EHRC consultation - schools technical guidance

Transgender Trend has produced a detailed response to the guidance and I'm pleased to see that it unashamedly highlights safeguarding - pointing out that safeguarding children must always be the priority. A few extracts from the blog - linked below that reflect many of the discussion points posted upthread. Their formal response is linked - these extracts are from their blog

"Gender Reassignment protects a person who takes a specific course of action or makes a specific decisionIn its language it is clearly referring to adults who are responsible for their actions and capable of making adult decisions.
Applying the protected characteristic to children, who have not yet achieved that level of personal responsibility or are not developmentally equipped to make such decisions, is contested".

"Treating a child as an adult, or assumed to have adult levels of understanding, is a recognised form of child abuse. Schools are guided by the updated government safeguarding guidance Keeping Children Safe in Education which includes the following in its definition of emotional abuse:

“It may feature age or developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. These may include interactions that are beyond a child’s developmental capability as well as overprotection and limitation of exploration and learning or preventing the child from participating in normal social interaction.”

The draft guidance risks exceptionalising children who say they are ‘trans’ by the assumption that it is difficult for them to follow the normal sex-based rules that keep all children safe. The term ‘trans’ also risks linking children with a varied range of discreet vulnerabilities together as a homogenous group requiring the same understanding and approach.
Where individualised, developmentally-appropriate care is most needed, there is a danger that these children may be treated instead as units of equalities monitoring"

It's good to read such a child and school centred response that clearly counters all the dangerous assumprtions that children are mini adults and that their gender confusion must be pandered to, no matter what the long term cost to them is.

www.transgendertrend.com/ehrc-technical-guidance-for-schools-consultation/

Because I have been looking at a specific detail in school toilets, I can see how design has evolved. I can also see, in KCSiE some awareness of standard toilet design.

KCSiE 2026 (my bold)

113. Where a school or college provides mixed-sex toilets in addition to single- sex toilets, schools and colleges should assess safeguarding risks and plan accordingly, for example, mixed-sex toilets should be in individual, lockable rooms and open directly onto public areas (e.g. a corridor).

There’s an acknowledged conflict there for safeguarding in plain sight.

Point 113 strongly suggests schools do not have to provide mixed sex toilets if they believe they can’t mitigate the safeguarding risks. ‘Mixed sex’ toilets is an interesting phrase because the technical building regulation terms are unisex/universal and accessible (which is usually a mixed sex design). I use ‘mixed sex’ because there’s so many versions of mixed sex toilets in schools so I welcome it implies that too.

It then goes on helpfully to describe the basic features of a ‘mixed sex’ toilet, as per standard building regs: being in a room, not a cubicle, and opening onto a public area (a safeguarding measure so hopefully more likely to notice who/how many are going in and vitally how long they are in there for). In building regs this means the washbasin and hand dryer are in the same room as the toilet. The ‘lockable’ is a misnomer though. No school toilets are permitted to be truly lockable, and shouldn’t be, for safeguarding reasons. In real life, toilets have needed to be accessed very quickly by staff.

From other documents and research, I know that schools have to have defibrillators, they have to have toilet doors that have to be openable quickly, and specifically doors that can open to access the child even if a child has collapsed against the door. DfE discuss these features, demonstrating they know toilets to be risky places. What schools don’t have to have is doors where you can see a child has collapsed in the first place. That’s an option but only in single sex toilet suites. The very first bit in the rescue chain is missing for safeguarding in the very location children go to when they feel ill/ take drugs/ want to harm themselves/want to harm others. When the first bit fails, the whole chain fails.

Everything needs to join up with health and safety.

The idea that you were any sort of safeguarding risk to your child for not going along with affirmation is utterly absurd and the idea that you were reported to social services is mind-boggling.

So I absolutely believe that any new guidance needs going over with a fine tooth comb to figure out what's legally permissible in it and where schools can be held accountable. I know quite a few teachers who were unconvinced by the KCSIE training they received at the most recent INSET and I think it's fine to say 'a good DSL would....' but that cannot be assumed.

I know when we get, say, a new behaviour policy at school, the maths and science dept have a tendency to be the ones who stress test it ("what if you don't know the name of the kid who wont hand you their phone?"), I think it's how our brains work.

