Relationships Education: LGBT Content

I would like to inform Members that the parliamentary digital communications team will be conducting secondary filming during today’s debate for its series of procedural explainers—welcome.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petitions 630932 and 631529 relating to LGBT content in relationships education.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Let me begin as usual by reading out the prayers in the petitions. The prayer in e-petition 630932 reads:

“We believe kids shouldn’t learn about this at an early age. I am sure there are many parents who do not want their or other children taught about LGBT in primary school.”

The petition closed on 12 July 2023 with 249,594 signatures, including 490 from Carshalton and Wallington. It did receive some attention because of the person who started it, so I want to clarify that they were a UK resident and that the Petitions Committee therefore felt it was appropriate to schedule this debate on the petition.

The prayer in e-petition 631529 reads:

“We believe kids should learn about this at an early age. I am sure there are many parents who want their and other children taught about LGBT issues…There is a petition to remove this content, which we believe is discriminatory. LGBT people exist, they have the same rights as the rest of us and kids should know them…without judgement or issue. Despite what their parents might believe.”

The petition closed on 20 July 2023 with 104,920 signatures, including 151 from my constituency.

In their replies to the two petitions, the Government stated that they had no intention of revising their guidelines, but they have since commissioned a review of relationships and sex education, or RSE, as I will refer to it throughout the rest of the debate. Today I want to make the case for why we should not go backwards and allow a return to the days of section 28, and to make the positive case for an inclusive, age-appropriate RSE curriculum. This is a policy the Government should be proud of rather than backing away from.

I thank the hon. Member for the way in which he has introduced the debate, which was made more powerful by his sharing his own experience. Some 512 of my constituents signed the second petition, and I am sorry I cannot stay for the whole debate, but I want to pick up on the point the hon. Member just made. Does he recognise the significant academic research demonstrating that, where we have LGBTQ+ inclusive curricula, there are higher levels of safety for individuals, lower levels of bullying in school and lower levels of adverse mental health reporting?

I am grateful to the hon. Member for that intervention, and I absolutely agree with him; in fact, that is the part of my speech I am moving on to, so I am grateful to him for giving me an opening. It is true that research has found that LGBT+ inclusive curricula are associated with reports of greater safety for individuals, lower levels of bullying at school and fewer reports of adverse mental health among all young people, irrespective of their gender identity or sexual orientation. That was set out in a report by Goldfarb and Lieberman in 2021.

High-quality, inclusive RSE is vital for children and young people to live safe, healthy and happy lives, and that can be demonstrated by young people themselves. Young people who took part in the Sex Education Forum’s research told us that their relationships education is not sufficiently inclusive of LGBT+ people, with 38% reporting that their RSE failed to provide any or adequate information about sexual orientation, and 44% reporting that it failed to provide any or adequate coverage of gender identity and information relevant to trans people.

I will share a couple of quotes from some of those young people. One of them said:

“We need to be told more about LGBT…I am a lesbian and growing up I never knew you could have sexual diseases”

from same-sex activities

“until the age of 15 when I started myself”.

Another said:

“Educate children on the LGBTQ community and same sex relationships. There will be someone in each class that it’ll be relevant to and children”

should learn

“to be more accepting. Queer people have and always will exist and children”

should be taught.

I have a constituent whose school will not show the materials. It will show a summary, but not the actual materials, so she has taken her child out of that school. I agree that we need complete transparency and that parents have a right to that. Does my hon. Friend agree?

That is absolutely appropriate. If the school has done that, it is contrary to current Government guidelines. I do not disagree with my hon. Friend at all.

The Government’s own statutory RSE guidance outlines obligations for parents and carers to be consulted on the development and review of schools’ RSE policies. It explicitly states that, as part of that process, parents and carers should be able to see “examples of the resources” that schools will use. Many schools should ask parents and carers to come in, view the materials and have a chat about the context in which they will be used. That is there in black and white, so if that is not happening, it absolutely should be called out. I do not think anyone would disagree that parents have a right to know.

With regard to the accusations of extreme, inappropriate, highly sexual material or similar, there simply is not the data to back up many of those claims, and that includes a lack of statistical data on complaints that have been escalated to the Department for Education. Many teaching organisations and people representing education unions, for example, have said that they have struggled to find any evidence of a widespread problem.

I suspect that I will come on to both Members’ points. I will finish this point, and if they still want to intervene, I will gladly give way.

Many of the examples that have been used come from other jurisdictions—one is from the Isle of Man, and many are from the United States of America—and others are anecdotal claims that have not been backed up with any evidence. Indeed, in the case of the protests outside schools in Birmingham, a High Court judge ruled that what was being taught in schools was being grossly misrepresented.

