Hate in schools has risen meteorically. What lessons are our children learning?

According to official Department for Education data, more than 70,000 suspensions and exclusions were issued in English schools between 2021 and 2025 for incidents involving racist, homophobic and transphobic abuse.

The figures represent a near 70% increase over the period, not over a generation, not over a decade, in just four years.

It is a shocking statistic, but I suspect for many parents, teachers and pupils, it is not a surprising one, making the obvious question, why?

What does it say about our country when prejudice is spreading through our schools at such a rate? What does it say about the society today’s children are inheriting? And who bears responsibility?

I do not ask that last question because I am interested in blame. I ask it because if we are not brave enough to answer it honestly, how can we possibly hope to solve the problem?

I certainly do not need a government report to tell me something has gone badly wrong. I know because I have seen it through my own daughter and through countless conversations with Jewish parents, teachers and students since 7 October.

When my daughter Anoushka was 11 years old, we made the decision not to send her to one of London’s leading private girls’ schools. The reason was simple, it was because we had become aware of an incident in which a swastika had reportedly been carved into a bathroom wall.

Perhaps some will dismiss that as an isolated act of vandalism, we did not. For Jewish families, a swastika is not merely graffiti. It is a reminder of where hatred begins and where, if left unchallenged, it can lead.

Six months later, while playing netball for her Jewish school against a local state school, Anoushka experienced something even more direct. She was told by girls a few years older than her that she could not use the bathrooms because they were “not for Jews”.

An 11-year-old child being told that because she was Jewish, there were places she was not welcome. The school chose not to take meaningful action against those responsible and in doing so the girls involved learned a lesson that day.

So did my daughter and that, perhaps, is the most troubling part of all.

Every incident of prejudice teaches two lessons simultaneously. One to the perpetrator and one to the victim. The perpetrator learns what society is prepared to tolerate. While the victim learns what society is prepared to ignore.

Anoushka’s experience is not exceptional, but a microcosm of the lived experience of many Jewish schoolchildren in Britain today. Most will never make newspaper headlines, most will never appear in government statistics. Most will simply become another story quietly shared between parents, another reason why a family chooses one school over another, another warning passed between friends, another small compromise made in the hope of keeping a child safe.

Over the past two years, story after story has emerged from schools across Britain. Jewish pupils subjected to Nazi salutes in classrooms. Students having swastikas drawn around them or directed at them. Children being called “Zionist pigs” by classmates. Jewish students threatened, isolated and blamed collectively for a war taking place thousands of miles away. Teachers reporting that concerns about antisemitism were ignored or minimised.

One recent collection of testimonies submitted to the government’s independent review into antisemitism in schools detailed incidents ranging from Holocaust references and Nazi salutes to threats of violence against Jewish children and yet even these examples barely scratch the surface.

For every incident that reaches a newspaper headline, there are countless others that do not. The joke made in a corridor, the slur muttered under someone’s breath, the social exclusion, the group chat, the teacher who feels uncomfortable speaking up, the student who decides reporting it is pointless, the parent who fears making things worse for their child.

Much of the prejudice that exists in schools never appears in any official statistics because many children simply learn to live with it. I strongly suspect that what the government’s independent investigation into antisemitism uncovers will dwarf the scale of the problem many currently believe exists.

It is important to say that this is not a problem unique to the Jewish community, it is simply the one I have lived experience of. I have seen its impact through my own children, their peers and the families around us, but the wider statistics tell a broader story.

Muslim children experience abuse.

Black children experience abuse.

Asian children experience abuse.

LGBT children experience abuse.

Disabled children experience abuse.

Different communities may experience different forms of hatred, but the underlying mechanism is often the same: teaching young people to view others not as individuals, but as representatives of a group against whom blame, suspicion or resentment can be directed.

While my lived experience may be of antisemitism, the disease itself is prejudice and every minority community eventually pays the price when prejudice is allowed to become normalised.

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable, because if we are serious about solving this problem, we have to be honest about where children are learning these behaviours.

The answer, they are learning them from us.

They are learning them from politicians who increasingly frame entire groups of people as problems to be solved, from social media platforms whose algorithms reward outrage, grievance and division, from activists who encourage collective blame, from parents who repeat conspiracy theories at the dinner table, from a culture that increasingly sees every issue through the lens of tribe, identity and resentment.

Schools do not exist in isolation, children absorb what they see around them.

It would be naïve not to recognise the key role politics is playing in this trend, both reacting to and proactively feeding the nightmare perfect storm swirling around the next generation.

