I’ve spent this week in Stratford-upon-Avon at the annual meeting of HMC, the organisation of leading independent schools. We were sharing both best practice and current anxieties, trying to map the future and to deal with an uncertain present. Business as usual, then?

Not really. Something changed this week. In nearby Birmingham, new prime minister Theresa May was laying out her vision, in many ways one with no place for people like us.

I’m not referring to my sector’s spat with her over charitable status in the Green Paper, but to something much deeper. Our conference, as ever, encompassed a broad view of education as creating opportunities for all: but our tone differed entirely from the PM’s. 

Representatives of universities are anxious about the future: will they be permitted to take students from overseas? As for researchers and university teachers from overseas, the whole thrust of government policy seems set to put at risk the sharing of knowledge, research and university teaching across Europe (regardless of the rest of the world).

You can see why academics are worried: home secretary Amber Rudd’s pronouncement on limiting foreign students to the “best courses” is already causing hostile waves in India.

And then there was the other part of Ms Rudd’s speech that generated such headlines as The Times’s “Firms must list foreign workers” - even some Tories were aghast at that. Neil Carmichael commented:

This unsettling policy would drive people, business and compassion out of British society and should not be pursued any further. People moving to the UK to work hard, pay their taxes and make a contribution to our society should be celebrated, not shamed. This kind of divisive politics has no place in 21st-century Britain.

This is about much more than Brexit. With Labour furnishing no discernible effective opposition, we might have expected the ruling party to seize and firmly occupy the centre. Yet the political centre-ground the PM boasts of redefining has lurched to the right: not one policy outlined was remotely centrist.

We educationists talk a great deal, at conferences and elsewhere, about school values, including that of compassion for the unfortunate, immigrants too. Teachers’ values, not merely in the private sector but shared by the colleagues I meet across both sectors, are essentially liberal, based fundamentally on respect for the individual and care for others.

Suddenly we find these values being pilloried. We are now the “liberal elite”, educated, internationalist, and slammed by Theresa May for our “smugness”. We’re accused of “sneering” at the patriotism of ordinary hard-working people (clearly education professionals are regarded as neither ordinary nor hard-working), and deriding their concerns about immigration.

In schools we teach children about human rights, not least in history lessons on Nazi Germany. Yet this week, the Tory faithful booed human rights lawyers: moreover, according to defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon, part of “getting our country back” will involve axing bits of the European Convention on Human Rights that he doesn’t like.

Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera was right to tweet:

Increasing fear “We need to accept results and make Brexit work” = “We need to sit back and accept bigotry, hatred, division, intolerance.”

What sort of country can seriously propose in a party conference, that of the party of government, no less, that we disengage from an international convention on human rights? What price compassion now?

You might ask, why am I writing this here? Surely the larger political picture has, or should have, nothing to do with education?

If only. Educators cannot claim it’s nothing to do with us when we see bigotry applauded and accorded standing ovations at the annual conference of the party in power. If we are indeed, the “liberal elite”, we must create debate and challenge intolerance. 

Normally optimistic, I retain a trust in old-fashioned British compromise and inertia. We’re not at heart extreme, so I’d hope that few of those extravagant, rabble-rousing promises to the party faithful will be fully enacted. 

I really do hope so.

Dr Bernard Trafford is headteacher of Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne, and a former chairman of the HMC. The views expressed here are personal. He tweets as @bernardtrafford

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