Parents must be involved if their children say they’re transgender or nonbinary in schools, the UK’s Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi told a select committee of lawmakers.
Answering questions from the Education Committee on Wednesday, Zahawi said parents must be “front and centre” in safeguarding their children from ideologies that are not age-appropriate, and that the government is working on a new guideline for teachers.
Zahawi was asked about a recent YouGov poll in which 79 percent of secondary teachers said their school had at least one pupil on its roll who identifies as transgender or nonbinary, and a fifth of the teachers surveyed said they would not normally inform parents if their child adopted a cross-sex identification at school.
The poll also suggested that only five percent of the teachers would proactively inform parents if their children adopted a cross-sex identification at school, and a third would only inform the parents with the child’s express permission.
Responding to the question, Zahawi said he believes “parents have to be front and center” of the issue.
“And that is my message to the frontline. [It] is to say: You have to involve parents in this, you have a duty to safeguard these children, and parents are very much a part of that,” he said.
The minister was then asked to address the “age appropriateness” of introducing in school some ideas, such as “critical race theory or gender ideology.”
He said this is the reason why he said “parents have to be front and centre of this. It is really important that parental engagement is front and centre.”
Zahawi told the committee that the government accepted the offer from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to help develop new guidance, which he hopes to be able to issue as soon as the work is done.
Another committee member, Conservative MP Dr. Caroline Johnson, asked Zahawi if he thought teen male students should have access to areas in which school-aged teenage girls are in a state of undress or a potential state of undress or if the issue will be addressed in the new guidance, citing an example where parents of a boarding school told her they were dissatisfied that “a male student had been allowed to go into that school because he was trans.”
“He had been provided with en suite accommodation in recognition of his needs for privacy, but the young ladies were required to walk along the corridor to their communal showers in towels. Many of them felt uncomfortable—but were bullied if they said so—about walking where boys were,” she said.
The minister suggested there are ways of accomodating both the needs of the girls and the transgender students, such as having them use the changing rooms at different times.
“The simple answer is that the reason why we have engaged with the EHRC is that there are people who have the capacity and the expertise, so we will be looking at all of that.”