Across the political spectrum, parties and movements that increasingly trade in grievance, division and identity politics are gaining ground. Whether it is the Green Party on the left or Restore on the right, voices that would once have been regarded as fringe are now attracting growing support and dragging mainstream debate further towards the extremes.

What was once whispered is now shouted, what was once politically toxic is now rewarded with votes. Many of those casting ballots for such parties would describe it as a protest vote. Increasingly, however, it feels less like a protest and more like permission. Permission to say publicly what people once knew they should keep to themselves.

That is an uncomfortable thought, but there is an even more uncomfortable one. It would be too simplistic to suggest that all of this hatred always existed and has merely been given a microphone. Certainly, some people have always held prejudiced views and now feel emboldened to express them openly, but many others have not simply been given permission to hate, they have been taught to hate.

Their prejudices have been cultivated, encouraged and reinforced by a culture that increasingly rewards outrage and division. The result is that prejudice has not merely been normalised, it has been manufactured and then amplified.

Children are not simply witnessing that process, they are being raised inside it.

When we spend years teaching people that entire groups can be judged collectively, dehumanised collectively and held responsible collectively, we should not be surprised when those lessons eventually find their way into classrooms.

What this is most definitely not is an argument against free speech, an argument against criticism or against debate. In fact, I would argue the opposite. The purpose of education is not to produce children who never say difficult things. It is to produce adults who can say difficult things responsibly.

Children should challenge authority. They should question orthodoxies, debate controversial issues, criticise governments, religions, institutions and political parties. A healthy democracy depends upon it.

What they must not do is confuse criticism with prejudice, disagreement with hatred. What they must not do is learn that entire groups of people are collectively responsible for the actions of a few. That is not democratic discourse, it is the oldest form of prejudice there is.

So what is the answer?

Part of it lies in education itself. If some children are not learning tolerance, empathy and respect at home, and if social media continues to fail them, then schools must step in.

They must do so not with slogans, performative assemblies or with tick-box exercises, but with people, real people. Jewish, Muslim, black, LGBT speakers. People whose stories challenge stereotypes and humanise those who are too often reduced to labels.

Children do not learn tolerance from PowerPoint presentations or lectures from a teacher with no lived experience of the hate being directed at others. They learn it from human connection. They learn it from hearing experiences different from their own. They learn it from understanding that the person they have been encouraged to fear, resent or stereotype is, in reality, not very different from them at all.

Most crucially of all, they learn that it is entirely possible to disagree with someone without hating them. They learn to challenge ideas without dehumanising people and to criticise governments, political movements and institutions without assigning collective guilt to entire communities.

Democratic society is at its strongest when we can disagree robustly but respectfully. When we can debate passionately but remain curious. When we can say difficult things from a desire to improve society for everyone, not to tear apart the fabric that holds it together.

Prejudice survives when people become categories and thus it weakens when people become human beings.

I have never much liked the well-worn phrase that “children are our future.” Not because it is wrong, but because it is incomplete. Children are not simply our future, they are our reflection.

They absorb the values we model, the language we use, the behaviour we tolerate and the examples we set. They watch us far more closely than we realise and, in time, they echo what they see. The kindness we show, they carry forward. The prejudices we indulge, they carry forward too.

Every generation inherits something from the one before it. The question is whether we are handing our children the tools to build a better society than our own, or merely passing down the divisions, resentments and failures we lacked the courage to confront ourselves.

The figure of 70,000 suspensions do not primarily tell us about the next generation, they tell us about ourselves. They tell us what children are seeing, what they are hearing, what they are learning from the adults around them.

When my daughter was told that the bathrooms were “not for Jews”, the girls involved learned a lesson that day, so did my daughter. That is the danger of every act of prejudice left unchallenged. It educates both the perpetrator and the victim and across our schools, our politics, our media and our wider culture, we are educating an entire generation every single day.

The 70,000 suspensions are not the disease, they are the symptom.

A warning light flashing on the dashboard of a society that is becoming increasingly comfortable with division, increasingly casual about dehumanisation and increasingly willing to judge people not as individuals, but as members of a group.

Until we are honest about that reality, we should not be surprised when the numbers continue to rise.

The next generation is watching us and increasingly, it is repeating what it sees.

So perhaps the most important question raised by these figures is not what is happening in our schools. It is what is happening in our homes, in our politics, in our media and across our society that is causing it.

If we cannot answer that question honestly, we have little hope of changing the outcome.