Anyway, looking at both the technical guidance and KCSIE, I don't think the technical guidance is trying to overturn KCSIE, I think they have both been written very much informed by the other. The technical guidance nods to the restriction on pronoun changes in KCSIE and KCSIE bows to the protected characteristic of gender reassignment that informs everything in the technical guidance. We can see from the change between the consultation to the live document of KCSIE that people have argued against this. The consultation version said that as it was difficult to decide whether a child had the protected characteristic, it should be assumed that all gender questioning children have it. This has been changed in the live document to where it is unclear if they possess it, they should be assumed to have it.

KCSIE might have changed the language of 'trans child' to 'gender questioning child', however there is still a basic assumption there: that some of them are "actually" trans.

And if some children are "actually" trans, then it can't be argued that the protected characteristic of gender reassignment shouldn't ever apply to children.

And if it does apply to children, (which it currently very much does), then the question of whether the technical guidance correctly interprets the law is probably 'yes', regardless of whether we're happy about it or not. I don't think that's a 'trans activist streak' running through the technical guidance, I think it's the current law.

"This is the abusive nature of transactivism - immediately label any questioning (which should be at the heart of safeguarding) as 'hateful' and 'dangerous'. Parental alienation is what they TRY TO DO, which is obviously not in the child's best interest".

Yes.

Why are parents or any other protective adults the enemy?

Because they provide boundaries to an adult who has questionable intentions. None of this is ever about the child.

"This is the abusive nature of transactivism - immediately label any questioning (which should be at the heart of safeguarding) as 'hateful' and 'dangerous'. Parental alienation is what they TRY TO DO, which is obviously not in the child's best interest".

This. Despite every aspect of safeguarding legislation / guidance centreing the importance of working with parents.

I've been raging about this for years (am passed the stage of calm debate) because children alienated from their families do worse on all life measures. Yet those keen on breaking up families (queer theorists) have been enabled to influence education in the face of all evidence.

@BonfireLady is not the only parent who's been threatened and intimidated by out of control transactivists in schools. This activist centred technical guidance has the potential to undermine the small steps being taken to restore parental rights and safeguarding.

Having read this thread and the NSPCC thread together recently, it occurs to me that we could all benefit from a lot more joined up thinking in our organizations, particularly those which can directly influence children and schools. Why do we need so many different guidelines stemming from the same laws? Shouldn't safeguarding be a universal concept?

And I'm sure we'd all be interested to know the connections between the NSPCC and the EHRC. Is it one person? A network of activists exchanging information and tactics? Who were the connections in the DfE who seem (perhaps) to no longer have quite so much influence?

It would all make sense if we knew the answers to those questions, I have no doubt.

Brilliant posts by both @BonfireLady and @MrsOvertonsWindow

In my experience it takes immense intelligence, perseverance and emotional resilience to take the approach Bonfire has taken in the face of activist staff who label parents genuinely caring about their child's wellbeing as 'a danger' to their child.

It's bloody hard to keep your cool when someone's labelling you as a bigot who doesn't love your own child for noting that sex is real and matters and when you're being stonewalled and drowned in supposed 'complaints procedures' that only lead back to either a dead end or the activist staff who are pushing your child to transition. And this is what has been happening. People in positions of power, doing this to families.

This is the abusive nature of transactivism - immediately label any questioning (which should be at the heart of safeguarding) as 'hateful' and 'dangerous'. Parental alienation is what they TRY TO DO, which is obviously not in the child's best interest.

Bonfire's approach WAS safeguarding. She was safeguarding her own child.

Julie Bindel's work is good on this https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/julie-in-genderland-e12

Unfortunately these staff are still not being held to account, so for gender questioning children it really comes down to whether or not parents are lucky enough to get good people in positions of power who care about child wellbeing or those who only want to use children to push an adult activist agenda. Activist staff or useful idiots who can't do safeguarding properly need to start to lose jobs over this or nothing will change.

I think also in schools, as for in families, there's the effect Helen Joyce has spoken about, whereby staff who have actually allowed harm to happen and safeguarding to be subverted in the past are finding it difficult to say 'this was wrong', even if they can now see that it was. Just because of human nature and the fact people don't like to admit this. However, a few job losses at DSL level might focus minds.

edited to add: It's also the case that to go against the gender ideology orthodoxy that took root in many schools in the past could have you be the subject of a witch hunt, especially if those in positions of power were activists. So lots of teachers kept their heads down, understandably. So it'll take a while (and as noted above possibly a few high profile cases of job losses or prosecutions) for the dial to shift. But we're talking about child wellbeing here so I hope it'll happen quickly.

