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I was proud to be the head of a 'woke' school.

I really don't understand people who use 'woke' as an insult. As far as I can tell, it means being thoughtful, empathetic and inclusive, which doesn't sound like an insult to me. When I was a headteacher, my school was very much a 'woke' organisation, and I am proud to say that this was as much due to the attitudes of the children as to the example set by the staff.

We had pupils who identified as being transgender, families with same-sex parents, families from many different cultures, and our children quite rightly accepted everyone as being part of our school community. Perhaps the thing that made me the most proud, though, was the fact that when I became the headteacher there we still heard children using the word 'gay' as an insult, but by the time I left my school, that had disappeared entirely.

Knowing quite a bit about our families, I suspect that 'wokeness' was largely driven by our children making their own decisions about how they wanted to act, and their strong moral choices used to make me feel really optimistic about the future.

Thankfully, our country has not abandoned this approach, unlike our friends across the pond, who seem to have done so. It saddens me to see that the US Secretary of Defence has announced today, at the beginning of Pride Month, that he was ordering the US Navy to change the name of one of their ships from its current name, The USS Harvey Milk, to reflect something I think he is calling the 'warrior culture'. 

Now, Harvey Milk was a gay civil rights activist who served in the Navy, so it would seem very appropriate for a ship to be named after him. I don't know what they expect to happen with the name change. Are they expecting the boat to be better at war? 

I really hope we don't go down this route in the UK, and that Farage, our own mini-Trump, is found out before he gets any more political power. Even if he does, though, I have faith in our young people that they will be able to counter any anti-woke agenda. If the children of my school are anything to go by, we needn't worry too much.

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