Kemi Badenoch: ‘Schools need robust guidance on gender’

Schools need Government help to tackle radical transgender ideology, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has said.

Speaking to Times Radio, Mrs Badenoch backed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to fast-track advice for teachers on the issue, saying “there’s a lot of misinformation out there”.

Last week, responding to a Policy Exchange exposé on the impact of “contested beliefs on gender identity” in schools, Mr Sunak said transgender guidance would be available for the summer term.

Confusing landscape

Mrs Badenoch told Times Radio: “I’ve spoken to head teachers myself, including the head teacher of my own children’s schools, and they are finding the landscape very confusing”.

parents should know

She also argued that schools should not have gender neutral toilets, noting that they undermine privacy.

In a separate interview with LBC, the Minister said it was a parent’s “right to know” if their child expressed gender confusion at school or was wanting to ‘transition’.

“I’m very much of the view that parents should know. I have three children myself and I think I would be astonished if a school was doing things without letting me, the parent, know”, she said.

Poor safeguarding exposed

An investigation by Policy Exchange published last week, found that “basic safeguarding protocol” was being “routinely disregarded” in many schools in favour of gender ideology.

The influential think tank’s report revealed that little more than a quarter of schools reliably inform parents “when a child expresses feelings of gender-distress”, with four in ten operating gender self-ID policies.

And nearly three quarters of responding schools teach that “people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex”.

It also observed that single-sex toilets had been abandoned in at least 28 per cent of schools, and 19 per cent no longer maintained single-sex changing rooms.

Sex ed review

In March, Rishi Sunak committed to bring forward a review of statutory guidance on Relationships and Sex Education in England in response to a question from Miriam Cates MP.

She told the Prime Minister that children are being “subjected to lessons that are age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate, often using resources from unregulated organisations that are actively campaigning to undermine parents. This is not a victory for equality, it is a catastrophe for childhood.”

The Department for Education is currently collecting evidence, with a consultation on updated guidance expected later this year.