Still Asleep at the Wheel: A Further Examination of Gender and Safeguarding in Schools - Policy Exchange

[IwantToRetire]

A new report by Policy Exchange reveals that secondary schools in England are still heavily influenced by gender ideology. Too many secondary schools are socially transitioning gender-distressed children without reliably informing parents, failing to adhere to their safeguarding responsibilities and compromising the rights and interests of other children in school.

The report includes FOI research assessing schools’ policies, replicating an identical round of FOI research carried out for Asleep at the Wheel: An Examination of Gender and Safeguarding in Schools in 2023.

Despite some progress, particularly regarding the provision of single-sex toilets and changing rooms, we found that many schools still lack adequate policies. In a minority of schools, it appears that contested beliefs about gender identity remain embedded: staff support children to begin a social transition in the school environment and teach contested ideas as fact. In other schools, staff are failing to uphold their safeguarding duties, as they do not reliably involve parents, the Designated Safeguarding Lead, or a medical professional. The interests of other children are often compromised, as all children are required adopt a transitioning child’s new name and pronouns.

Moreover, many schools permit a child to self-identify as a different gender and participate in sports activities with opposite sex. We found that:

• 70% and 73% of schools maintain single-sex toilets and changing rooms.
• 43% of secondary schools reliably inform parents when a child discloses feelings of gender distress.
• 58% of schools reliably involve a safeguarding lead or medical professional in these cases.

More than one third of schools do not maintain single-sex sports.
The report calls for the Government to amend the draft statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, on which it is currently consulting.

As Baroness Falkner of Margravine, former Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said in her Foreword to the report:

“Schools require greater clarity and authoritative guidance, consistently enforced. They carry a significant responsibility and must be supported to understand how to discharge their duties lawfully, consistently, and with confidence.”

https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/still-asleep-at-the-wheel/

Thank you. I have genuinely gone to a huge effort to remind everyone that this is nothing to do with trans children and everything to do with privacy safety and dignity for girls (and boys). I hope that has come through.

It is recognised that children who are sexually inappropriate may be victims of predatory adults or older children. I think I remember correctly that the children referred tor the Tavistock were significantly more likely to have a parent (carer?) who was a sex offender.

To my reading it always has. Girls spaces and girls needs are not about boys. They're a separate subject.

Notably the GLP have posted advice on how to respond to the KCSIE guidance - https://goodlawproject.org/good-law-project-warns-draft-schools-guidance-could-encourage-unlawful-discrimination/

Key to this chat:

• They say schools should make case-by-case “best interests” decisions, not follow hard rules against social transition.
• They oppose a strong presumption that parents should be told, arguing this can be unsafe for some pupils.
• Overall, they frame the draft as risking unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act if schools follow it too rigidly.

I will not trust anyone who encourages secrets and lies between children and parents. They have motives, they must, otherwise why.

Eh? Safeguarding is there for a reason. Parents have parental responsibility. If schools think parents would react badly to knowing something about their child in a way that would put the child at risk of harm, they should inform Children's Services.

They either think the child is at risk of harm (from the parents) or they don't. It really is that simple. They don't get to keep secrets because they decide it's in the best interest of the child.

The only hole in the process here is that if a child is gender questioning, this should be a safeguarding matter by default. Not because the child is at risk from the parents harming them (although of course they might be**... in which case Children's Services should be informed) but because they may enter a pathway towards permanent physical harm e.g. they may believe that they need to chop off body parts when they become 18.

** For example, parents may source medical interventions privately, which even the NHS now thinks are a bad idea for children, such as puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

To add:

@GlovedhandsCecilia I'm sorry to read that you had a difficult experience as a teenager, and it's great that you found a counsellor who helped you unpick it. I would hope that the counsellor decided not to keep it a secret that you were underage and being exploited but instead had made a note in the safeguarding system at school and that appropriate decisions had been taken by the adults that are responsible for safeguarding to make sure you got the wraparound support you needed. In theory, all of that could have been via your counsellor, without you realising it was in place. There will of course have been some children who were lucky that they found a responsible adult who could deal with everything themselves, but history is full of far too many examples where this wasn't the case. That's why safeguarding laws had to come in.

I'm deeply suspicious of the intent of adults who believe they are superior to and should be providing for a child they have a temporary interest in over and above those who have cared for the child daily since birth. Or who see parents as a barrier to what they would like to do with the child. It sounds distinctly like in many cases a desire to use the child to further their own righteousness and arrogance, and/or to further their own political obsessions. They will then wander on out of the child's life and take no responsibility for what comes next.

If a child is in actual danger there are already strategies and policies and procedures to follow. They are there. For every child. There are no special circumstances involved regardless of how often activists try to pretend that there are. And even if a child is in actual danger, professionals involved, courts, all of it, will look for many other strategies and ways forward before they take the final, last step of severing parent and child relationships. It's a final solution, not a first step. No child is ever better off with the state - it is a last ditch option when the state is merely the least of two very bad options.

I'll add that I can't help thinking of a poster a while back who used to talk about being a special counsellor for identity-confused children, with the qualification being trans identified. I would be deeply concerned that such people should be involved, recommending or making decisions for children when they themselves have not been a part of a school senior safeguarding team with the highest level of training and regular experience of all kinds of safeguarding process in action from first disclosures to court procedings.

Rather like the activists from well known groups who advised schools on policy significantly affecting safeguarding - particularly for all the girls in the school - who were later found to have had no training, even the basic that a lunchtime supervisor would have had, and one was found by an inquiry to be 'incapable of understanding' safeguarding even after several days of patiently trying to explain it. I believe from the released documents afterwards that he thought it had to do with data processing.