An “illegal” school is teaching children conspiracy theories including “I’m a Celebrity” as a Bill Gates-inspired plot to prepare the public to eat cockroaches after the “Great Reset”, an undercover investigation has uncovered.
Ladan Ratcliffe, 60, founder of Universallkidz, in Stockport, Greater Manchester, is allegedly convincing parents to take their children out of mainstream education and tell the council they are being home-schooled.
But in reality they send their children, aged between eight and 14, to a dilapidated Victorian mansion, a former nightclub, to be taught by a ‘shaman’ called fill that crystals can cure any illness or injury.
Tom Ball, an undercover reporter The times He worked as a teacher at the school for almost a month and said his colleagues believed that viruses are fake, that airplane chemtrails cause dementia and that dinosaurs do not exist.
One teacher, Justine, taught the children that they would eat cockroaches in the future if ‘Klaus (Schwab, director of the WEF) and (Bill) Gates have their way’ and that I am a celebrity… Get Me Out of Here It Had Been broadcast to “get us all into this” when “the time comes for everyone to start eating cockroaches.”
Shaman Phil teaches children that crystals can be used to heal any illness or injury at Universallkidz in Stockport, Greater Manchester.
Ladan Ratcliffe, 60, founder of Universallkidz
The history teacher taught students about the diaries of Holocaust victim Anne Frank, but questioned the truth of them, a common anti-Semitic conspiracy, when he spoke to another teacher.
Lessons were held at the mansion, at a community center in Stockport and online, The Times reported.
Throughout the hallways of the mansion were conspiracy theory flyers claiming that Covid vaccines, climate science and 5G mobile internet were methods the government used to control the public.
The Times claimed that Universallkidz “goes to great lengths to conceal its activities.” The school’s website says it offers “holistic alternative education” to provide an “innovative approach to supporting homeschooling parents.”
Ladan Ratcliffe, a former teacher, founded the school more than three years ago.
Following the undercover investigation by The Times, Ofsted has launched an urgent investigation into Universallkidz, the newspaper reports.
Illegal schools, which offer full-time education but are not registered with the government, take advantage of the lack of legal regulation over homeschooled children.
Universalkidz students are officially homeschooled. Ratcliffe told the Times undercover reporter that he helps parents get their children out of the state system and says they should lie to the local council about sending them to school, which costs £30 a day.
Ratcliffe photographed in schoolyard in The Times’ undercover footage
Growing concerns about illegal schools led Ofsted to set up a taskforce to tackle them in 2016. Inspectors thought only 24 existed at the time, but hundreds are now thought to exist.
Most of the illegal schools prosecuted by Ofsted have been run by Jewish and Christian extremist groups, but in the wake of the pandemic, more non-religious illegal schools have been set up by conspiracy theorists.
When the journalist worked at the school, in January of this year, there were 13 students there, but he had been told that sometimes there were 28.
The school runs four days a week, from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., but not all students attend every day, and most attend three days a week, The Times reported.
Two children who attended four days a week had special educational needs.
Ofsted chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver said the findings of the Times investigation were “very alarming, but sadly not surprising”.
He told the newspaper: ‘Over the last eight years we have found hundreds of unregistered schools, operating in unsafe premises, run by the wrong people and teaching very little to children. We are urgently investigating this shocking case, but weaknesses in the current legal system continue to hinder our efforts to tackle unregistered schools.
‘The 2022 Schools Bill would have given us additional powers to investigate and close illegal schools, but that legislation was abandoned. Without those powers, I remain concerned that thousands of children across England continue to attend illegal schools.”
Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson told the Times it was “frankly shocking that this school has been running with impunity for so long and poisoning the minds of these young people”.
And a Department for Education spokeswoman said it was “committed to improving powers to investigate and take action against these schools”.
Ratcliffe denied to the Times that Universallkidz was a school, saying it “only runs about 11 hours a week”, and said it was “a parent-child community initiative”.
She denied to the newspaper that the school was teaching conspiracy theories, saying that “the learning experiences we provide are based on the natural law of the universe and ancient knowledge that has been omitted from mainstream education.”
MailOnline has contacted Universallkidz for further comment.