Thank you for taking the trouble to explain all this from a parent's view @BonfireLady . You raise so many important points that demonstrate the the massive naivety in some schools that can enable a bad faith actor to flourish.

As with anything, experience helps you to look behind the situation. Working in safeguarding is humbling - as a DSL, running an LA service, working with social services, the police, criminal investigations, being interviewed for serious case reviews when things have gone wrong etc. You learn to look behind the initial presentation, to work with professionals with different perspectives and to ask the uncomfortable questions.

That's why the EHRC tech guidance is so problematic. It's written with zero insight into schools, safeguarding or even an understanding of children & adolescence, let alone their rights. Much of it is incoherent in terms of guidance which doesn't help.

The DfE is inching towards acknowledging the profound vulnerability of any child who's been encouraged to think of their body as wrong that needs fixing. It's evident that the extreme transactivists have been removed from writing policy at the DfE and we've got adults back in charge.

But at school, LA & national level there are still too many powerful people seeking to groom the young into believing in gender identity and who promote the alienation of parents as you so clearly evidence.

These children are all immensely vulnerable and should all raise safeguarding concerns. A DSL who focuses on a child's GI and seeks to control / alienate concerned parents raises so many red flags - they need significant scrutiny.

We are moving towards a more responsible position over this but the technical guidance with its failure to relate to KCSIE is a problem. That needs to be one of the main responses in the consultation imho.

The adultification of children runs through the whole document (deliberately one might cynically conclude). Anyone thinking of responding might find the Sex Matters response informative

https://sex-matters.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Analysis-of-EHRC-draft-technical-guidance-for-schools.pdf

Oops. That should have said I would expect a good DSL to want to join the dots, not that I wouldn't expect this.

Quite a marked difference 🤦‍♀️

Too late for the edit.

Don't act like I'm happy about it!

Fair play. I think it's fair to say you (unintentionally) hit a raw nerve. I will explain. It relates very strongly to what @Cantunseeit says above about the shit position that parents can end up in.

Before I share my own experience, I'd like to say a couple of things about your posts. I am saying them in good faith and hope that they come across as such:

1. Your posts come across as being in good faith
2. Although I am no safeguarding expert, when I read posts from MrsO and you there is a huge contrast (to me) in how a top-down safeguarding approach should be taken. As you're not a DSL (I assume) this isn't a massive surprise and I now see your position as someone who is trying to balance what you're reading alongside the ambiguity of how it has been written. This latest post demonstrates your desire to understand a balanced approach IMO... (and I agree with you that the inconsistency here is unhelpful) however...

This is something I would expect DSLs to manage through a cautious approach with safeguarding at its heart and a recognition that social transition is both not a neutral act and does not begin with a defined threshold. I wouldn't expect a good DSL to want to join all the dots, irrespective of what's written. In other words, I would expect a good DSL to recognise that any indication of a child being gender questioning is a safeguarding issue in and of itself because it shows that the child is vulnerable to believing that they are in the wrong body. That the child has potentially been exposed to the concept that it is a fact (contrary to how RSE guidance says it should be taught) that we all have a gender identity and needs support to navigate this. Fundamentally, it is a sign that parents need to be involved - and that the parents need to be made aware of the risks of social transition etc. I would expect a good DSL to make sure the parents understand the Cass Review at a high level and why an affirmation pathway is risky.

In my own experience:

• I spent 2 years talking carefully and respectfully with a DSL. It always struck me as odd that things didn't move as fast as I thought they might on how the school dealt with gender identity, but I persisted with a neutral approach. There was always just enough movement in the right direction to make it look like they were taking a neutral approach with safeguarding at its heart and were simply hampered by lack of clear government guidance, until...
• the 2024 KCSIE guidance came out and the school went straight to its lawyers to see if they needed to follow the 4 paragraphs related to gender identity. The lawyers said no, which is utter bollocks because the whole document was statutory. I looked up the lawyers and they pride themselves on how they push for progressive change in "LGBTQ" issues. Of course they do.... 🤦‍♀️
• in parallel, the school stepped up its position that I was a risk to my daughter with my "views". The complaints system was an utter farce, including all available escalation routes, and there were a total of 4 referrals to Children's Services (with my daughter apparently being at risk owing to my "views") by the time my daughter left the school.

