A Government-funded education group is gathering to discuss how to create “primary classrooms where gender-queer bodies and queer sexualities (for children and teachers) are affirmed and celebrated”.
The No Outsiders group is led by researchers from Sunderland University and is funded with £600,000 of public money provided by the Economic and Social Research Council.
It is holding a seminar at Exeter University entitled Queering the Body; Queering Primary Education.
Questions for discussion were outlined in the seminar schedule, obtained by The Christian Institute. They include:
•How might we create primary classrooms where gender-queer bodies and queer sexualities (for children and teachers) are affirmed and celebrated?
•What would it take to teach queerly? How would teachers’ and children’s bodies be implicated in this? What sorts of subversions and reversals might it entail?
•At what cost do we deny children’s and teachers’ sexuality? What do we lose if desire and pleasure are banned from the classroom?
The Christian Institute’s Simon Calvert said: “When an adult who is working in a primary school suggests that children should explore their sexuality, that should result in a complaint to the police.”
Patricia Morgan, an academic and author of studies into family life and gay adoption, said: “The proposal is that primary school classrooms should be turned into gay saunas.
“This is about homosexual practice in junior schools. The idiots who repealed Section 28 should consider that this is where it has got them.”
Section 28 prevented local authorities from promoting homosexuality in schools. The Christian Institute and other Christian groups lobbied heavily for it to be retained, but it was finally repealed in 2003.
No Outsiders currently works with 14 primary schools, although the project’s leader insists that the seminar has no relation to its sex education work in schools.
The group was recently at the centre of another controversy over its calls for storybooks about same-sex relationships to be used in primary schools.