Teacher sacked over eight-year-old's trans pronouns may have to remortgage house

[IwantToRetire]

Nottinghamshire county council has threatened to force a teacher to remortgage her house after she lost a legal dispute over using a pupil’s preferred pronouns.

The council has demanded that the teacher pays its £14,000 legal costs after her application for a judicial review was rejected by a High Court.

The teacher began a dispute with the council after the local authority-run school where she worked decided to facilitate the social transition of a girl who wanted to be treated as a boy two years ago.

The teacher said that she repeatedly raised concerns about the pupil’s welfare and followed the school’s whistleblowing procedure to raise safeguarding concerns. After bringing a claim for judicial review against the school, the teacher was sacked and is now working in a sandwich shop.

The application for a judicial review hearing was rejected on the grounds that she lacked “standing” to challenge safeguarding failures in relation to an individual child at the school, adding that the school had moved the child to a different class and she was no longer the child’s teacher. A High Court judge ordered the teacher to pay the council’s legal costs.

Teacher sacked over eight-year-old's trans pronouns may have to remortgage house (yahoo.com)

(Story from the Telegraph reproduced by Yahoo, and as they have done the Telegraph story about Shaaron Davies loosing work Sharron Davies: ‘I lost the vast majority of work the moment I put my head above the parapet’ (yahoo.com) - The Telegraph is in the process of being sold, so it may have a new owner who is less committed to publishing stories about women's sex based rights being lost, and their ability to keep jobs ... )

Sow what you reap

Really, Mishy?

Aaron95

They are not saying she shouldn't have raised concerns. She is perfectly entitled to bring concerns to the attention of the appropriate authority. She just cannot request a judicial review when she is not the expert in the field and when her opinion differs from that of the relevant authority.

So if the appropriate authority is the school or the council and they do not think transing an eight year old child is a safeguarding issue, then that’s it?

Quel surprise that Nottinghamshire City Council has behaved this way:

^Thousands of pounds of taxpayers' cash in Nottinghamshire has gone towards a controversial charity, it has emerged. Research shows that Stonewall, a lobbying group andLGBTQ+ charity, received around £709,225 of taxpayers' money across the country for its Diversity Champions scheme in 2021-22, with £2,500 being paid to the scheme from cash-strapped Nottingham City Council*.

https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/thousands-pounds-nottinghamshire-taxpayers-cash-8035520.amp

You can read about the case in The Telegraph by putting this title into archive ph

Teacher sacked after refusing to use eight-year-old’s trans pronouns

I've reported a school head to LADO for serious safeguarding concerns at Nottinghamshire which is drummed into us at every moment. I was even asked about the procedure for reporting during an OFSTED. I had loads of evidence, it wasn't just an email I sent whilst waiting at the self service checkout at Tesco.

LADO told me to go to the governors instead, which I couldn't and so I had to resign.

I know it's not the point, but...

Nottinghamshire county council has threatened to force a teacher to remortgage her house

No it hasn't.

Isn't that basically what lots of posters on here say about companies like Target, Bud Light etc though?

Lol, yes get it right Mishy

I feel like i'm missing something, did she literally just get in trouble for raising a safeguarding concern?! That's ludicrous.

Nottingham has form though ...didn't they have to pay for illegally banning Julie Bindel. Or was that the city council ?

Having read more into this I'm confident it is the case I mentioned upthread. In which case the answer is no. She was sacked for gross misconduct after accessing and sharing confidential information about the child.

You can eventually sow what you reap.
Like you can lie in your bed whilst making it.

But the expression is you reap (harvest) what you sow.

Happy to help

And regardless of the details of the case, a judge saying a teacher doesn't have 'standing' to raise a safeguarding concern is extremely worrying.

This was my concern. but from posts today it seems that the Telegraph may have mis-reported which is also a worry.

Have also thought that irrestpect of its politics, The Telegraph was said to be the best (ie fact checked) news source.

Can someone who knows post the link to the Christian web site, as I would like to read their article.

Is the case more like the one in Ireland where a Christian teacher was sacked.

https://christianconcern.com/ccpressreleases/teacher-takes-legal-action-over-sacking-for-safeguarding-concerns-about-8-year-olds-gender-transition/

This has the most detail I've seen, although it's written with a clear bias.

There is an earlier article in the DM which explains more about the case (based on a Telepgraph article) so can only assume because the Telegraph had reported in full earlier they didnt with this more recent article, as the story was to highlight the Council going after legal costs.

