So, I’m having a problem with my employer.
I am—or was—a Learning Support Assistant at Nottingham College, and have worked for them nearly continuously since 2006.
Last September, I was informed that a vulnerable 16-year-old autistic girl was to be socially transitioned within the college, adopting a male name and “he/him” pronouns. I was also informed that her mother had not been consulted and that this information was to be deliberately kept from her. After unsuccessfully raising my concerns with Safeguarding that withholding important information about her daughter’s health and well-being was a risk for the child, I decided to inform the mother about what was happening. As a result, I was fired.
The college’s decision to hide the social transition of a vulnerable 16-year-old girl from her mother was unlawful and violates both the Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSiE) statutory guidance and the Department for Education’s Guidance on Gender-Questioning Children. Both frameworks are informed by the evidence presented in the Cass Review, which emphasises that social transition is not a neutral act and can be harmful to a child’s welfare, particularly for vulnerable individuals.
Paragraph 208 in KCSiE states that supporting a gender questioning child “should be in partnership with the child’s parents” and clinical advice should be sought.
By engaging in this deception, the college directly breached safeguarding principles. Any collaboration between adult staff and a vulnerable child to withhold information from their parents is a clear violation of fundamental safeguarding standards. My referral to safeguarding referenced all these points but wasn’t acted upon. I raised these concerns multiple times during the disciplinary process, yet they were repeatedly dismissed.
I’m taking the college to a Tribunal for false dismissal (and am gardening to help with that, check the CJ site). But one of the objections raised against me is that I “outed” the child, with all the connotations that go with that, the abuse that gay children often face from unaccepting parents.
I don’t think the two situations are comparable. For a start, the parent already knew her child was gender-questioning, so she wasn’t “outed” in that sense. She was informed, by me, about what the college was doing, not any new information about her daughter. She was told that the college was facilitating the “social transition” of her daughter and, particularly egregiously, that the college was trying to keep this information about their activities hidden from her.
All the relevant guidance, some of which is statutory, states that she had a right to know this. That she had a right to be consulted about it. Indeed, that the college had a duty to consult with her about this. One that it not only failed in but actively tried to subvert by conspiring with a vulnerable 16 year old child to keep their activities secret from her. Conspiracies between adults and children to keep secrets from parents are a huge safeguarding red flag.
Not only this, but it can be argued that a child’s sexuality is the child’s business and, even if the college were to find out about it, they have no reason to disclose it to anyone. Even Section 28 didn’t put a duty on a school or college to inform a child’s parents that they were gay, were they to find out that they were. But the guidance quoted above does include a duty to consult with a child’s parents about their “social transition”, for good reason. “Social transition” involves the school or college making significant changes to the way it operates. Names must be changed, wrong-sex pronouns must be used by staff and students, decisions need to be taken about what punishments, if any, should be meted out to dissenters, and so on. Certainly, this is not a secret – all the child’s fellow students and all the staff in the class will know about it. It cannot be claimed, therefore, that this should be kept from the child’s parents in the name of privacy or confidentiality – such things do not exist for social transition, the nature of it requires widespread dissemination. It is instead, as I’ve already said, a conspiracy – a group of people working together to do something, and to keep their activity hidden from other people.
Nothing comparable could be said about gay children, even in the days of Section 28. This is not the same thing.
What do you all think?