Should a primary school head really have asked pupils as young as four to go on an LGBT Pride march?
by Antonia Hoyle, Mailonline:
Four-year-old Tristan Anderson is a lively boy who loves books about bears, cartoons and playing football.
At an age when he’s still learning to read and can’t yet tell the time, he has a simple outlook on the world — and, with a Mummy and Daddy to care for him, the assumption that everyone else belongs to a similar family unit.
And that, his mother insists, is how it should remain for another few years
So when she discovered Tristan’s primary school was organising a march to celebrate the culmination of lessons they’d laid on to mark June’s Pride Month, thrown nationwide in honour of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gender (LGBT) rights, she was concerned.
‘Of course we realise families different to our own exist,’ says Ruth Anderson. ‘But it’s up to us as parents when to explain this to our son — not to his school, whose head teacher is pushing an agenda that is entirely irrelevant to children this young.’
Ruth wasn’t alone in feeling this way. So strong was this sentiment among a faction of parents at Heavers Farm School in Croydon, South-East London, they warned head teacher Susan Papas that should the march go ahead, they’d keep their children at home.
Twenty children didn’t attend due to the planned march; 90 more failed to turn up to school that day without their families offering explanations.
So strong was this sentiment among a faction of parents at Heavers Farm School in Croydon, South-East London, they warned head teacher Susan Papas that should the march go ahead, they’d keep their children at home
After having initially justified lessons on LGBT issues as part of the statutory school curriculum, Susan Papas, 58, finally buckled under parental pressure, axeing the march and holding a scaled-down assembly instead.
It was a decision that caused a ferocious backlash, with angry parents who’d been in favour of the march branding those who had objected as bigots.
Meanwhile, the school became a cause celebre for LGBT rights, with no one keener to defend it than Papas herself.
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