She has now been forced to take legal action against Nottinghamshire County Council, which runs the school, for alleged unfair dismissal.
She added that the school put her on suspension and under disciplinary investigation for her alleged 'ongoing refusal to follow a management instruction'.
After the suspension was lifted, the teacher agreed with the school to limit her encounters with the child and to avoid using any specific pronouns when addressing the eight-year-old, should she have any contact.
But in fear of the child's welfare, the teacher once again raised her concerns, explaining that the gender transition had the risk of causing detrimental effects on the child's health and welfare.
Her concerns were struck down by the school's governors and the local authority.
The teacher claimed that she was sacked for gross misconduct after sharing details that identified the child with her lawyers while preparing for a judicial review claim against the school and the council.
She alleged that the school viewed this as an alleged confidentiality breach, reporting her to the Teacher Regulation Agency, which could result in her facing a lifelong ban from her profession.
'The Education Secretary is working closely with the Minister for Women and Equalities to provide guidance for schools in this area, based on the overriding principle of the wellbeing and safeguarding of children.
'We expect schools to carefully consider their approach to these matters, to ensure that they take the right decision from the point of view of safeguarding children, accounting for parents' views and those of medical experts where relevant.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12074909/Sacked-Christian-school-teacher-taking-legal-action-refusing-use-pupils-trans-pronouns.html

Thanks for Chritian Concern links will look at those as well.

Okay so in the Christian Concern article it implies that the allegations of breaching confidentiality weren't accepted by information commissioner and others. But the TRA is still considering whether her disclosure to lawyers etc., as a professional breach.

So she cant teach until this is resovled?

And the employment tribunal isn't until 2024!

Will look forward to this - not!

The Education Secretary is working closely with the Minister for Women and Equalities to provide guidance for schools in this area, based on the overriding principle of the wellbeing and safeguarding of children.

Agreed.

opps TRA in my post above isn't how it is often used on here, but Treachers Regulatory Authority, which is hopefully a coincidently similarity with trans rights activists TRAs!

The child's parents supported the transkid. There was no right for her to step in on someone else's child like she did.

I haven't read anything about this case, so this is a general observation. We had that very sad case in the UK a few years ago where a baby called Alfie Evans had an incurable medical condition and his parents tried to get permission from the courts to take him to Italy for experimental treatment. His doctors at Great Ormond Street thought this was not in his best interests and a very high profile legal case ensued. It got a lot of publicity on social media and I noticed that US commentators were often very much of the view that the courts and doctors and authority generally should have no say in what happened to this poor child - it should be entirely down to parents. Most UK nationals would disagree with that general principle, I think.

I wonder if this is a cultural difference between the US and the UK, or perhaps between North America and Europe.

There's a bit of a difference between an extremely unwell child who can't be moved being flown to another country for experimental medical treatment and a girl who is being dressed in boys clothing and going by a male name.

There is no indication this child was undergoing any sort of medical intervention, and indeed that would be supremely unlikely at 8 years old.

If the child's parents were threatening to fly them to Thailand for dubious surgery you would have a point.

There's a general similarity. In the UK we had, I thought anyway, a consensus that the state or the community or society generally, whatever term you choose to use, has a legitimate interest in saying to parents 'No, you can't let your child do this/arrange for someone else to do a thing they want - it's not in the child's best interests'. There's a huge range of things like this, e.g. piercings and tattoos, insisting children are in carseats, alcohol consumption, ensuring children are in full-time education, restrictions on children working, criminal justice sanctions for a child over the age of criminal responsibility who assaults a family member when the parents might have been prepared to do nothing. This is because not all parents have their children's best interests at heart and not all parents are very well informed.

Thanks to the Cass Report, it is now accepted by the NHS and the government that social transitioning is not a neutral, harmless act. It puts a child on a fast track to medical treatment. The child's parents may have no issues with this, but it's certainly an issue that should not just be left to parents. It affects other children in the school for a start, and we know that people working at GIDS have been concerned that some parents have seen transitioning as a less awful prospect than having a gay child, i.e. they are motivated by homophobia.

What the problem is (along with others) is that this is all a bit random. So whether as a teacher or a parent it is sort of pot luck whether the school you are part of has a policy of affirmation.

So how is it possible that schools are able to decide this over riding culture.

We wouldn't let a school who thanks to aggressive campaigning and support from some part of the media, suddently say any child taken ill will receive medical treatment based on, for instance, homeopathy.

So where or how has the school got the idea that this is what they should do, when down the road another school has said they wont agree to do this.

And in terms of breaching confidentiality if a school was agreeing with a child's desire to change identity and names, but their parents didn't want this, would a teacher be entitled to tell the parents how the school was behaving.

So all this legalise about contracts, confidentiality, are hiding the bigger issue.

Is it right in any circumstance to let / allow a child to say they have a new identity, and is it okay that an organisation (ie not the family) is allowed to enable this?

No idea if there are two councils in Nottingham, but the Nottingham council which banned Julie Bindel was also the council which had re-written the protected characteristic of “pregnancy and maternity” to “maternity and paternity” in its equality strategy, as discussed on here at the time they banned Julie Bindel from speaking at the library. Then one of the council’s employees came on here to say they’d got the wording changed in the document, was arsey with some posters, and then asked MNHQ to delete their posts.