‘Safeguarding blind spot’ on sex and gender in schools exposed

Schools are promoting contested political ideas at the expense of child safety and wellbeing, research by an influential think tank has revealed.

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

The report by Lottie Moore, ‘Asleep at the Wheel: An Examination of Gender and Safeguarding in Schools’, is based on 154 responses to Freedom of Information requests sent to a random selection of state funded secondary schools.

Evidence

Policy Exchange found that, of the responding schools, only 28 per cent reliably inform parents “when a child expresses feelings of gender-distress”, with four in ten operating gender self-ID policies.

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It also observed that single-sex toilets had been abandoned in at least 28 per cent of schools, and 19 per cent no longer maintained single-sex changing rooms.

With regard to Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE), the think tank said that 72 per cent of schools are teaching that “people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex”.

One in four tell children that some people ‘may be born in the wrong body’, and almost one in three teach that a person who self-IDs as a man or a woman should be treated as such “in all circumstances”.

Partiality

Summarising its findings, the think tank warned that by “uncritically accepting contested beliefs on gender identity”, as well as “affirming a child’s belief that they are the opposite gender to their sex”, schools are “failing to consider their safeguarding duties.”

It also highlighted the “considerable influence” being exerted by external agencies in “embedding gender identity beliefs” within the RSHE curriculum, often – it stated – by “partisan” groups receiving Government funding.

The report continued: “Schools are teaching beliefs about gender identity as though they are facts, often presenting the immutable and biological reality of sex as less important than a person’s ineffable feelings about themselves.”

Challenging the involvement of schools in the contested practice of ‘affirming’ gender-distressed children, the think tank maintained: “school is not the setting in which these complexities can be resolved”.

‘Scandal’

Responding to the publication, Head of Education at The Christian Institute John Denning said: “The title of this report is spot-on. Guidance for schools on transgender issues has been repeatedly delayed.

“The Education Secretary needs to wake up and take urgent and decisive action to protect children.

“As this report recommends, the review of Relationships, Sex and Health Education must be taken out of the hands of the Department for Education, which is complicit in this scandal.”

Recommendations

Report recommendations included maintaining single-sex facilities, clear Department for Education (DfE) guidance on gender dysphoria, and that parents should be “central” to any decision relating to a child’s “gender distress”.

Policy Exchange called for schools to be required to publish all RSHE material online, and said the DfE should instruct schools to challenge gender stereotypes, but to do so “without conflating beliefs about gender identity with sex”.

It also echoed MP Miriam Cates recent call for the Government to “urgently commission an independent review of the teaching of RSHE materials and approach to gender distressed children in schools, with a focus on safeguarding”.

The findings and recommendations were endorsed, among others, by the former Secretary of State for Education Rt Hon Nadhim Zahawi, Baroness Morris, former Secretary of State for Education under Tony Blair, Labour’s Rosie Duffield MP, and Conservative backbenchers Nick Fletcher and Miriam Cates.