Secondary School complaint about mixed sex changing rooms. Update, school response and request for help writing the escalated complaint to governors

[TangenitalContrivance]

Hello everyone. Some may remember I asked for help with a complaint to my daughter’s secondary school in Brighton which allows Males into female changing spaces. Including swimming, without informing either children or parents.

this is clearly a safeguarding issue, borderline illegal and must not be allowed to stand.

I’m going to have to take the whole thing through a governors complaint and even higher, which I am willing to do.

please, if you can, could you read my complaint and the schools subsequent response and give me pointers for what to say in my follow up.

feel free to use the original complaint at your own school. You will be surprised how many are doing this!

Well done those parents. It's disgraceful that Scotgov is still dragging their feet on this. There's going to be loads of court cases, isn't there?

Love 💖the archive URL! Was that deliberate, do you know?

Heh! Never noticed that! 😄

Ha! Didn't spot that either 😂

There's going to be loads of court cases, isn't there?

If schools don't start grabbing this with two hands, rather than obfuscating behind "it's all too complicated, we're waiting for guidance" etc then yes, I should think so.

The draft Gender Questioning Children guidance made it very clear where it was repeating existing law. Toilet and changing room provision was a section with much of this in it.

If schools and their governors continue to rely on this tactic, it's going to get very expensive for them I should think.

Yes, the DfE does need to pull its finger out. But KCSIE exists now and so does lots of other legislation. Schools need to wake up, stop assuming that the unions have got it right and read the law for themselves.

I rewatched a bit of Life on Mars the other day. It took me back to when the DfE quoted 1974 H&S at work legislation when I asked for risk assessments for their 2023 designs, which aren’t suitable for lots of children for safety reasons.

edit: pressed post too quick

Great work OP.

I'm hoping after the SC ruling there will be renewed pressure on the government to clarify policy for schools, and I think your case could be part of that.

They've been allowed to just quietly ignore the draft guidance as if there's no issue, but the issue is there and readytoexplode.

Schools are ignoring Cass and supporting social transition and they are ignoring the Equality act and not protecting single sex spaces.

I hope they are going to be coming under some serious scrutiny very soon.

agree - @Globulesthis is a good thread breaking down the issues with it.

https://x.com/matildagosling/status/1913892996208067032?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA

i would not trust any external company of any description that’s not SSA, TT or SM on anything at the moment. Hopefully the EHRC will provide everything schools need to know.

The EHRC didn’t want to know when I tried to tell them about toilets last year.

Some schools are ignoring Cass, existing guidance and breaking the law. Others are very much not breaking the law but doing safeguarding properly, including single sex spaces.

This fact I hope will mean the "it's so complicated" defence won't wash. There are enough school leaders who have shown sufficient intelligence not to put children at risk at the behest of adult political activists. I hope this means those who have capitulated to anti safeguarding TRA rubbish will face full responsibility including losing their jobs

I have no doubt that guidance will be being picked apart @WarriorN . I posted it merely as a reference point for the OP to see what advice schools were being offered following this judgement to support their letter and to try to deflect what arguments could be thrown back.

And whilst I agree with the sentiment of ignoring the unions and the like @BonfireLady , these larger bodies are the guides that schools have to go by. Schools are run by teachers, who are trained to teach, and are not trained in the nuance of law. Governing bodies may have a legal brain within them, most will not.

Schools are having to take guidance from somewhere. How are teachers supposed to know if the union or SSA are on the right side of the law with their advice? Both offer convincing arguments as to why they are correct in their opposing arguments.

Well that's bleak. Hopefully a positive knock-on of the SC ruling will be giving orgs like the EHRC a kick up the arse.

yes, this is true.

this ruling is likely to have been needed before the schools gender questioning guidance was finalised.

EHRC should be able to clarify for schools too.

Absolutely they'll be loads of cases both immediately and in the future.
I think this could be like historic sex abuse cases, things will have happened in 'single sex spaces' to young people and it will be decades before they feel able to talk or take the institutions to court.

I agree, but for places that didn’t used to be so private as they were single sex.

edited to clarify

And whilst I agree with the sentiment of ignoring the unions and the like , these larger bodies are the guides that schools have to go by.

I disagree. The schools can ignore the unions if the unions are providing advice that clearly contradicts existing statutory guidance and the law.

There are some areas where the guidance for schools is still not robust enough, so ambiguity can creep in e.g. sports. Unfortunately there is only non-statutory guidance which talks about "gender affected" sport. So if schools can find a way to justify not following it, there is wiggle room for them to do so (whether they should or not is another matter) and/or if the unions are advising that it's fairer and more inclusive not to segregate by sex, they might decide they agree.

However, on toilets and changing rooms it's clear and it always has been, at the very least since the FWS appeal case in 2022. The latest SC ruling is about GRCs. There was already an SC ruling in 2022 which made it clear that sex meant biological sex if no GRC was involved.

