Bit miffed by school...

[CactusMactus]

Received this email from school at 4pm yesterday:

"Dear Parents/Guardians,
We want to inform you that we will be hosting a guest speaker tomorrow to talk about building empathy for others and the importance of being yourself. This speaker is a member of the LGBTQ+ community and will share their experiences to help foster understanding and respect among our pupils.

Please note that this session is not a compulsory part of the national curriculum. If you prefer to withdraw your child from this 30-minute session, kindly let us know by the end of today, and we will make the necessary arrangements.
Thank you for your support."

So I emailed the school asking for a bit more information, I am totally cool with them learning about LGBTQ+ rights, experience and empathy for others... but there is zero information about who this person is and what their agenda is.

Full disclosure I am gender critical. And would object to my daughter being told she could be a man.

The school has not replied to me. So I am past the point of being able to choose whether my 8 year old listens to this talk or not!

Why would the school not share this information earlier? Surely this "person from the LGBTQ+ community" has had to be DBS checked prior to yesterday afternoon? Surely the school knows what the talk is about?

Any advice?

It's not really sex education, or inappropriate, to show and talk about with kids (of any age) that some people have two mummies/have an uncle who loves and lives with another man, etc.

💯

This isn't sex education though. What we know of the event is its an LGBTQ person telling their story to build empathy.

Nothing to do with sex.

I'm really struggling to see the issue with the session. Totally respect OPs choice and there were obviously issues with communicating and planning the event. But I don't think speculating about the topic and "safeguarding" is at all helpful.

Children of that age can have images of same sex parents and different family structures introduced in more subtle ways than having a an activist stand at the front of the room and lecture to them.

You have no idea whether that's what happened.

In my opinion its entirely fine for an LGBTQ person of any variety to talk about their own life story and answer questions. It would be unlikely this would take the form of "lecturing".

I didn't read it like that and think you are being oversensitive.

This is total speculation.

I think some people are letting their imaginations run away with them.

Exactly.

@Valdor Gosh you just love jumping to conclusion after conclusion don't you based on (once again) no information. It couldn't possibly be that more than one person disagreed with you!

I'd be interested in what your dd says about the session op. It would be a good starting point for a discussion. I suspect the school realised at the last minute that some parents might want to withdraw their children from this session. I would complain that your request that your daughter not attend this session was ignored, the email was far too late and that it didn't contain any information about the session on which to base your decision. I'd ask that the school puts policies in place to make sure this doesn't happen again and request the materials from the session your daughter attended be sent to you along with details of the person who delivered the session and the organisation they represent.

The type of people who squeeze under the LGBTQ+ label is pretty broad, a 'man in a dress' would be in there. In all probability, if the school have been sensible in the past, it's probably nothing to worry about. If it were my child, the last minute notification, the vagueness, the invitation to withdraw (why?) would all raise my suspicions. It's likely to be incompetence (which doesn't speak well of the school) rather than anything nefarious. However, I'm no safeguarding expert, but surely hoping it'll probably be okay isn't safeguarding.

I'd want to know who they'd invited and what was going to be said. I can then make a decision to withdraw my child or not. The school, through design or incompetence, took that decision from the parents. I'd be furious.

When you say ‘strident’…? [tilts head] do you mean ‘not strident at all but insists on truth and biological reality and sick of people telling them to stfu’?

No I meant what I said. Btw people stopped typing things like tilts head and headdesk a decade ago..

Did you find out any more about the talk? I would definitely raise the poor procedure with the head and governors, whatever the topic.

Not being comfortable with gender ideology is a very different thing to homophobia

Except posts I have responded to aren't making that distinction even and they're not providing any reasoning or evidence why they think this talk was about gender ideology. They've seen a post that mentions LGBTQ education and have posted about the "agenda" and how it's "sex education" etc, all things people would also say if they're unhappy with the LGB of LGBT hence why I've asked people to clarify what makes their post any more nuanced than the complaints from the homophobic patients.

The deletions next to accusations of "being over sensitive" are a thing to behold.

Likely very instructive for lurkers.

No, of course not, and primary schools no doubt deal with that in an age-appropriate manner if it crops up. But AIUI, sex education 'proper', if you will, doesn't start in the UK until kids are at secondary school.

I was responding to you saying 'mummies and daddies or hetero fairytale love stories' are good enough for 8 year olds and younger.'
My point was that I think 'mummies and mummies' and stories involving two dads, sisters with girlfriends, whatever, is also 'good enough' or anyway not inappropriate, seeing as many kids will have non-straightforwardly hetero family members.