Colleen Harkin on Mornings fiveAA – 1 October 2025

In this interview, Colleen Harkin appeared on FiveAA Mornings to discuss the IPA’s research into the National Curriculum.

All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.

Below is a transcript of the interview.

Matthew Pantelis:

Quarter past nine on FIVEAA. Now, policy documents across education departments right across the country encourage teachers to use non-gender inclusive terms for their students, and the advertiser’s got a story this morning, and I’ll read you one paragraph from it. It says a policy document from the SA Department of Education says, “Teachers are responsible for promoting the use of inclusive and non-gendered language within the education or early childhood service setting.” What that basically means is boys and girls are out, and words like friends, fam, cherubs, squad, gang, funsters, and comrade are in our classrooms. Have you ever heard anything as ridiculous as this? From the Institute of Public Affairs, the Director of the Schools Programme is Colleen Harkin, and she joins me now. Colleen, good morning. Thank you for your time.

Colleen Harkin:

Hi, good morning. Yep. Good morning, Matthew.

Matthew Pantelis:

It sounds ridiculous, does it not? I mean, surely, just stupid language.

Colleen Harkin:

It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. Look, as a former teacher myself, my students would’ve rightly laughed me out of the room if I’d attempted to call them things like epic humans, or cherubs, or comrades, or something. And despite what bureaucrats want us to believe, students are very good at sniffing out nonsense. They know when things are just not authentic. And sort of trying to get rid of the terminology of boys and girls, it is dehumanising, and it’s just a pursuit of an ideological conformity that just denies biological reality.

Matthew Pantelis:

Teachers would know this, would they not, that this is stupid? And kids do sniff this out, as you say. They would know this. So where does this come from? People who have never dealt with kids presumably.

Colleen Harkin:

Well, that’s right. I mean, this is sort of bureaucrats sitting in an office somewhere who very likely have never had a cold face teaching job in the classroom. And the issue here also, Matthew, is that our education system is in crisis with declining standards and schools need to focus on ensuring that students are proficient in reading and writing and all the things that parents rightly send their children to school for so that they can become independent and critical thinkers so that they’ve got skill set that they require for their adult life, and they don’t expect them to be sent to school to be indoctrinated with radical social justice causes.

Matthew Pantelis:

Is that what this is essentially?

Colleen Harkin:

Of course, it is. Of course, it is. Changing the language to deny biological reality is the underbelly of the critical race theory stuff. It’s the underbelly of an ideological pursuit and they’re sort of putting it in by stealth.

Matthew Pantelis:

Yeah. All right. Tied to this morning, quoting somebody here who’s a practitioner for gender diverse children and families saying non-gendered language, hugely important for some students. And the quote is having teachers use gender inclusive language has huge impacts on kids’ mental health and shows gender diverse children, they are included and seen. Any truth to that?

Colleen Harkin:

Look, I mean, the challenge with this is that, of course, everybody wants to feel included, but definitionally, we are now confusing other children. So the percentage of children in the classroom who are now being told that they can choose their gender and that we are confusing them. So the idea that including one child will solve the problem is actually it’s naive and it doesn’t work that way. There’ll be half a dozen at least other children in the classroom who’ll be thinking about, “Well, I thought I was a boy, am I?”

Matthew Pantelis:

Look, if teachers came in, and this happened back in the day and they said, “Good morning, everyone.” Then everyone’s included, and we don’t think anything out of that. If they say boys and girls, boys over to the right, girls over to the left, whatever, we’d go okay, but the funsters and the, as you say, the epic humans and whatever else, I mean there is a level of BS that creeps in.

Colleen Harkin:

The other component of this, Matthew, is that in any given day, a teacher will use some kind of collective noun for the group a thousand times. This is not just saying good morning everyone once in the day and then you never use it again. It’s a concerted effort to have to change your language to use the children as props for an ideological experiment.

Matthew Pantelis:

Yeah, indeed.

Colleen Harkin:

It is standard procedure and language to say, “Good morning, boys. Good morning, girls.” As you say, boys move over to the left, girls move to the right, whatever. You say those things a thousand times a day. So to have to actually critically examine every single word that you say all day and change your language is an indulgence, an absolute luxury of indulgence for ideology and a distraction to what a teacher actually needs to be doing.

Matthew Pantelis:

Sure, we must have a lot of bored bureaucrats, don’t you think, coming up with things like this?

Colleen Harkin:

Well, I think often they make work for themselves. We don’t hear them crying and pushing towards what’s going on in our classroom. We’re nearly one in three of our students fail to make minimum benchmarks in literacy and numeracy. That’s what we should be focusing on, not whether people are called collectively boys or girls.

Matthew Pantelis:

Yeah, correct. Colleen, appreciate your insights. Thank you.

Colleen Harkin:

No problem. Anytime.

Matthew Pantelis:

Colleen Harkin there, Director of the Institute of Public Affairs Schools Programme on the degenderization, I suppose, of boys and girls in the classroom and terms like funsters, epic humans and whatever else creeping in, because the education department here and interstate thinks that we need to be more gender-neutral, not specific. So boys and girls, no, got to be funsters. Righty-ho, I love to-

This transcript of Colleen Harkin talking on FiveAA Mornings from 1 October 2025 has been edited for clarity.