I'm with SSA on this:

https://x.com/SafeSchools_UK/status/1915065131827957790?t=0E-B35qpMC0Fux_4WKsagA&s=19

School leaders and governors are accountable for understanding and implementing statutory guidance and the law. In the first response to the OP, the person writing it misrepresented/misunderstood the statutory guidance regarding the difference between LGB and gender questioning children. This obfuscates what should be simple: boys and girls should change in the correct changing room for their sex, regardless of whether they have a gender identity that differs from it or not. The school could choose to go one step further if it so wishes and follow the draft Gender Questioning Children guidance to private an additional, alternative individual facility for any child who does not feel comfortable doing this.

100% agree.

And as I said before there are a sufficiently large number of Headteachers and schools where they DID follow the law where they resisted the gender woo and were the adults, doing proper safeguarding.

So any argument it was all too difficult is clear and obvious bollocks. And school leaders that pick and choose, using advice from politically active organisations rather than KCSIE, Working together and draft guidance from the government is almost certainly going to lose in court.

Both of the HTs and SLT at my DDs schools are doing safeguarding properly and have single sex spaces. There was a brief period of a gender woo addled activist teacher infecting some of the PHSE resources with ridiculous anti-girl stuff from the USA but thankfully - after parent complaints - sanity and science was restored. Students and teachers are of course free to hold gender woo beliefs along with many others, what they can't do is impose it on everyone else. Just as the religious students and teachers can't force all the other students to celebrate their religious festivals but are accommodated in doing so themselves.

I'd suggest anyone who wants to take their school to court over this, find a school (ideally nearby) where the HT and senior teachers have not imposed gender ideology on children. I think demonstrating how far from safeguarding as implemented in other schools certain schools have gone will be helpful in legal challenges. Plus, giving them a template to work towards - because despite TRA statements about how complicated it is, it really, really, isn't.

School leaders and governors are accountable for understanding and implementing statutory guidance and the law.

I agree @BonfireLady

However, this is just one area of school life.

School leaders are not experts on the law. They cannot be experts on gender law, H+S law, financial law, workplace law etc etc. First and foremost, they're educators. Not lawyers.

Therefore they have to rely on the larger bodies to interpret the law for them, to help them understand and implement statutory guidance and the law.

The OPs school was following guidance from their county council. If your county council is advising you (aka telling you) as a school leader to do X, you need to have a damn good reason to be doing Y. To say "well, the SSA says something different to you, and I agree with them" isn't good enough.

To say "well, the SSA says something different to you, and I agree with them" isn't good enough.

But "Governor X is a Lawyer and thinks you have misinterpreted the law", might well be? Don't assume that all Governors are amateurs.

Agreed.

But like I said in an earlier post

"Governing bodies may have a legal brain within them, most will not."

As an ex-teacher I completely agree that schools can’t be experts on door gaps, like I appear to be after a few years of research.

But now we’ve got the situation where the DfE are using 1974 legislation to justify their 2023 design when you have at least a dozen pupils in every secondary school with invisible disabilities with no toilets safe for them. Then there’s the stories of pupils dying in new enclosed cubicles and cpr being administered too late to help. And records of sexual assaults. Obviously I cannot state that design was the only factor.

Proper risk assessments and safeguarding should always some first. Not privacy at all costs. The DfE told me they do not hold any records of these risk assessments (for making all secondary school toilets private) in their department.

The last few years have been a free for all. You’ve got headteachers boasting about designing new toilet blocks themselves. No one’s thought about the WHY in design.

All this highlights how catastrophic it's been to allow political activists / queer theorists to influence local authorities, regulatory bodies and national / local governments. Even Ofsted were banging the Stoneall drum citing failure to address trans issues as one of the reasons for finding fault in some primary schools. It was an FOI that revealed Stonewall's complaining letter that Ofsted inspectors weren't speaking to little children often enough about trans issues and the Daily Telegraph picked it up.

So Ofsted - then a Stonewall champion - were complying with Stonewall's demands and imposing, via the Ofsted framework, gender identity and queer theory on the youngest children. That's why we're in this mess.

Ofsted did do a quiet reverse ferret but so much damage had by then been done

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/18/ofsted-cites-lack-gender-identity-lessons-factor-primary-school/

I actually agree if HTs have followed illegal LA advice, they have more cover and then the accountability for the breaking of the law resides with those in the LA who imposed this. However, you'd hope good teachers would say 'but doesn't this conflict with safeguarding....?' over something so obvious. I expect many did and have kept the emails.

I didn't know this. Ofsted, FFS! 🙄 I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Thankfully things are on the move now.

The regulatory bodies were specifically targeted by Stonewall - Social Work England, the CQC, even I think the GMC.
It's why these lobby groups have been able to so comprehensively dilute safeguarding for such an exceptionally vulnerable group of children.

We can and will fight back

Now we have the judgement for example - we can legitimately write to these places and ask them how they are changing their policies and then FOI the life out of them - going to need a lot more letters like mine but we can do it!!