Students for a Free Tibet (SfT) raised concerns over Labour’s early years minister, Stephen Morgan MP, following his trip in May to Wuhan, where he represented the UK at the World Digital Education Conference.
SfT is a global chapter-based organisation that campaigns in solidarity with Tibetans seeking freedom and independence after China’s invasion in 1950.
According to various media sources and the United Nations, around 80 per cent of Tibetan children aged between four and eighteen - around one million pupils - have been placed in state-run boarding schools. These schools reportedly remove children from their families and replace Tibetan with Chinese as the primary language of education.
As a result, some children return home unable to speak their mother tongue, making communication with their families difficult. SfT describes this as a form of “cultural erasure” that can result in long-term emotional trauma.
In 2022, the UK government told the United Nations that Tibet remained an issue of “deep international concern, including new reports of boarding schools being used to further erode cultural, linguistic and religious identity.”
The following year, UN experts expressed alarm at what they described as the “forced assimilation” of Tibetan children and "erosion of their identity".
Following Mr Morgan’s visit, SfT wrote to the MP seeking clarification. The group said it received only a vague reply in which Mr Morgan asserted that a Labour government would “challenge where we must, to protect UK values,” and highlighted that there is no record of him raising the Tibet issue during the conference.
In a statement, SfT said:
“The fact that Stephen Morgan, as the individual entrusted with overseeing Early Childhood Education and representing the United Kingdom abroad, is publicly contradicting an established, major foreign policy position held by the UK and echoed in consensus by many like-minded countries and allies cannot be ignored, as the potential political consequences are significant.”
The group has called on the UK government to release a statement detailing the purpose of the visit, including who funded it and what was discussed at the conference roundtable.
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