head, wants one in three of his teaching staff to be an ethnic minority — matching up with the ethnic makeup of the pupils. However he claimed the UK doesn't have a large enough bank of BAME teachers to recruit adequate numbers.

Both Millfield and St Dunstan's College have received advise from Flair, a firm that has audited the staff by race, including non-teaching staff, at over 30 independent schools. The result of these audits, which are yet to be published, suggests only two percent were black.

State schools haven't escaped being affected by this phenomenon either. Pupils at Pimlico Academy in London walked out after complaining about racist policies, including one that prevented students' hair obscuring the view of the person behind them.

Inspectors were called to the school and the head teacher has since resigned.