Schools are in danger of breaking the law on sex and gender - Sex Matters

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The Department for Education’s new guidance for schools needs to be produced soon, and it needs to be aligned with the law. Today we publish the UK’s first review of the legal framework on sex and gender in education, and it shows that thousands of schools and colleges in England are in danger of breaching legal requirements due to the lack of government guidance and faulty existing guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Our review found that schools are legally obliged to recognise sex in a wide range of areas, including registration, data protection, toilet and changing facilities, and behaviour policies, and that it is crucial that every teacher knows each child’s sex in order to fulfil their duty of care and safeguarding.

Full statement here https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/schools-are-in-danger-of-breaking-the-law-on-sex-and-gender/

Some news papers have reported this, eg Times & Telegraph but not sure what impact it will have.

I’ve only skimmed through the Sex Matters analysis document. What immediately strikes me about it is:

• that it is a very high quality document;
• it should have been produced by the civil service;
• that, as a nation, we find ourselves in a position where children and families are reliant on individuals outside government, Parliament and the civil service to undertake basic safeguarding analysis is a situation which should cause government, Parliament and the civil service to do some self-reflection.

Thanks for this. Very interesting.

My other observation is that Sex Matters have provided the TRA movement with a helpfully thorough list of legislation for them to target for amendment. Expect to see behind the scenes pre-election lobbying of political parties and members of the House of Lords focusing on the legal provisions listed.

Well it's not as if people intent on dismantling safeguarding haven't been taking every opportunity to do so anyway. They will already have had this legislation in their sights, they're well organised. At least now they can't do it by stealth, which is what has happened so far.

Great work from sex matters although I'd remove the title 'schools are in danger of breaking the law' and replace it with 'many schools are currently breaking the law' as there's not a 'danger' of this happening, it's happening. i
It's established fact, which has lead to harm in some cases, that many children don't have access to single sex toilets, for example.

However, a bit like rape laws, it seems to me safeguarding laws are the types of laws a lot of people just ignore and get away with. It's partly underfunding, but it's partly lack of enforcement, focus on only certain types of abuse etc.

If they wanted to and had the money to fund it / support to do so, parents up and down the country could be taking schools to court over actual breaches to the law e.g. the lack of adequate provision of single sex toilets for children over 8, the fact that many girls don't use the toilet at school all day. Most parents don't because at the moment families have to do it individually. Even when making a complaint to the school, parents are actively discouraged from banding together across common interests (we've seen this played out on here with individuals making complaints). The cost of taking up an individual case both financially and the negative impact on the wellbeing of their child would be far too high for most families. (the process is the punishment)

I hope that Sex Matters will work with Safe Schools Alliance (who have been doing excellent work revealing the massive systemic safeguarding failures across some schools) to look into how legal cases could be brought against schools / DfE (who are the ones really responsible) with large groups of parents. This would spread the risk and makes it much more possible (in terms of child wellbeing) if part of a large group and the risk of media exposure is low.

I'm pretty sure it would be a slam dunk in legal terms. Many schools are totally flouting the law on toilets (and in other areas) but many aren't, so there is direct discrimination in terms of cohorts of children between different schools.

I'm really glad sex matters have finally done this - women on here have been saying safeguarding law needs to be considered not just equality law for YEARS. We've given many examples of where policies like using wrong sex pronouns if children demand them is anti-safeguarding in terms of the definitions of abuse in KCSIE.

This is very long overdue, but better late than never and a lot better than the nothing we're getting from the government.

“Well it's not as if people intent on dismantling safeguarding haven't been taking every opportunity to do so anyway. They will already have had this legislation in their sights, they're well organised. At least now they can't do it by stealth, which is what has happened so far.“

Fair point.

What would be good is if the MSM would use this analysis when talking to politicians.

Too often the media rolls out the go to commentators, many of whom dont have the right expertise, because they want to dumb it down to a left right ding dong.

Its like they never ask the Women's Budget Group although their work is well respected.

So the idea that they would ask someone from Sex Matters to commentate seems remote.

The market is shrinking because the demand is.