100 organisations ask Labour to abandon Tory revised guidelines on RSHE

[IwantToRetire]

The Conservative government launched a consultation in May on planned updates to guidance first issued in 2019, following a review of the reforms.

It proposed age limits on “sensitive” topics, ordered schools not to teach about “gender identity” and to share materials with parents.

Ministers were accused at the time of stirring up “culture war” issues in the run-up to the election.

The consultation closes today.

To coincide with its closure, more than 100 organisations including the ASCL and NAHT leaders’ unions, the PSHE Association, Sex Education Forum, Barnardo’s, Refuge and Everyone’s Invited have issued a joint statement calling for a “fresh start” to the review.

“We are calling on the next government to discard the draft guidance and begin this process in due course, focusing on the needs of children and young people and supporting teachers to deliver a high-quality, inclusive curriculum.”

Lucy Emmerson, CEO of the Sex Education Forum, said age restrictions would be a “backward step making children more vulnerable to abuse and harm”.

PSHE association chief executive Jonathan Baggaley, warned he had “deep concerns about the development process and shortcomings of the draft guidance, particularly on critical aspects of children’s safeguarding, wellbeing and inclusion”.

And Lynn Perry, chief executive of Barnardo’s, said introducing age limits to RSHE topics “risks children missing out on crucial teaching about abuse and exploitation”.

Continues at https://schoolsweek.co.uk/labour-faces-pressure-to-ditch-tory-rshe-reforms/

They already do this from a young age. But this is not "teaching about pornography", or being in any way limited by the new guidance.

Yes this happens already

I think a lot of this seems from the previous Government ideology of "the big society" - get rid of centralised LEAs who oversaw standards and let schools find their own sources from charities/third sector. Leading to dubious quality materials in some cases.

I'm hoping the different ideological approach of Labour will result in more centralised standards and control. For me that would be a more effective way to control what's being taught, than blanket banning certain topics at certain ages but continuing to insist schools source the teaching themselves.

The sourcing is the root of the problem, not the guidelines.

The proposed guidance was never advocating "blanket bans". Jeez.

Great post and this kind of behaviour is why we have safeguarding in schools, at least in theory.

I’m sorry what primary school are being exposed to porn and how? I’m not saying it’s not happening as have no idea but I’m struggling to understand how it’s happening.

Most internet and phone services now have explicit content blocks as standard. You literally have to ring up or go in settings of your provider (ie. Be the bill payer), to unblock these sites.

Who is unblocking these on children’s phones?!

And if it’s through the home WiFi that they are accessing these then I’m sorry but the adults in that family need to be keeping that blocked and using hotspot from their mobile instead for their visits to pornhub or whatever.

My sons 2 so I do not know what it’s like on the ground atm. And I can well imagine that it’s been a shitshow the last decade or so as people got their heads around the tech. But we have most of what we need now (restriction wise settings) to stop this kind of thing happening. My sons cohort of parents are already signing national pledges to not provide phones to the kids (removing the peer pressure problem).

These are all issues we can solve without saying let’s teach year 3s about masturbation or year 6s about dick pics with ‘wanna cum on me’. It’s absurd that’s the conclusion everyone came to as a ‘solution’. Race to the bottom as always.

The thing is, most of the people against teaching explicit sexual content in school actually have kids. So we do know what's age appropriate, we know what the range is for children of a particular age. We know what works and what's dodgy as hell. We interact with schools / school staff on a daily basis. We are on the front lines.

We see the dodgy stuff coming through - often purely because teachers don't have the time to check things.

I know people with a huge range of parenting styles - there is not a single parent who would be ok with the approach taken by School of Sexuality "Education".

You are right. If children have been accessing this material, it forms a safeguarding matter, and from there the teacher would talk to the safeguarding lead. It might require intervention from other partners like the police, as exposure to CSAM can be a sign of abuse.

You're not confused, or wrong. Other posters pushing The adultification of children as a "solution" are in the wrong. They won't accept it. But you're not wrong here.

