Wilson is said to have claimed that ‘a week is a long time in politics’. Not for the civil servants tasked with producing guidance for schools attempting to support gender-questioning children. On Thursday, seven years after the government first promised statutory advice, we got another draft document for consultation.
The delay might not be so egregious were it not for the fact that the last consultation on this issue opened in December 2023 (and closed in March 2024 without a whisper from officials about next steps). Since then, teachers have been navigating the safeguarding issues raised in the Cass Review without any legal direction.
The delay might not be so egregious were it not for the fact that the last consultation on this issue opened in December 2023
Policy Exchange’s famous report, Asleep at the Wheel, which revealed that fundamental safeguarding principles have been compromised in service of gender ideology, was published almost three years ago. It is impossible for any minister to claim ignorance of the scale of the problem and yet all we have seen heel dragging and stakeholder consultation without any attempt at action.
Worse still, the latest guidance represents an alarming backslide from the more rigorous, evidence-led advice put out by the previous government. Most concerning are the government’s proposals on how schools should treat requests by children to socially transition.
Dr Hilary Cass found that many children are encouraged to socially transition at school by their peers, often without informing their parents. This creates ‘an adversarial position between parent and child’, in which many children suffer. She found studies that identified a link between social transition in childhood and suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, although noted a weakness of research in this field. Her conclusions were clear: social transition is ‘not a neutral act’ and one that should not be kept secret from parents who may be aware of contextual information explaining why their child has expressed gender dysphoria to teachers.
Previous guidance reflected this. It recognised that basic safeguarding principles should never encourage children to keep secrets. This should be obvious to anyone working with children: abusers often thrive by encouraging children to hide things from their parents. Such behaviour should never be normalised by those in a position of authority.
Labour refuse to understand this. The guidance no longer requires schools to inform parents. It simply states that ‘in the vast majority of cases’ they would expect schools to. This might seem like a small change. But we have to realise that the evidence shows many schools have taken activist positions in this area and cannot be trusted with leeway.
As of 2024, more than 300 schools were still signed up to the controversial charity Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme. Many teachers will have received biased training, such as widely reported instructions never to use terms like ‘boys and girls’ in lessons. Schools need clear, statutory instruction which cannot be ignored. As long as teachers are allowed to make decisions on behalf of young children on a case-by-case basis, we might as well have no guidance at all.
The guidance is not all bad. The government has correctly realised that it should be incorporated into the existing Keeping Children Safe in Education policies. Clear instructions are given to schools about providing single-sex changing facilities and toilets (something Labour still has not done for employers).
But it is unacceptable that it has taken so long to get to this point. We have known that the number of children experiencing gender distress has been dramatically increasing since 2016. Young girls, who are vastly overrepresented in the data, alongside neurodiverse children, are the most at risk.
And yet successive governments have failed to act to ensure the safeguarding of some of the most vulnerable members of society. Thanks to an early election, Conservative sources tell me updated guidance, which would have prevented activism in schools, never made it through.
Now we are back in the consultation stage again, with worse guidance and far less information for teachers on how to act. Before the election, Labour finally decided they knew what a woman was. Ministers have made softly reassuring statements claiming to understand the scale of the problem. But action has been severely lacking, and children will suffer as a result.
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