Suffer the little children…. SNEAKY!
from Voice for Justice UK:
While no one’s been looking, the DfE has been busy. On November 5th, immediately before Parliament’s dissolution on November 6th, and before the Government and civil service went into purdah in the run up to the General Election on 12th December, they issued a revised response to the new Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) Regulations. This replaced the earlier response published on 5th April 2019. For those unfamiliar with the term ‘purdah’ as it relates to elections, it means that there are restrictions in place on government business and all communications to the public. The DfE therefore literally slid this in at the very last moment… and people have been so tied up with the general election that it has largely passed without notice.
So why does this matter?
The reason is simple. This is not a change to the Guidance, but there are a number of highly significant changes to the Government view of how the Regulations should be interpreted and applied. The previous response stated that Primary schools would be encouraged to include LGBT content, it they considered it age appropriate, but that there was no specific requirement for this. In other words, it left schools with discretion on whether or not to include such teaching, and if they didn’t want to, they could simply say they didn’t feel if was age-appropriate.
But in this new response the wording has changed. Now the relevant section reads, “Pupils should receive teaching on LGBT content during their school years. Teaching children about the society that we live in and the different types of loving, healthy relationships that exist can be done in a way that respects everyone. Primary schools are strongly encouraged and enabled to cover LGBT content when teaching about different types of families.” (italics added)
It is immediately obvious that this marks a sea-change in attitude, and will make it extremely difficult for schools to resist.
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