Discussing age appropriate issues is a really important issue - for schools and parents. As parents we struggle with "what age should they.. walk to the shops alone, have a phone etc. In terms of sex and relationships it's even more critical and more difficult.
As someone who's taught SRE I know that one of the challenges is the different levels of knowledge, experience, understanding in any one class. Let alone issues relating to sex, religion etc. There's not a common level that you can test and aim for. It's why it's so important to tease out the issues because as we've seen, too many inappropriate adults are over keen on dismissing age appropriate and pushing their preferred kink, fetish etc as a norm that children must have access to.
I'm really pleased that these discussions are happening as a result of pressure from parents.

Going back to this post as it’s very well said.

It’s bad enough adults use these tactics when relating to women and what they should accept, even more so for children. It needs to be recognised and called out.

Parents will know better what's age appropriate for their child than the school staff, they will know their children better. This point from a PP is so important SRE needs to be taught in schools in full partnership with parents

It's not just about what is taught - because that will rightly vary according to schools and different groups of children - but about HOW it is taught. It is already written into safeguarding law and statutory guidance that sharing information is critical to safeguarding. Sharing all RSE resources is part of this. If a child is getting mixed messages or conflicting messages from home and school that is not in the child's best interest.

Instead of following safeguarding law, we've seen schools use outside resources and trying to hide what they're doing from parents - on the gender issue and on RSE. This is NEVER in children's best interests except in situations where social services should already be involved as a matter of urgency and these cases are very few.

I think the way in which adults with dubious agendas have been enabled to try and keep secrets from parents is one of the biggest parts of the scandal because it's ALREADY against safeguarding law and good practice so all schools doing this should be marked down by Ofsted / have interventions. But somehow these very determined adults seem to have got away with it for a decade or more and have convinced other useful idiot adults this is a good idea. Though I think even the useful idiots know it's never in a child's best interests which is why they're so cagey and have to resort to 'pearl clutching' as an argument.

And we know the lobbyists got to Ofsted of course.

Partnership with and feedback from parents, not organisations or charities, is critical if there is central guidance about what is taught. This is about what they're teaching OUR children - all these organisations are LESS important than parents. Definitely we need to cut out the dodgy outside agencies (I suspect this is why some of these charities are against the draft guidance as it's drying up an income stream), but even if it's the LA doing it, there needs to be partnership with parents. I'm afraid I find the attitude of some LA staff contrary to safeguarding guidance as far as that goes. There is sometimes a 'we know best' attitude when they clearly don't, not about individual children.

I don't know when some people in charities, organisations and local authorities decided parents were the enemy and they knew better, but having this attitude is not in children's best interests and does not follow safeguarding best practice.

Fortunately in my experience most teachers don't think like this - probably because they're on the front line and do actually speak to parents!

I was at school under Tony Blair's Labour and we had 3rd parties come in to do certain aspects of sex education. The outsourcing of it is not a Tory thing, it was happening before.

The main difference between then and now is how sex has become politicised. Yes Section 28 was in operation, but it didn't ban the teaching of homosexuality, and we learnt about it.

Now sex has been politicised and there are a lot of vested groups coming in to not just teach facts, but teach theories as fact too. Stonewall are one of the signatories.

Everyone remembers "Stranger Danger", it didn't need to go into explicit detail, so discussions around porn can do the same too. Children don't need to be told about the content, and clearly there are some people doing that.

The "big society" and getting rid of LEAs was most certainly a conservative movement.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/big-society-speech

We’ve got to get rid of the centralised bureaucracy that wastes money and undermines morale.

And in its place we’ve got give professionals much more freedom, and open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need.

Section 28 was under the previous administration (Conservatives) and most certainly did affect what was taught at school. If you were at school under Blair, you'll be too young to remember it. I do and I can see the difference between LGB children's experiences today vs. when I was in secondary school (during s. 28)

This is section 28:

Prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material.

The following section shall be inserted after section 2 of the Local Government Act 1986 (prohibition of political publicity)—
“2A Prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material.

(1) A local authority shall not—

(a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality;

(b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.

(2) Nothing in subsection (1) above shall be taken to prohibit the doing of anything for the purpose of treating or preventing the spread of disease."

