Britain’s schools are not sharing access to graphic third-party sexual education material which risks indoctrinating children, according to a parent campaigning to increase transparency in schools.
The founder of No Secret Lesson Plans In UK Schools, Clare Page has been campaigning for parents to access sex education teaching materials via relationships and sex education (RSE) in schools.
‘Very strange’
“There they actually taught her that it had been discovered that there were many more than two genders. And that she should refer to all people in history with the gender-neutral pronoun of the day because we don’t know what gender pronoun they would prefer, and we can’t ask them today,” she said.Mrs. Page said this was “very strange, and not the right thing to be teaching nine and ten-year-olds.”
However, when she made a complaint to the school she was really “surprised” to find that the head teacher and the governance together all said, “well, actually, this is what we need to teach” under the at the time upcoming sex education school guidance.
She then said when her eldest was at secondary school by 2020, she was taught “very politicised” and “increasingly ideological lessons.”
“Especially, the George Floyd death and the American election at that point, there was a lot of critical race theory, social justice ideology, teaching about white privilege, teaching almost an American curriculum in a strange way. And by the time we got to 2021, there was also gender theory added to that.”
“And that’s the moment actually that the RSE curriculum became compulsory across all schools,” she added
Mrs. Page said that her daughter was taught that a heteronormative society was a bad thing and that she should be “sex positive” in her attitude to relationships and aware of intersectionality.
“This certainly didn’t match what I'd been told she would be taught, so I made some inquiries to the school about this and found that they weren’t really telling me the truth about what happened in that lesson,” she added.
On the idea that some schools are not telling the truth about what children are being taught, she said that this “creates a really huge unease.”
The School of Sexuality Education
The third-party provider The School of Sexuality Education also refused to release the information. Mrs. Page also found that the names of the educators who came into schools were on The School of Sexuality Education website with links next to their faces to businesses “that promoted sex toys, pornography, very graphic imagery.”However, when she contacted the school about this, she said the school backed The School of Sexuality Education.
She was also told that at one point actually that she was a “harasser” for trying to see sex education material.
The school did eventually give her access to the resources, but just via a laptop where she could have a look but not do anything about it.
“I couldn’t refer this plan to Ofsted. I couldn’t have a stage three complaint, which is the usual complaint process you have in a secondary school, so it was kind of meaningless,” she said.
“And that’s when I kind of realised actually this is a really serious problem here,” she said, expressing concerns that commercial secrecy was being enacted in schools, which separated children’s and parents’ experiences and prevented a proper complaint process.
Consequently, she pursued action to try and get the lessons made public.
“If we can’t see the end result of that and have it really poured over in the public space, we can’t actually prevent our children from being indoctrinated en mass actually,” she said.
She referred the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), though the watchdog backed the commercial interests of the third-party provider over the public interest to see the lessons.
Furthermore, at a tribunal court, the case was overruled by a judge who also ruled in favour of The School of Sexuality Education, that it didn’t have to disclose to a parent the content of a sex education lesson or identify those who delivered it.
Mrs. Page said she was “slightly despaired” because she thought “this is this is a public service, paid for by taxes” and that the kickback and campaigning ultimately led to her daughter having to move schools.
She added that a lot of parents say now that schools have “some kind of mission or agenda or a sense of cultural values that they wish to instil” but that the people who don’t fit into that or are uncomfortable with what children are being taught are pushed to one side.
Indoctrination, Not Education
However, she has also gained much sympathy and easily met the legal target for her Crowdfunder with many people describing the same issues as “indoctrination, not education.”She added, however, that authorities and the government have got to put parameters on what “age appropriateness” means.
This, she said, needs to happen when “something falls really below the standards of what a child should be exposed to, not just age-inappropriate, not just a bit early or a bit too much, but really potentially malevolent at times.”
“Safeguarding is not being properly prioritised,” she added,
