Toby Young resigns from Office for Students after backlash over his Twitter posts

Gone: Toby Young said he quit because he was a distraction to the higher education regulator
Rex
Martin Coulter9 January 2018
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Toby Young has resigned from his position as a director of the newly created Office for Students.

Mr Young revealed his decision via a blog post for the Spectator magazine, in which he said his appointment at the new higher education regulator had become "a distraction".

He wrote: "I have decided to stand down from the Office for Students.

"My appointment has become a distraction from its vital work of broadening access to higher education and defending academic freedom.

"Education is my passion and I want now to be able to get on with the work I have been doing to promote and support the free schools movement."

Mr Young had come under increasing scrutiny since his appointment in early January, when posts from his Twitter account were unearthed in which he was alleged to have made sexist and homophobic remarks.

A petition calling on Theresa May to sack Mr Young from Government recently gained more than 200,000 signatures.

Defending reports of his social media activity, he said: "The caricature drawn of me in the last seven days, particularly on social media, has been unrecognisable to anyone who knows me.

"I am a passionate supporter of inclusion and helping the most disadvantaged, as I hope my track record of setting up and supporting new schools demonstrates.

"But some of the things I said before I got involved in education, when I was a journalistic provocateur, were either ill-judged or just plain wrong – and I unreservedly apologise."

Mr Young's appointment came under heavy scrutiny recently due to a series of Twitter posts, many of which he has since deleted.

While watching Prime Minister’s Questions in 2011 he wrote: “That’s quite a cleavage behind EdM.”

In 2012 during PMQs he tweeted: “Serious cleavage behind Ed Miliband’s head. Anyone know who it belongs to? #pmqs”

He followed it up with “Breaking: Cleavage belongs to @pamela_nash #pmqs”, referring to former Airdrie and Shotts MP Pamela Nash.

In 2013 he responded to criticism of his previous comments by saying: “Women who display a lot of cleavage shouldn’t then complain when men notice them.”

In 2004 he wrote an article about posing as a lesbian for the night and embarking on a “whistlestop tour of New York’s hottest lesbian clubs” with the aim of drawing lesbians into his confidence to “make out with them on the dancefloor”.

In a Spectator column in 2012 he called on the Government to repeal the Equalities Act, saying: “Schools have got to be ‘inclusive’ these days.

"That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy.”

He went on to say: “If Gove is serious about wanting to bring back O-levels, the Government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t ‘accessible’ to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be ‘elitist’ and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.”

He has since said that he was using the word “inclusive” in the “broad sense to mean a dumbed down, one-size-fits-all curriculum, rather than the narrow sense of providing equal access to mainstream schools for people with disabilities”.

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