Safeguarding without parents
Slippery terms, loopholes, and lack of admonishment permit ideological teachers to push transgenderism, keep secrets, and flag parents as harmful to their own children
Britain’s government has drafted new guidance on safeguarding children.
The Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, claims the changes would provide public authorities with “the clarity they need.”
In fact, the new guidance exacerbates legacy contradictions between sharing and hiding information from parents.
Early in 2023, Policy Exchange published Asleep at the Wheel, which found that schools are violating safeguarding principles (such as teachers should not be keeping a child’s secrets, and parents should be informed about any medical or behavioral issue at school) in service of gender ideology.
In December 2023, the Conservative government clarified that teachers are not obliged to use a child’s preferred pronouns, or to permit both genders to use the same single-sex spaces, and are obliged to inform parents of any gender dysphoria expressed at school.
The government closed its public consultation in March 2024 before the general election campaign.
This helps to explain why, in May 2024, the same (Conservative) government did not write parental rights into its updated guidance on “information sharing” for safeguarding. The well-established “seven golden rules” start with an effective obligation on teachers not to keep children’s secrets: “Protecting a child from such harm takes priority over protecting their privacy…” And yet parents are not mentioned in the seven golden rules. The information sharing is framed between public authorities.
Worse, this same guidance contains loopholes for hiding information from parents.
The caveats are superficially justified to protect children from abusive parents, but are too under-specified to prevent teachers from protecting children from trans-sceptical parents.
Mid-way (page 12), the guidance contains the following: “If you have concerns about a child’s safety and have decided to share information to protect them from a risk of harm, whenever it is safe and practical to do so, you should engage with the child, their parent(s)or carer(s)…unless seeking to discuss a potential concern would put the child or others at risk of harm.”
The next paragraph confirms: “you should not inform the child or their parent or carer about your decision to share information if doing so could put a child or others at further risk of harm.”
Yes, we should protect children from harm. But “harm” is under-operationalized, and open to abuse as an excuse to cut out parents — even to punish parents for disagreeing with teachers, while pushing harmful ideologies on children.
Earlier in 2024, Dr. Hilary Cass reported that some teachers encourage children to transition at school, without informing their parents. This creates ‘an adversarial position between parent and child,’ which worsens an already fraught and confusing – and ideological – issue.
Cass concluded that gender transition (even in the form of pronouns alone) is ‘not a neutral act’ and should not be kept secret from parents.
Keir Starmer’s administration won the election in July 2024, but waited almost two years to release for public consultation its own safeguarding guidance.
Since Starmer’s administration rubbished everything the Conservatives did, teachers felt at least more conflicted about their obligations, if not more permitted.
Just in the last year, we saw some teachers and education authorities abusing “safeguarding” concerns to hide information from parents, and to punish parents for raising concerns about their children’s education, or for holding views outside of the leftist consensus that dominates education.
“Safeguarding” is even weaponized against teachers who don’t adhere close enough to the leftist political consensus. This weaponization further encourages teachers to push transgenderism, performatively, to protect their jobs and earn promotions.
The Department of Education’s latest draft guidance does confirm some unambiguous rules: Pupils will not be allowed to use toilets or changing rooms designated for the opposite sex; The genders should not be sleeping in one space on school trips.
While ministers spin the guidance as clarifying rights and responsibilities, the old contradictions and escape clauses are buried within 200 pages of guidance.
The reader waits until page 68 before the government slips in several escape clauses into a section on “social transition” — meaning a change of name, pronouns, or school uniform associated with the opposite sex.
A subsection on parents starts off reassuringly: “Parents and carers have the leading role in the lives of their children, and this area should be no exception.”
Except, there are exceptions!
