Last week Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the launch of a review of the relationships and sex education curriculum, which was introduced into schools in September 2020.
The policy had been due to be re-examined after three years but the Department for Education will now do this earlier after allegations from Conservative MPs that children were being “indoctrinated with radical and unevidenced ideologies about sex and gender”.
Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, complained that children were being subjected to lessons that were “age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate”.
While the focus might be on allegedly over-explicit material, the review could be an opportunity to address another issue: the long-running clash between the education authorities and Charedi schools over RSE, in particular the requirement to introduce children to LGBT content.
According to the guidelines, children are supposed to learn about LGBT identity by the time they leave secondary school.
It may be perfectly reasonable to insist that if a faith school is teaching that same-sex relations are wrong according to the tenets of its religion — as it is permitted to do under school regulations — then it should also inform children that same-sex marriages are legally allowed and LGBT people are entitled to respect as fellow-citizens.
However, the guidelines do not take into account the position taken by many Charedi schools, which maintain that they do not discuss anything to do with sex at all; sex, they believe, is a matter for the home, not the school.
While primary-age children in both state and independent schools are meant to be taught that there are “different types” of family set-up in today’s world, LGBT content is not compulsory for that age-group.
The guidelines nominally allow schools to decide what age is appropriate to deal with delicate topics.
However, any discretion the schools might enjoy seems to have been taken out of their hands by Ofsted, which has criticised Charedi schools for not talking about sexual orientation or gender reassignment to year-7 or 8 secondary students.
As the JC reported recently, there appear to be instances when even Charedi primary schools have been taken to task by inspectors for avoiding LGBT content.
And frustration remains within the Charedi community that it is only opposition to teaching about LGBT issues that has prevented some of their schools from being graded as good. The latest list of warning notices issued by the Department for Education includes a number of Charedi schools where this seems to be the case.
One Charedi school has come up with a compromise: it would address LGBT issues as part of sex, rather than relationships, education. The difference is that whereas relationships education is mandatory, parents can still withdraw children from sex education (at 15, it is the pupil’s choice). In other words, if any pupil wanted sex education, the school undertook to cover it.
Ofsted was not satisfied, but it remains to be seen whether the government is willing to reconsider such creative solutions.
One of the strongest arguments for including LGBT content is that it is, ultimately, about safeguarding. If a Charedi child were experiencing gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction, then acknowledging the existence of LGBT identity would help to support them.
But it is questionable whether forcing Charedi schools to tackle such topics in the classroom will bring much benefit to such children. Rather, a better way to support them is through access to sympathetic counselling.
For some in the Charedi community, the RSE controversy is unhelpful because it distracts attention from the more pressing need to improve standards of secular education in some schools. Instead, diehards dig in their heels and resist any change in the name of protecting their community from incursion of alien values.