That is not to say that sometimes things do not go wrong, and I will come to that, but the research suggests that the opposite is often the case: schools are not teaching young people key aspects of the curriculum, rather than going to the other extreme. The Sex Education Forum’s polling of young people aged 16 and 17 found that basic mandatory aspects of the curriculum, such as healthy relationships and how to access sexual health services, are frequently missed, with close to three in 10 young people saying they had not learned how to tell, for example, whether a relationship is healthy.

When providing a universal service such as education, it is naive to think that things sometimes do not go wrong, and I acknowledge the comments from the chief inspector of Ofsted that that has happened on occasion. There may well have been occasions where inappropriate things have been said or brought into classrooms, which is not acceptable, but there is a framework in place to deal with that, and we do not have to jump to erasing LGBT people entirely.

The hon. Member is giving a characteristically powerful and important speech. I, too, have seen myths going around in my own constituency, in Wales, about what is allegedly being taught in schools, and they are simply not borne out by the facts. Does he agree that the important thing is for parents, or indeed anybody else, to speak with schools? My schools have been working with families and across school clusters to ensure that parents are involved and understand what is going on. Of course, parents can also often access the information online—for example, the Welsh Government’s curriculum is there for everybody to read online. It is important to base discussions on the facts, not on the myths that are circulating.

The hon. Member is absolutely right. It comes back to the point I have been trying to make throughout: there may well have been occasions where things have gone wrong, but that is where we need to ensure that schools engage with parents and carers, fulfilling the statutory guidelines and allowing parents and carers to see the curriculum and help develop it. We also need to have these discussions based on fact.

I thank my hon. Friend for what he has said so far. He has said that there is not enough evidence of this material. Will he meet me later this week so that I can set out all the evidence we have? I have also shared it with the Department for Education, because to say it is not out there is completely and utterly wrong. It is out there, and in my speech I will be mentioning all the different companies that are sharing it. I am afraid some it is completely abhorrent.

I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend. We sit on the Petitions Committee together and I am sure we can happily have that chat. To clarify, I am not saying that the material is not out there. I think I have made that clear in my speech so far, but I apologise if I have not. I want to be crystal clear that with a universal service that everybody gets, such as education or health, it is inevitable that sometimes things go wrong. What I am saying is that there is no statistical data to back up the idea that this is a widespread problem, so rather than trying to erase LGBT people from existence in schools, we need to look at why teachers do not feel confident delivering such material and why, on occasion, people sometimes invite inappropriate stuff into the classroom. I agree with my hon. Friend that if material is not age-appropriate, it should absolutely not be in our classrooms. The point I was trying to make was about ensuring that schools feel confident delivering the information and that parents feel empowered, but I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is often a conflation between all the material an organisation might produce and the material that is used in schools? Disney produces adult movies as well as children’s movies; the children’s movies have children’s content and the adult movies have adult content. An organisation might produce adult materials and children’s materials. Just because an organisation produces a range of materials does not mean that is evidence they are being used in schools. The evidence is what teachers are doing and what children are reporting, which is broadly positive.

I absolutely agree with the hon. Member, who makes a good point. Many people who produce children’s content might also produce adult content. For example, many authors write books that are aimed at adults and books that are aimed at children; that it is not unusual. Any assessment needs to reflect what is going on inside the classroom. We need the DFE to be well equipped so it has the expertise needed to ensure that any complaints that come forward can be thoroughly investigated, and that it has adequate resources in place to deal with issues when things go wrong, which is inevitable in a universal service. I would like to hear more from the Minister about that.

I will bring my remarks to an end by focusing on the societal change from the days of section 28 to where we are now. Section 28 was the ban on the teaching or “promotion”, as it was called, of LGBT+ issues. Since those days, we have been allowed to marry, to obtain a gender recognition certificate and to adopt, and we have gained many other hard-won rights. What does that mean in practice? It means there will be LGBT+ people at the school gates dropping off their much-loved children. Are we seriously suggesting to the Government that a child will have no ability to discuss why someone has been dropped off by two mums or two dads at the school gate? Of course not. Are we seriously suggesting in a digital age, when LGBT+ people are allowed to go about their lives out of the closet and in the knowledge that the state has protections against discrimination in place, that there is a way of preventing children from finding out that LGBT+ people exist? As we saw in the data, more children find out from social media than they do from schools or their parents.

It would be next to impossible to hide from children the fact that LGBT+ people exist. The Government think so, too. Their guidance for gender-questioning pupils explicitly said that it was not appropriate to continue to ask schools to hide a student who was questioning their gender from a parent because it would be next to impossible for that parent not to find out anyway in the digital age. If the Government agree with that when it comes to gender-questioning pupils, they have to be consistent and agree with that when it comes to LGBT content in the RSE curriculum.

I remind Members to bob if they wish to be called. I also ask Members to address the Chair.