MEDIA RELEASE
12 August 2026
NSW Schools Are Being Used to Groom Kids for the Far Left — Where Is Education Minister Prue Car: Shelton
Family First National Director Lyle Shelton is demanding NSW Education Minister Prue Car explain how university-aged activists were able to hand schoolchildren a manual urging them to skip class, form “socialist” cells and join a political strike, and what the Government is doing to stop children being used as props in an adult political campaign.
The Daily Telegraph today revealed that university-aged activists have been distributing an eight-page manual, titled “The High School Anticapitalists’ Toolkit”, to students outside inner-Sydney high schools ahead of a planned school strike against One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. About half a dozen activists wearing “socialism T-shirts” handed the booklet to a Year 10 boy and his friends between Newtown railway station and their school. The document instructs students on how to get out of class, recruit classmates and “build an anti-Hanson, socialist activist network” at their school, and tells students to remain in uniform at the strike so they can be “immediately identified by the media and the public as school students.”
“This is not about politics — it’s about protecting children who cannot even vote from being recruited into somebody else’s revolution,” said Mr Shelton. “These are school kids being coached by university activists on how to skip class, form ‘socialist’ cells and march behind a booklet that says the answer to everything is to ‘tear down the entire despotic system of capitalism, root and branch’. That is indoctrination, not education, and it has no place anywhere near a NSW school gate.”
Ms Car has said nothing publicly about adult activists targeting school children outside Sydney high schools with material calling for the overthrow of the economic system.
“Where is the Education Minister on this?” said Mr Shelton. “Parents deserve to know what her department is actually doing to stop adults handing revolutionary pamphlets to Year 10 students on their way to school, and whether any child who wags class to join this strike will face the same consequences as a kid who skips school for any other reason. Silence from Ms Car looks a lot like sign-off.”
“Family First’s education policy is simple: schools exist to teach children to read, write and add up, not to be recruiting grounds for adult political movements of any stripe,” said Mr Shelton. “Whether it’s this toolkit or the taxpayer-funded activism we’ve called out elsewhere in this state’s institutions, the pattern in NSW government schools is the same — ideology first, education second. Kids who can’t vote have no business being marched around as human placards for causes they are too young to properly weigh up.”
Family First is calling on the NSW Government to:
- Publicly explain what the Department of Education is doing to stop activists distributing political recruitment material to children outside NSW public schools;
- Direct all NSW public schools to treat participation in the strike during school hours as unauthorised absence, and communicate this clearly to parents;
- Investigate how “The High School Anticapitalists’ Toolkit” came to be distributed to students, and whether any child safety or school-grounds policies were breached; and
- Recommit the NSW public school curriculum to literacy, numeracy and core education, free of partisan political activism, consistent with Family First’s education policy.
ENDS
Lyle Shelton is Family First’s National Director, NSW Legislative Council lead candidate.
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