The new Government document prosaically named “Suspensions and permanent exclusions in England” hardly sounds like a riveting read. And yet it is the most up-to-date document telling us what is really going on in the country’s schools. From it, we can gauge not only behavior but also see how opinions around education can be shaped by deliberate misrepresentations of data.

Reporting on the figures this week, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror suggested that pupils in junior schools are becoming increasingly racist. When you look at the statistics it does, initially, seem to support such a conclusion: there has been a 220% increase in suspensions for racist behavior in primary schools over the last three years. But the alarmist headlines, emphasizing that children “as young as four” are being suspended for racism, are pure clickbait. In reality, only five reception-age pupils in the country were logged as using racist language.

That doesn’t stop groups such as the Campaign for Real Education (CRE) claiming that “our anti-racism teaching strategies are clearly failing”, which is, to say the least, highly debatable. For those of us who work in schools today, they are incomparably more tolerant places than they were several decades ago. The Mirror refers to two shocking videos of black children being bullied and concludes with the unfounded claim that “experts fear children isolated during the pandemic may have developed racist views.”

One of these self-styled “experts” is Maryam Javaid who, perhaps inevitably, is on a “journey” of motherhood and homeschooling. She likes to “share her ramblings”, and one of these is the claim that a pupil being called a name “creates shame, fear and a message that they don’t belong”. She calls for “clear policies, swift accountability and staff trained to […] challenge racism”.

But contrary to the experts, what these statistics actually show is that, in many ways, schools are doing all that Javaid and others like her are calling for. Teachers are regularly trained in issues relating to equity, diversity and inclusion. Safeguarding training is mandatory. Every school will have publicly available policies on bullying which will include action taken for racist behavior. No profession is perfect, but if there is one that is committed to treating everyone equally, and being under huge scrutiny to do so, teaching is just that profession.

Schools are often a reflection of society’s ills. If racist language is ubiquitous online, if once-taboo words become used in everyday conversation at home, they will be heard in the playground. Inevitably, our youngest pupils, lacking the ability to edit themselves, or use words in a suitably sensitive way, may repeat what they have heard. But the truth is that children are no more racist than they have been in the past, and much good work is being done in schools to ensure that they remain overwhelmingly tolerant places.

We have to strike a balance between being too zealous in our desire to accuse young children of beliefs they imitate and don’t understand, and seeing our schools as broken places which can only be fixed if we pursue one agenda. For a four-year-old to be excluded from school for using racist language isn’t just a damning statistic: it is a national tragedy that will, almost inevitably, ultimately harm the society that has been so severe in the first place. Many people — primarily the parents — will have failed that pupil, but the school will not be the main influence.

Accusing a whole school system of failing to combat racism and intolerance is self-defeating. We ought to have more faith in our young people and those who teach them. It must not become another theatre in the culture wars.

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David James is deputy head at a leading independent school in London, and also teaches at a local state school.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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