Good Riddance to 'Educate and Celebrate'
Elly Barnes set up Educate and Celebrate to "queer" schools. Her over-reach and the antics of a Trustee caused the charity to implode. With any luck the same will happen to more LGBT+ lobby groups.
If you want to know how our institutions became infested with gender identity ideology and why that has been such a disaster a good place to start is with the rise and rapid collapse of the LGBTQ+ charity, ‘Educate and Celebrate’, which recently announced its closure.
This is a longer version of an article that will appear later this week in Spiked Online.
You get it first ….and with all the naughty bits their lawyers will delete.
By the way, I kept the special Christmas offer of a paid subscription going for a few weeks extra. It’s currently at only £30 a year.
So grab it while you can. Remember it works out at only…£2.50 a month if you take the discounted annual subscription.
According to its own folksy official history, Educate and Celebrate was set up by a well-meaning music teacher Elly Barnes to promote a diversity training programme she developed in her school in Stoke Newington in 2005. Driven by her cheery personality the organisation became a huge nationwide success, garnering accolades, awards and for Barnes herself an honorary doctorate and even an MBE.
In countless newspaper and TV interviews Barnes spun this as a feel-good story in which a plucky grassroots initiative overcame all the odds ….in order to improve children’s lives. The truth was rather more sinister. Like almost all contemporary LGBTQ+ lobby groups Educate and Celebrate was actually a vehicle by which dangerously wacky notions approved by the woke elite could be imposed top-down on ordinary families. Enabled by a network of friends in high places it was then assisted at every turn by an idiot civil service and activists from the furthest fringes of the Far Left.
At first Barnes seemed innocent enough. In the first years of her organisation she focused on the prevention of homophobic bullying of secondary school students. All very laudable. It wasn’t long though before she turned her attention to younger, more impressionable minds. In a video in 2019 she announced she wanted to “smash heteronormativity” among primary age children and even “queer the primary school”.
You, me and any sane person might think these goals a tad outlandish. After all 97% of the human population is heterosexual, and no primary age child is ‘queer’ except in the fevered imagination of the kind of people for which criminal checks were invented.
Yet instead of banning this spiky-haired fruitloopy from schools the wonks at the Department of Education described the programme of Educate and Celebrate as ‘Best in Practice’.
The Educate & Celebrate initiative is innovative and visionary’ claimed Ofsted in Jan 2016.
Barnes wasn’t finished plumbing the depths yet. As her star waxed so the target age of the children she wanted to ‘queer’ got lower. In 2022 she co-wrote a book aimed at that eminently queerable demographic ….3 year olds and above…. which aimed to teach them the alphabet using LGBTQ+ issues. The cover sets the tone, featuring a “woman” with heavy stubble and what seems like breasts holding a baby.