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/

I've seen a number of professionals lose their jobs for deciding their opinions mattered more than statutory safeguarding guidelines. Tragically in most of the cases it was a child who suffered awful consequences.

Children are not able to safeguard themselves. This is a fundamental principle of safeguarding and this is why you cannot (at least I hope not) be in charge of safeguarding any actual children.
This includes children not being able to decide when things should be kept a secret and children not being able to decide when social services should be involved.
You may have different opinions but if you went on a safeguarding course and said "I'm not going to tell social services/the DSL in my school in some cases where a child says their parents are a danger to them" then you would not be proceeding into a safeguarding role.

And this could also apply to beliefs that girls should marry early or that religion trumps children's personal ambitions.
I wonder if@GlovedhandsCecilia would report a family to social services if a girl said she wanted to go to university but was afraid her family would harm her if she told them?

I dont agree with socially transitioning at school, but nor do I know that telling you would be the right thing, either.

Yes I think adults should ultimately make the choice when a child doesnt want to disclose. That choice might be not to tell the parents.

Its not as simple as a child saying that their parents may bea danger to them. This is why when you've actualy worked in roles supporting children and young people, you have a better understanding of nuance and that there isnt a one size fits all approach. Especially in a system where foster care for older teens is often semi independent living without the supervision they really need.

Depends on the circumstances. It might be best to help the soon to be adult gain that independence covertly by the time she is 18 and just leave as an adult with certain rights already in place.

I'm going to butt in here, as an experienced teacher, and address myself to any non-SLT teachers reading along. You are employed to teach Maths or Year 3 or whatever. You also have pastoral responsibilities for a group of children which involve helping every child to thrive in school. You are not a 'friend' to any of these children, you are their teacher. That is your professional role. You have zero qualifications in social work, psychotherapy, medicine or counselling and you have actually had very little safeguarding training compared to more senior staff. You know much less than you imagine about the individual pupils that you teach. If you ever have any worry that a child is at the start of a pathway that may lead to harm, then your absolute responsibility is to bring this to the attention of the DSL at your school, using whatever mechanism your school employs.
Conversations about involving parents or not should be held at DSL level. These are not your decisions to make.

As you were.

Yes.

Can you accept that in some cases not telling parents is the wrong thing?

It seems to me that we have lots of instances of schools doing the wrong things against a hypothetical situation where telling parents (or SS) may be the wrong thing but it’s all very difficult and nuanced. That’s not clear safeguarding procedure for teachers

Ahh I see you agree with @WiseWomanOfPutney

Perhaps this is semantics. I am using school and teachers synonymously (which I can see is unhelpful).

My position is:
Teachers shouldn’t keep secrets where there’s a safeguarding risk

Disclosure or discovery of gender questioning children / desire for social transition should always be considered a safeguarding risk

Teachers should therefore inform DSL if they learn about this risk

DSL should inform and support parents (or take the decision to involve other agencies)

case in point @SingleSexSpacesInSchools’s school.

guidelines and law exist. Already. School refuses to acknowledge. Biased. Brighton, obvs

But this is the point - Cpom and pass up.

the DSL has the full picture of part two.

They will be held responsible if they ignore current guidelines.

This is my prediction over the next few years. Transgender trend, Bayswater and safe schools alliance will still have to provide support and criticise the DfE.

Multiple companies will be working on new training for schools and DSL and governors now, ready to finalise and deliver when KCSiE is finalised.

Where there are the above questions and differences of opinion will show up in different ways.

A rash of policies will be created for schools to use off the shelf OR schools will write their own, matching what they best can from kcsie directly. Or a mix of both. MATs will share obviously.

Where the lines are drawn will be confusing between different schools. Parents will still have to raise issues for some time. Some children will fall through the gaps.

GlovedhandsCecilia

What is your actual role working with children? Because you don't seem as informed as the safeguarding experts on this thread. More about your personal experience shaping your viewpoint.

You talk about having sex when you were an under age with someone over age and realising you were exploited by it. But presumably you didn't want your parents to know.

That sounds like a safeguarding risk to me. I don't think consensual sex generally is always reported, but where there's an element of exploitation, that changes things.

it would help if you could say where you have learnt your safeguarding from.

The "professionals" are demonstrably the wrong people, who are not objective, and very much steered by dogma, authoritarianism and social pressure.

For example:

Jolyon Maugham - professional Barrister
Dr Sam Hall - professional GP
Zarah Sultana - professional MP

Professional means nothing when the professional class does not hold itself to proper account.

The entire senior leadership team and governing body at my daughters school - professionals one and all - have been told, directly, of the proven dangers and direct risks they are bringing to about 800 female students - and yet they do nothing but encourage males into female spaces, pursue queer theory in the classroom.

They do not know better than us because they call themselves professional. They are demonstrably nothing but.

Our core opportunity to change this is to do two things:

1 - Inform organisations that their policies or practices are illegal/discriminatory/dangerous whatever
2 - Give them an off ramp, provide a click-and-done replacement for their previous policies, that is supportive of reality, supports males and females, and provides space for those who have issues with their sex to exist with dignity, but not at the expense of others, and does not require compelled speech, actions, etc.

This is all most organisations need in order to make permanent changes to the way things work.

We show them they are wrong
we provide a solution

and we do it before the activist organisations, the ones lower than Stonewall, get their acts together to do just the same thing.

As a school governor I’d love to see some good examples I can use in my school.

happy to receive via dm

And as someone who has been involved in this fight for a while, I urge you all to sign up as a school governor. Even if it’s not your child’s school, take your skills and sign up as a co-opted governor at another local school because they all reference each other.

Well said. And that is why any advice that tells adults in schools to keep a child's secret is a predator's wet dream.

It can be a hard lesson to learn when a child has confided something in you and you know that passing it on will likely have repercussions.
But that's why we teach teachers not to keep secrets and help them plan for what to say to a child about the need to share.

This thread is about the extent to which transactivism is wedged into certain schools and how children and parents are harmed by these narrow beliefs. It defies belief that a poster is continually arguing with those experienced and qualified in school safeguarding and thinks that they know better.

They don't.

Yes in some cases. As ive said over and over, it depends on the individual circumstances.

Situations are nuanced. Then telling my parents at that time woukd mean I trusted nobody in authority and then the people who spoke to me about sexual exploitation would never have had the chance of that conversation. I learned how to better protect myself because I had a trusting relationship with them.

I work for the LA with children and young people who, for a range of reasons, are at risk of imprisonment. That's the official thing. It's meant to be about young offenders. However the role has morphed since Covid and now I'm working with a lot more young people who arent necessarily at risk of offending or imprisonment, but arent on the right track either. Like school refusers, teens who beat up their parents and siblings, teens who have self harmed. We say its the signs of gentrification in our area.

You think that because they make a different decision than you would have. That's all.

Yeah they disagree with what you think. Doesn't make them wrong. It means they disagree with you and won't be using the approach you insist on. Thats doesn't mean they arent professional, it means that you arent steering their ship.

Oh I think you’ll find I have suddenly got quite the influence on steering this particular ship.

Will you continue to do this even when some women disagree with you about something, or will you threaten to stop the whole thing to show them that they have to listen to you?