The most significant difference between the DSL and Children's Services was what has clearly been a bad faith interpretation of any statutory guidance. There have been far too many incremental issues for this to have been a coincidence. By contrast, Children's Services had a good faith approach. I appreciate others have experienced this differently. For example, I (politely) challenged them when they told me that they pride themselves on how they have a lot of experience with gender questioning children and always take a "step by step" approach. That a child only took the next step if they were ready. I explained how this affirmation approach was underpinned by a presumption that the child had a gender identity that was more important than their sex.

They listened with curiosity. They didn't think I was a risk to my daughter. They recognised that I had supported her through all the relevant routes and, although they didn't say it, I'm pretty sure they agreed with me that the school were fuckwits. Obviously I didn't use that word 😂

So actually, your posts are super helpful because they demonstrate how a bad faith DSL could interpret the legislation. They demonstrate where the holes are that will be exploited by the DSLs that want to do so.

Edited for grammar.

I don't think having the protected characteristic of gender reassignment is enough for a school to have to socially transition a child.

The EHRC bit about pronouns specifies that a school has to have made a decision to permit preferred pronouns before there is an expectation that staff and pupils will use (or avoid) them, this is not automatic. And the social transitioning section of KCSIE says that there needs to be a really good reason not to involve parents in this decision.

Don't act like I'm happy about it!

Hopefully you're right and attention would be paid to the advice in a separate section about social transition rather than the actual section about using other changing spaces.

Look at the inconsistency between a child not wanting to share a same-sex bedroom (directing you to read the social transition guidance) and the child not wanting to use a correct sex changing room (make sure recorded and communicated appropriately).

Point 271 makes it clear that your point 268 is about a child seeking support with social transition where they have defined social transition as appearing as the opposite sex. Using a separate changing room doesn't make you appear to be the opposite sex. But then neither does a bedroom.

It's all pretty inconsistent.

No more about toilets for today I promise! 🤐I need to get on with life admin.

The language changed in school design documents. There is no such design as a gender-neutral toilet. It’s never been a regulated design in British Standards etc. yet a few years ago the term ‘gender-neutral’ started appearing in DfE design guidance AS WELL AS the term unisex in the same documents. Unisex toilets (now technically called universal toilets) are regulated in terms of layout, space, hook placement, sink height etc.

In 2026 the design documents changed. There is no mention of the term ‘gender neutral’ toilets.

Wow. So if a child tells the school that they are gender questioning and asks for alternative changing facilities because changing in sex-segregated facilities distresses them.... your first thought is that the parents don't need to be told because this doesn't meet a threshold for social transition 🤯

If a gender questioning child asks for any support from the school, the KCSIE guidance says that parents should be involved. Here's what it says (bolding is mine):

268. Parents and carers have the leading role in the lives of their children, and this area should be no exception. Therefore, where a child who is questioning their gender asks for support from a school or college, schools and colleges should engage parents/carers as a matter of priority. It is important that the views of the child’s parents or carers should carry great weight and be properly
considered. However, in the rare circumstances where involving parents or carers would constitute a greater risk to the child than not involving them, the school or college should involve their designated safeguarding lead to determine what action is needed to safeguard the child, before the parents or carers are contacted or any decisions are taken.

A gender questioning child who is asking for alternative provision to change (because of feeling distressed about getting changed with members of their own sex) is an example of a gender questioning child asking for support.

Edited for typo

It's very telling and depressing that appeasing trans rights has until very recently been the priority over safeguarding children in some schools. It's a minority but there's still a significant battle with transactivists promoting the ideology at the expense of children's wellbeing.

I hope that the feedback on this guidance will make it impossible for the government to ignore the conflict it raises with KCSIE & children's safety.
But it's not certain.

A child uncomfortable with their pubescent body is basically every child for a bit.

I disagree. I don't think any gender questioning child can have the PC of GR. If they are committed to transition then they are no longer questioning. There are only ever going to be a tiny number of children who could qualify for the PC of GR. Cass's mythical child brought up as the opposite sex for 10 years would have the PC of GR but a child uncomfortable with their pubescent body would not.