Introduced by the Conservatives in 1988. Repealed by Labour in 2003 after a previous unsuccessful attempt where the Tories in the Lords blocked it.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0213/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/homeaffairs/page/0,11026,875944,00.html

Give it up Cassie. Many of us know what school was like with S28 and what you're saying does not reflect the reality of school at the time. Yes. Even with your googling. This was not my experience at what was so lovingly called a "bog standard comprehensive".

Honestly what happens to threads I am on quite late at night, when there seem to be reasonable and on topic posts, but when I have time to get back to them maybe 12 hours later and they have been hijacked.

Talk about déjà vu - not just the baiting but the responding to baiting.

Just for once it would be nice to have a discussion about the issue not some silly school boy point scoring.

To recap as I see it.

Thanks to various campaign groups, worried parents and newspaper reports it became clear that some, if not all schools were using RSHE
to promote theories and beliefs that were those of an individual or campaigning group.

One of these is the contested "belief" that you can change sex being taught as a fact in lessons meant to help children understand about their bodies, and their right to say who can and cant have any contact with their bodies.

Another is that some parents felt many children were being taught age inappropriate material.

As well as many parents feeling that were not only not consulted about what was being taught but actively excluded.

The then Education minister issued guidelines to try and standardise what was taught (there were threads at the time) and also set up a consultation that allow not just interest groups but individuals to respond to proposals to make the guidelines permenant.

Then on the day the consultation closed a group of organisations, some of whom seemed to have no relevance to the consultation, wrote to the new Minister (but strangely kept very quiet about it to the public as a whole) saying the consultation was not adequate and should be scrapped and made statements about trans ideology.

So the immediate issue is whether Labour will think this self selecting group of organisations has more statues than those who took part in the consultation and / or are better informed about how a consultation should be conducted.

Shouldn't mumsnetters also get together and claim to represent thousands of actual parents and say can we have the results of the consultation?

This is about something that is happening know, and being dragged down a keyboard cul-de-sac by party political sloganeering could well mean that the situation will be changed whilst FWR is bogged down in whatabouterry.

Over and above the content and who is allowed to teach it, the biggest issue seems to be parents not being included adequately, but also a political failure by the political class that knows their is a social issue and think palming it off to schools will some how sort it out.

Shouldn't mumsnetters also get together and claim to represent thousands of actual parents and say can we have the results of the consultation?

I am not familiar with other forums on mumsnet, but is there one where without getting into a pointless part political slagging match the question could be asked:

Was everyone aware of the consultation
Did they take part
Are they aware that 100 groups have got together to say the whole process and guideliens should be scrapped

My experience of school under section28 was horrendous, as was the experience of many other people I know.

Well said Retire. I'd also add in the lack of due diligence from the last government and civil servants (all very well documented and evidenced) that resulted in some of the most unsuitable individuals and organisations in the world being given access to schools and shamefully children via SRE.

The DfE issue countless consultations - most? policy changes quite rightly goes out to consultation so I'm not sure how much mileage there is in challenging this one? I think the main issue is that the game is up for trans activism.

Parents have the confidence to speak out. We're refusing to be shamed out of our concerns by the bad faith actors. This isn't going to stop. For every derail (oh no Section 28 - here's a google) parents and responsible adults know that too much SRE has been provided that fails to centre children. That children shouldn't be confronted with porn and unhinged transactivism in schools. And yes - it's not all schools but it's far too many.

Partnership with parents as established in the Children Act way back in 1989, schools to maintain political neutrality (as dictated by law) and safeguarding children to be central for every adult and organisation working with children.
They're legal and reasonable expectations (unless you're a transactivist)

Thank you. Most of the gay people I know my age say the same. I didn't know any out gay people when I was at secondary school in the 90s, I think be because it was not as accepting then as it is now.

It's a discussion board. People can discuss things

I agree with the signatories of the letter. I think another consultation probably is a good idea; if it happens parents and orgs will get a chance to feed in then.

It may be better for LGB which is good. That doesn’t mean propagating male toxicity or reinforcing gender stereotypes through gender ideology.

Or the falsehoods due to the GRA and gender ideology generally.

Adults who push for the above are not helping children