All I wanted to know was what my daughters were learning in sex education.
by Kathryn Knight, Daily Mail:
Two years and one court case later, I’ve been branded a bigot… and parents still aren’t being told.
Clare Page was both incredulous and wearily resigned when the email finally dropped into her inbox.
From her solicitor, it contained what Clare hoped would be a vital legal milestone giving her — and, by extension, other parents — the right to receive copies of exactly what their children are being taught at school.
Their ‘lesson plans’, she hoped, would be as readily available as, say, attendance records or textbooks.
You might think this would already be the case — government guidance certainly suggests it should be — but as Clare had discovered, it isn’t.
Concerned by her 15-year-old daughter’s reports that contentious theories were being taught as fact in sex education lessons — among them the suggestion that we are living in an unacceptable ‘heteronormative society’ (a world where heterosexual relationships are promoted as the norm) — Clare had asked the school for copies of the slides on which the lessons were based.
As the Mail reported last year, she was refused time and again, leading to a near two-year long fight which ultimately took Clare to court.
But in a decision that has consequences for all parents, the email Clare received that morning set out the judge’s ruling that the school was entitled both to refuse to publish the lesson slides in order to ‘protect commercial interests’ and to refuse to give the identity of the teacher, due to data protection concerns.
‘In essence, she was prioritising the commercial interest of a third-party education provider over the public interest of parents to know what their children are being taught — and the privacy of a teacher over safeguarding concerns,’ as Clare puts it.
So yes, incredulity was the 47-year-old mother of two’s instinctive response. But so, too, was a sense of weary resignation after a battle in which she was accused not only of harassment, but of being ‘anti-homosexuality, anti-trans and anti-equality’.
All because she asked for transparency.
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