Member

Consider the experience of another parent, Emma. Her complaint centred on the presentation of contested gender theory as fact, and age-inappropriate relationships and sex education materials in a primary school. I ask noble Lords to please forgive me, but I need to be plain in what these pupils were told to do: to work in groups using play-dough to make a model demonstrating a condom catching semen from a penis. This was a primary school, and it was following a scheme developed by a company established by the local authority. When, having escalated her complaint to the DfE Emma chased it for a response, she was told that the evidence she had submitted had likely been subject to “premature secure destruction”. That is a new way of saying “shredded”. Even after Emma resubmitted everything, the department’s final response, which did not uphold her complaint, arrived a year after her initial submission. By then, her daughter had already left to attend secondary school.