Adelaide school principal takes on Andrew Tate, inspiring educators around the globe to do the same

An Adelaide principal became an unwitting hero for teachers around the globe in how he handled his school’s take-down of “mega misogynist” Andrew Tate.

Educators around the globe have turned their eyes to an Adelaide high school that moved quickly to shut down Andrew Tate-inspired misogyny that included boys “barking like dogs” at girls in the schoolyard.

Months on, Unley High School principal Greg Rolton is continuing to receive calls and emails from school leaders as far away as London, seeking insights into his school’s handling of the issue.

Mr Rolton says his school simply responded “very quickly” before it had a chance to catch on, with parents and teachers sent advice and fact sheets to help deal with students exposed to the “extreme sexist, misogynistic and toxic views” of Tate.

The long-time educator learned of the disturbing behaviour “by a small group of boys” last August after a teacher told she’d been “barked at” in class.

Unley High School principal Greg Rolton was determined to react quickly when students at his school ‘exactly copied’ Andrew Tate in August last year. Pictures supplied

“When a student did it to a teacher, we started asking questions … the girls were very quick to say, ‘yeah, this is what is happening’,” he said.

“When we dug a little deeper, we were quickly able to see the boys were exactly copying what they’d seen (on a Tate social media clip).

“Being young men, the motivation was stirring someone up to get a reaction … ‘we’ll bark at girls, that’s funny’ but they were only getting a small part of the story (from the clip), what they weren’t realising was the actual impact, or the undercurrent behind it.

“In the old days, some behaviour or trend would crop up in a district but, with social media, it’s across the world.”

Tate, 36, a British-American former professional kickboxer and self-professed misogynist, who has compared women to dogs and argued they should “bear some responsibility” for being raped, has since been banned from TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for hate speech.

He was recently reinstated on Twitter after a five-year ban with tweets from his account regularly posted despite him now being detained in a Romanian jail after being charged in December with rape and human trafficking.

Educators from across the globe have reached out for advice from Unley High School principal Greg Rolton who moved quickly to shut down Andrew Tate-inspired misogyny at his school. He is pictured here chatting with year 12 boys Anuj Nanda and Dorian Fusil. Picture: supplied

So-called mega misogynist Andrew Tate has now been banned from most social media platforms but is still active on Twitter, having recently been reinstated.

“The key thing we are asked is how we turned (the SA incident) into a positive conversation,” Mr Rolton said, of questions he fields from teachers around Australia and overseas.

“Instead of us going down the punitive path and just leaving it at that, we went, ‘no, we can’t just let this go by, we need to have some real-time conversations’ … we want (our students) to understand the full ramifications of their actions (and for) everybody to get the same message while it has relevance,” he said, adding in 2023 his school had moved to “solidify the strength of the pastoral care program”.

“Parents were overwhelmingly positive, grateful we’d moved to share information, understanding it takes parents and schools to raise a child … for us, (this incident) is now quite a thing of the past.”

Prince Alfred College headmaster David Roberts said students at his independent all-boys’ school were also being helped to “understand the value of critical thinking and good decision-making when evaluating the merit (or not) of social media influencers.”

At coeducational Pembroke, principal Mark Staker said students were taught “concepts such as ‘positive masculinity and gender constraints’ and ‘what it means to be a ‘good’ man in a complex world’.”