Mention woke indoctrination in schools and most people might imagine something like a pink-haired, nonbinary teacher forcing children to take the knee for Black Lives Matter. If you look on TikTok, you will find no shortage of such teachers gleefully revealing how they sneak Pride flags, LGBTQ+ books and BLM posters into the classroom. Certainly, there are plenty of activist teachers working in schools, who see pupils as a captive audience. Yet as worrying as such examples may be, they are merely the tip of the iceberg.

New research conducted for Policy Exchange by author and academic Eric Kaufmann suggests that activist teaching is now extremely widespread in the UK. What’s more, it is beginning to have an impact on the views of young people. Polling for The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary Britain, published last week, finds that six out of 10 school leavers say they were either taught about ideas associated with critical race theory, or they heard about them from an adult at their school. These include concepts like white privilege, systemic racism and unconscious bias. Slightly more – 65 per cent – say they either encountered the concept of patriarchy or the idea that there are multiple genders from adults at school.