UNESCO’s Heather Mann: Australia ’starting from scratch’

UNESCO project officer Heather Mann has told The AJN that Australia’s education system is in some ways starting from scratch on antisemitism.

The AJN spoke to Mann, who coordinates UNESCO’s work addressing antisemitism through education, at a training session in Sydney earlier this month, where educators from nearly every state and territory were brought together to learn to deliver sessions to teachers and schools nationally.

The program was initiated by Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal, who engaged UNESCO and commissioned a pilot from her office’s budget. Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has since provided additional funding to expand it. An agreement was signed with the Department of Home Affairs on December 13, 2025 — the day before the Bondi Beach Chanukah attack.

Mann said the original plan was to move through one state at a time over two years.

“The Bondi Beach attack changed everything,” she said.

“What we needed as well was a national approach … so that there’s common lessons that are learned about antisemitism in all Australian schools. So our timelines have really, really condensed.”

Pilots in NSW and Victoria were established between December and March, delivered with the Sydney Jewish Museum, Melbourne Holocaust Museum, Jewish Museum of Australia and both state education departments.

The Antisemitism Education Taskforce, chaired by David Gonski, lists the UNESCO work as one of its priority work streams.

“It’s not just one day of training, which will be ineffective, but it’s working with these schools with different touch points across these one to two terms, so that they can really embed that learning in their school practices,” Mann said.

Independent evaluation teams are interviewing schools, principals and teachers about the NSW and Victorian pilots, with results a few weeks away.

“So it’s not just us saying whether this works, but it’s really tested and tried and refined before sharing the results with Australia to see how this can be implemented nationally,” Mann said.

The aim is to equip teachers to explain what antisemitism is and how it manifests in Australian schools, to hold difficult conversations, including where it touches the Middle East, and to teach about it directly — which Mann said is rarely attempted, but “can be a preventative piece of the work that builds students’ resilience to hate speech and antisemitism before they may see it online”.

She said Australia’s distinctive problem was the speed of change from a very low base.

“A few years ago there were very few antisemitic incidents in Australian society. But since October 7, 2023, and the war between Israel and Hamas, the amount of antisemitic incidents has really, really exploded,” she said.

“It’s meant that the education system doesn’t have the same resilience that maybe we see in some European societies, or for instance in North America, because there hasn’t been the level of resources or tools or guidance in place, so we’re starting in some ways from scratch.”

What she sees in schools now is normalisation.

“Often we see and we hear about teachers telling us about swastikas in school toilets, swastikas in desks, graffiti written somewhere in the school that they then have to clean. But there isn’t necessarily a sustained approach that takes that moment,” she said.

Mann said she had followed the education submissions to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closely, describing the data and testimony as harrowing, and that one clear lesson was that reporting was being left to those targeted.

“We’re putting a lot of burden there on the victims of a racist incident, in its essence, to do the heavy lifting of explaining to the rest of society why antisemitism is so harmful,” she said. “One of the lessons that we could take from the Royal Commission is share that burden with the educational establishments, whether that’s the public education system, whether that’s the Catholic school system, whether that’s independent schools.”

The program works with all schools, she said, including rural ones where students may never have met a Jewish person.

Every training session is run with the local Jewish community and Holocaust museum, with presidents of the state representative councils involved.

“Working in this space it’s critical that you do this work hand in hand with Jewish communities,” Mann said.

“We start each of our sessions understanding who the local Jewish community are and their contributions to their society, and learn a little bit about Jewish identity as well.

“Yes, you focus on antisemitism as a form of hatred, as a form of racism, as a conspiracy theory, but there’s also space to rehumanise the Jewish community.”