Mick Hartley

It's beyond the capabilities of the government to provide guidance on trans issues to schools, so head teachers are left in an impossible situation. Katharine Birbalsingh in the Telegraph:

In the past decade, the number of children telling their schools that they identify as something other than their biological sex has soared. From an issue that almost no school leader had to consider, this has become one of the trickiest to cross their desk. Head teachers hold a wide range of opinions on issues of biological sex and transgender identities, just as they do on everything else. But on all issues school leaders must fulfil their statutory and legal responsibilities – and on this one we are crying out for definitive guidance on how to do so from the Government.

Such guidance has been promised for more than five years. In 2019 a draft from the Equality and Human Rights Commission was leaked, only to be abandoned after widespread criticism. The job was handed to the Department for Education. It has promised that a draft was imminent several times, most recently before the summer holidays. But we are still waiting.

I understand that the issues involved are complex and that agreement is hard to find. I also understand the need for a rigorous and comprehensive legal analysis. No doubt the Government fears that, whatever the eventual guidance says on this fraught and bitterly contested topic, it can expect legal challenge. But delay does not remove this risk: it multiplies it by shifting it on to tens of thousands of individual schools. 

Well no, it's not complex: gender identity has no place in schools. But yes, it's certainly a fraught and bitterly contested topic after so many educational institutions have signed up to the Stonewall ideology.

Children cannot be frozen in time to await the production of a definitive policy. And if it is hard for the Government, which benefits from access to the country’s most experienced lawyers, an array of civil servants and the power to write laws, how hard is it for a busy head teacher who lacks anything like this support? …

Schools are rules-based institutions, with rules designed to protect all children and give the greatest opportunity for every pupil to flourish. That is equally true for gender-confused and gender-distressed children as for all others. Schools’ actions are constrained in many ways by the need for coherence, not least because children change schools over their educational career.

It is deeply unfair that head teachers have been left to act on their own given the need for co-ordination and the legal risks on every side. More importantly, it is deeply unfair on children and parents. The wrong choice by a school not only opens up the possibility of being sued, it also risks harming children, perhaps irrevocably.

The only solution is unambiguous government guidance that provides head teachers, parents and pupils with a common set of expectations about what can and cannot be accommodated within schools.

And that unambiguous governement guidance should state quite clearly that a ridiculous and dangerous social contagion should not be encouraged by schools, and that sex matters. But with an Education Secretary who's concerned about "trans rights", this one is set to run and run.