Baroness Barran (Con)

My Lords, I start by stressing how much I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Sandhurst. As we have heard, the RSHE curriculum exists in a delicate area between the responsibility of the school and the values and beliefs of a child’s parents. Amendment 466 would ensure absolute transparency on what a pupil is being taught and avoid some of the very regrettable instances in recent years that noble Lords are well aware of. My Amendments 502YE and 504B would require the Secretary of State to publish guidance for schools regarding gender-questioning children. I was slightly surprised at this new idea that things are being rushed through. As my noble friend Lady Jenkin said, the previous Conservative Government published draft gender-questioning children guidance in December 2023 and ran a public consultation on its contents in early 2024. This was in response to evidence of schools socially transitioning children or affirming children as being of the opposite sex, sometimes behind their parents’ backs. As my noble friend Lady Spielman suggested—and as I can confirm to be true—I cannot describe the care that was taken over every single word in that guidance, and I pay tribute to the longest-suffering, most patient official in the DfE responsible for leading that drafting. The guidance said: “In recent years, we have seen a significant increase in the number of children questioning the way they feel about being a boy or a girl, including their physical attributes of sex and the related ways in which they fit into society. This has been linked to gender identity ideology, the belief that a person can have a ‘gender’, whether male … female … or ‘other’, that is different to their biological sex”. Since the publication of this draft guidance, there has been a growing consensus that gender ideology harms. There is no science or evidence behind the idea of gender identity—it is an ideological assertion. Social transition or cross-sex affirmation for children is not a neutral act. It is a harmful one, and it sets vulnerable children on a pathway to bodily disassociation and psychological confusion. The draft gender-questioning guidance established a number of clear principles, including the duty of schools and colleges “to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children … Schools and colleges should be respectful and tolerant places where bullying is never tolerated … Parents should not be excluded from decisions taken by a school or college relating to requests for a child to ‘socially transition’ … Schools and colleges have specific legal duties that are framed by a child’s biological sex … There is no general duty to allow a child to ‘social transition’”. The guidance gave a number of clear directives to schools, including that they should keep accurate records of every child’s sex. In addition: “Primary school aged children should not have different pronouns to their sex-based pronouns … For older children, schools do not need to specify pronouns to be used about each pupil and can decline a request to change a child’s pronouns … Schools must always protect single-sex spaces with regard to toilets, showers … changing rooms” and dormitories. It continues: “For all sports where physical differences between the sexes threatens the safety of children, schools … should adopt clear rules which mandate separate-sex participation … Single-sex schools can refuse to admit pupils of the other biological sex”. I cite these because they are clear directives that will help schools struggling with this complex issue and will help the children and families impacted by this ideology. I urge the Minister that it is urgent to act. We know that the Secretary of State is under huge pressure from some of the unions to move away from the Supreme Court judgment, as we heard in her speech at the TUC conference, but I very much hope that the right honourable Lady will hold her nerve against this and that the Minister can reassure us that that will be the case.