The Department for Education has revealed that the number of primary school children being suspended for racist behaviour has risen by a third in the past few years, from 430 incidents in 2014-15 compared with 320 in 2009-10.

This is not a case of “political correctness gone mad”; children as young as six are not being routinely suspended for just poor choice of language. The issue is more widespread than individual schools and speaks volumes about a society where young children mimic racial abuse. Such an increase should come as no surprise, given the nature of the Tory-led government’s increasingly racist social policy.

There are undoubtedly a variety of reasons for the increase in reported racial incidents in schools. A spokeswoman for the DfE explained that the figures showed an increase in reporting, “not necessarily that there had been more incidents”. Due to the Prevent agenda, schools are now sites of surveillance where teachers are expected to report signs of “nonviolent extremism”. In the age of hyper-vigilance it is certainly possible that teachers are being more sensitive in their reporting.

Schools could, maybe even should, offer a corrective to the corrosive social attitudes that children bring in

It is also easy to lay blame at the door of parents for their children’s poor behaviour and tie these figures into the wider problem of abuse that teachers face in schools. However, the sociologist C Wright Mills warned against seeing public issues of society as personal troubles of individuals. If we take the figures at face value then a large increase in racist abuse in primary schools is a symptom of a wider societal problem. And even adults have to get their cues from somewhere. When the “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” of Ukip have become mainstream and Nigel Farage is deemed as some kind of lovable rogue, then the well has truly been poisoned.

The young child spouting racist abuse is drawing from the toxic environment towards immigrants that the Tories have contributed to since coming to power. Theresa May, the one constant since 2010, presided over a Home Office that thought it appropriate to send vans round the capital telling illegal immigrants to “go home”. The vans were just the visible expression of her anti-immigration policy which included refusing entry to parents for their child’s funeral; illegally deporting almost 50,000 foreign students; and leaving people to drown in the Mediterranean as a deterrent to anyone thinking of migrating to Europe.

The vote for Brexit demonstrated the depth of anti-immigrant feeling in Britain, as did the sharp rise in racial attacks following the referendum. But the truth is that Brexit and its aftermath were just the crest of a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that the Conservatives have been riding since 2010. One of the main reasons that a referendum on Brexit was offered by the Tories before the last election, was to play to the concerns of the electorate about immigration. David Cameron badly miscalculated when he assumed that people would not “vote themselves poorer because they don’t like the Poles living next door”. But as the saying goes, you reap what you sow. You cannot spend years stoking the flames of anti-immigrant feeling and then complain when they set you alight. The Tories are complicit in creating an environment where racist abuse is flourishing.

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Schools could, maybe even should, offer a corrective to the corrosive social attitudes that children bring in with them. But the fragmentation of the system makes this more difficult to deliver. On top of this, the government’s response is to “promote British values”, completely ignoring that this very notion is part of the problem. The logic goes that in order to protect these “British” values, which supposedly keep the nation together, we need to pull up the drawbridge to prevent society being polluted by alien ideas. Notions of Britain as a benevolent force for good in the less advanced parts of the world were central to the British empire. Unsurprisingly, recycling ideas of colonial supremacy, in the form of “British values”, does little to reduce racist incidents in schools.

When the government feeds off anti-immigrant sentiment it is sadly no wonder that young children are increasingly bringing racism into the classroom. We would be wrong to think that this problem can be solved at a school or individual level. Children act as a mirror for the environment they grow up in, and the challenge is to build a society we are happy for them to reflect.