Member

The remaining route is for parents to escalate a complaint to the Department for Education, but this is one of the problems that I want to highlight. The department has become a black hole—a place where parental complaints go to die. Consider the case of Susan, a pseudonym, a parent governor who questioned her school over the lawfulness of its proposed RSE policy. When her concerns were sidelined, she was told by the head teacher that her only recourse was to submit a formal complaint as a parent, and so she did. She detailed how one of the lesson plans adopted by the school instructed pupils to plot their gender identity on a spectrum from trousers to tiaras. Pupils were then asked to add to this their “personal identity mind map”. It declared in uncompromising terms that no one else could tell them what their gender was and said that people must always be treated according to their self-declared gender. This is Stonewall orthodoxy, not shared values. It is political indoctrination, not education. It potentially even raises safeguarding concerns.