Relationships Education: LGBT Content

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Elliot Colburn]

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.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to support the second petition, but it is important that we recognise the concerns of those who signed the first petition. I hope those concerns can be allayed.

Let us remember what we are really talking about: age-appropriate education for children. It is not the first time that people have deliberately used age-appropriate education to try to ban wider education; in fact, that is one of the ways that section 28 was introduced. People will remember “Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin”, a rather dull and boring book about a little girl who goes and has ice cream and walks through a park with her two daddies. That was one of the books that caused the furore when it was stocked by the Inner London Education Authority and it was suggested that it should be in schools. I do not think anyone in the Chamber would now suggest anything other than that the book is appropriate for children aged three to five, as it was designated at the time.

The book was rather dull and boring, as these things should be in many respects. People’s boring and dull lives in all their different aspects and orientations need to be explained to children, and we can see that if we look through children’s libraries in schools at the moment. There is the fantastic “And Tango Makes Three”, where two father penguins are raising a penguin child, which is actually a true story based in a zoo. There is “What Does a Princess Really look Like?”, which is for nought to three-year-olds, and is about how anyone can be a princess if they want and how everyone is flawed. The book ends with the father and the child realising that we are all flawed, but we are all striving to be good people. “Love Makes a Family” contains pictures of loving families in all their diversity—mixed race families, where the grandparents are raising the children, and so on. From “’Twas the Night Before Pride”, which is four to eight-year-old appropriate, children can learn about why people of all different backgrounds celebrate Pride. There are other books for older age groups.

Those books are in school libraries. Would I give “’Twas the Night Before Pride” to a two-year-old? No, because it is stated quite clearly on the book’s cover that it is appropriate for four to eight-year-olds. The same is true of teaching materials; we use different materials and different levels of education for different ages. However, I am afraid that there is no starting point where children need to start to realise that there are lots of different families, or to realise that gender and sex are important dividing points in society.

I think that children in lower primary school—infant school—generally should not be divided very much by sex at all. At that age, they should be taught, “Actually, you can be anything you want. You can play with any of the toys you want. You can do all of the sports activities that you want.” We should have almost no gender-specific activities or separation at that age, and I think that it is a great shame that we now see adverts for Lego that are gendered, whereas only 30 years ago they would have no gender attached to them. I think that we have gone backwards in many respects for infant and lower-primary-school age groups.

That does not mean that we should be blind to differences. It does not mean that we should not say, “When you get older, sometimes, girls and boys do separate off and do different activities,” but that that should be dealt with in an age-appropriate way. Of course, when we talk about bits of the body, as well—children of a very young age are curious—that should be described in an age-appropriate manner.

To ignore differences in that sense is actually to raise our children to be oblivious to what is appropriate—to what parts of their or others’ bodies are appropriate to show or to touch. If we do not get that across, we create children who are less safe, because when people then do have inappropriate relationships with them, they have not been taught that that is wrong. If we just talk about it in the sense of “mummy and daddy,” then we also set up a relationship danger, where we are not explaining to children that, “As you get older, your older brother and sister, and your older aunts and uncles, might also have different forms of relationship that are healthy and that are safe.” Therefore I do think it is important that that is done.

Where I think we have gone wrong, particularly in this area, is in the lack of proper guidelines when relationships education was rolled out initially. When some of the Birmingham protests were happening, we expected teachers to engage with the community without proper, clear guidelines from the Department for Education about what was and was not appropriate. Teachers had to go to bat for what were often very sensible policies without the defence of, “We are following the national guidelines.” Those guidelines have now been out for a little while, and it is perfectly sensible for those guidelines to be reviewed from time to time to make sure that they are still working.

I also think that that parents should be encouraged to see the text of the work in all aspects of education. In maths and in English, we should not have secret education, where we say to parents, “Oh, well, you want to know what literature your children are studying at the moment? No, I am afraid you can’t do that.” We should be open about it: “Here’s the book that we are studying, and here are the resources.” That is partly because we want to encourage parents to go on a learning journey with their children. We know that children perform best in schools when the parents are working at the same pace with the children. That sometimes means the parents learning as well. When I have taught nieces and nephews or worked with other younger children, and I have tried to help them with maths, sometimes, I learn as much as them. They do long arithmetic nowadays very differently to how I did it. It is perfectly acceptable to say that, as a minimum, we expect parents to see the resources. I do not think that is unusual. We should not be targeting LGBT specific RSHE in that discussion, but talking about it as a wider school community.

There is also a case for schools to ask parents to come in to learn about the RSHE the school is providing. I actually think we should encourage schools to offer those activities for wider parts of the curriculum as well. We know that children from highly educated backgrounds often have an advantage because their parents are able to engage easily in the curriculum, while parents who do not have that same academic background might not be able to do so. Schools inviting people in to engage with that is therefore something that we should encourage.

