Ruth Hunt and Ofsted

Still Tish reports on how the sausage is made

Given my coverage of Ruth Hunt’s role, as former CEO of Stonewall, I am somewhat late to the discovery of her links with OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education). OFSTED are the government body that oversees education standards in England. This is a devolved responsibility so it does not cover the other parts of the U.K.

OFSTED has quite a range of responsibilities as outlined here:

The current chief inspector is Amanda Spielman:

Amanda Spielman was appointed as the Chief Inspector in 2016. The appointment was met with some criticism, at the time, and it was not endorsed by the Parliamentary Select committee covering education. Not a usual occurrence.

The Education Committee held an on-camera, pre-appointment, scrutiny hearing on the 22nd June 2016. You can watch that on the link below. 👇 (For the Hansard nerds)

Education Committee

Following that session the Chair of the Committee wrote to Nicky Morgan, then the Minister of Education, to express concerns at Spielman’s appointment. The committee raised a number of issues. One of their specific concerns was about child protection:

Nicky Morgan, Minister of Education robustly defended the appointment and rejected the opinion of the Education Committee. This is a report of the recruitment process, as recorded on Hansard. Trigger warning! This was in 2016 and here is the analysis of the shortlisted candidates; which uses the transphobic dog whistles of “male” and ”female”.

Interestingly, Nicky Morgan’s own appointment had attracted criticism, because she had voted against gay marriage. Ms Morgan allayed these concerns by appointing Luke Tryl, late of Stonewall, as her special advisor.

The Stonewall influence did not end there. This is the recruitment panel for Ms Spielman’s appointment, it includes Ruth Hunt.

Ruth Hunt was then the CEO of Stonewall. Here she is celebrating the fact that Ofsted had joined the Stonewall #NoBystanders campaign. Standing beside her, highlighted in blue, is another member of the recruitment panel, Chris Wormald. Highlighted in green is Alison Pritchard, now at the Office of National Statistics, formerly Director of Transformation in the Dept. of Environment who has also held posts at the GEO (Government Equalities Office).

In the following, Ruth Hunt celebrates the support from the Department of Education and inserting the Stonewall mantra of the day “acceptance without exception”.

Chris Wormald made the announcement and signed the Stonewall pledge at an event hosted by the Department of Education LGBT & BAME staff networks. The DFE was ranked in the top 100 of Stonewall Employers when the list was available. (After a number of high profile departures, the list is no longer publicly accessible).

Circled in green, in the above picture, with Ruth Hunt, is Alison Pritchard. Pritchard has had an interesting and influential career.

Pritchard has had two stints at the Government Equalities Office. This from LinkedIn.

Pritchard was recently nominated for an award reserved for women in tech.

Pritchard now works for the Office of National Statistics, who lost a court judgement, in March 2021, when they attempted to change the Census to allow self-identification into sex based categories. You can read about this here. Census case

Following the appointment of Ms Spielman the love-in continued when Luke Tryl , Nicky Morgan’s special advisor, was appointed, by Spielman, to a £90,000 a year role at Ofsted.

The cosy relationship continued with Ms Spielman giving the keynote speech at a Stonewall Youth conference.

This was part of Spielman’s pitch, to Stonewall Youth, in that keynote address.

More information about Sabah Choudrey, one of the speakers mentioned above

Sabah worked with the All Sorts Youth Project who are behind some of the more egregious school guidance on Transgender pupils.

I wrote about that here:

Brighton Allsorts: Transgender Guidance for Schools

As frequently observed the activists in this field are not satisfied unless its supporters show abject compliance with all aspects of trans-ideology. Here, Ofsted is criticised for failing to discuss transgender issues with primary school children. This information was obtained by a Freedom of Information request. The email shows Stonewall lobbying Ofsted via back-channels.

Stonewall went on to imply that schools should be “marked down” if they did not discuss the issue of “gender reassignment” with children, that is children in Primary School.

Fast forward to 2021 and, at last, we see some unravelling of the institutional capture as OFSTED finally leave Stonewall Lobby Group.

I am not able to determine where Ms Spielman stands on this issue. I am merely pointing out the influence of Stonewall, yet again, and emphasising the level of institutional capture.

I will leave you with Ms Spielman’s own spiel to the Education Committee during the pre-appointment scrutiny. Stonewall is a crusader for Gender Identity Ideology and by aligning too closely with their controversial agenda, many institutions lost sight of their objectivity, honesty and integrity.