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend is making some important points. Does he agree that additional safeguards can be put in place? In Wales, the curriculum specifically says that material has to be “developmentally appropriate” for young people. We have to take into account not only age but knowledge, maturity, additional learning needs and physiological and emotional development to ensure that materials are provided at the right stage for every young person.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I totally agree. We also need to be clear that these considerations should apply not only if there is a trans child at the school; they are of wider importance. I remember this issue at my primary school, not with relationship education but with education around different religions. My year group was almost exclusively of a white and Christian background, but we learned about Buddhism and Hinduism, with all the different festivals. There is a danger of thinking that we should teach these things only if there happens to be somebody in the class with a gay family member, or an older sibling who is transgender. I benefited hugely from the school trips we took to the synagogue, even though I think I am right in saying that there were no Jewish children at my school. It was really important for me to understand the different backgrounds that different families have, and then, when I went to secondary school and mixed with a bigger group of people who were from different groups and had different backgrounds, I understood where they were coming from.

I want to touch briefly on a point I made in an intervention earlier. I think we have got waylaid in this conversation by condemning organisations that produce different age-specific materials. It is quite right that sex and relationship-based organisations that specialise in the subject will produce materials for adults and materials for children, and on their website they will publish all those materials. It is totally right that they will do that. It is, of course, totally wrong for a teacher to pick adult material and use it for activities with younger people. When we had this debate last time, I remember several Members on the opposing side of the argument reading out a number of rather adult activities, but when we got to the bottom of it there was no evidence that those activities had been run in any primary school in this country. To this day I have seen no evidence that schools have run those activities.

I am sure the exception will prove the rule in the sense that the outrage of one example out of the 100,000 schools across our country will be one where it needs to be age-specific, but that is why we need a better system for the Department for Education to share the books, educational resources and organisations that it recommends. Diversity Role Models is one organisation that does great work. It recently released a set of great cartoons that touch on all these different issues, which it launched only a few weeks ago at the Disney headquarters here in London. That is the kind of thing the Department should be signposting. It would ensure that teachers and parents have that reassurance, but most importantly that children can learn about the glorious diversity of the world they are growing up in, and that when they get to the right age, they are equipped and prepared to keep themselves safe and to have a happy and wonderful life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Fletcher]

It is the T that I am discussing today, but I believe that the sexualisation of our children should stop within schools—all of it. I do not think there is any need for it, especially in primary schools. I genuinely do believe that there is absolutely no need for it.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I am very interested in the hon. Gentleman’s analogy, but it is a bit unclear. Is he saying that we should not teach what two plus two equals at all? In other words, is he saying that we should not teach anything around relationships, including straight relationships and that there are parents, mothers and fathers? Or is he saying that he wants that to be taught, but that the only outcome he wants is that people have to be straight? That is what is not clear.

Every book, whether it be Enid Blyton, Harry Potter or whatever, mentions relationships and we talk about them when we teach literature to children. In primary schools, children are taught about how a hen lays an egg, and the egg hatches—

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

It would be great to know what the hon. Gentleman wants: only straight, or nothing?

[Nick Fletcher]

I thank the hon. Member for his speech. I said right at the beginning that I would be speaking specifically about trans, and what I was trying to say is that I believe there is an untruth there. Two plus two equals four, but we seem to be teaching that two plus two equals five when it comes to gender. I believe that boys are boys and girls are girls, and that they cannot change sex.

Stonewall, Mermaids and other bad actors in this field have lobbied schools into subscribing to their ideologies, which are not grounded in anything factual. We have mainstream publishers such as HarperCollins publishing school textbooks that tell children:

“Myth 1—the world is divided into men and women.”

HarperCollins actually teaches children:

“Trans women are women and trans men are men.”

If that were so, that would be the end of female-only sports.

We have Stonewall teaching children:

“Everyone has a gender identity.”

I do not, so that cannot be true. We are lying to children. We have Brook teaching that a man who identifies as a woman is

“A woman of trans history”,

or even simply, “A woman.” If that were so, that would be the end of female-only spaces. We have some teachers, who have written to me, who are too scared not to teach those lessons, when they know that what they are teaching is wrong. That cannot and should not continue.

The Department for Education has quite rightly written a letter to schools telling them to let all parents see what their children are being taught. However, we have evidence that some schools are ignoring that and continuing regardless. Parents who have been shown what is being taught have sometimes seen only part of the material, or they have had to go into schools to see it and are then told they cannot photograph or copy it. Copyright issues have trumped our children’s safety. Be under no illusion—this is happening across the country. Swindon Borough Council produced its own material for use across local schools and it is quite clearly abhorrent. A staff member from Pop’n’Olly who explains to primary school children that he is trans and non-binary claims to have spoken to 100,000 children. Jigsaw says it has worked in 7,000 schools.

In 1994, we had 12 children suffering with confusion about their body and attending gender clinics. Now, we have 5,000 on a waiting list and we ask: why? I will tell you why: it is because our schools have been captured by bad actors in despicable business making huge sums of money out of feeding our children this ideology. We should not have to put legislation in place to deal with this. We as a nation should be playing no part in this. However, if individuals are too weak or too scared to stand up and say no to this ideology, I am afraid we must legislate. We must put legislation in place to deal with this with immediate effect. In 10 to 20 years’ time, this will be the next contaminated blood scandal or Post Office scandal. I hope all who have been pushing this will be dealt with accordingly.