LGBT Community and Acceptance Teaching

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I particularly want to thank the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for securing this debate. His personal reflections bring so much to the debate. It is genuinely inspiring. I know that young LGBT children and adults will be listening, and to see that someone is able to speak out in this place and be proud to speak out is so inspiring.

I want to reflect on the hon. Gentleman’s opening remarks about young people internalising the perceived shame of being gay, and his closing remarks about the intolerance in society and how that can impact on young LGBT children’s lives. For me, relationship education is about keeping all children safe. We have to be aware that four in five young trans children and three in five young LGB children self-harm, and that two in five trans children and one in five LGB children contemplate taking their own lives because of the pressure put on them by an intolerant society. That is why, along with colleagues and charities, I campaigned so hard for relationship education, particularly at primary school age. I firmly believe that its introduction will have a transformational effect on the next generation, supporting them to form healthy relationships, be tolerant, recognise harms and have safe sex.

We know that LGBT young people are often more vulnerable, face greater risks and have lower levels of wellbeing than their peers. Robust, age-appropriate relationships and sex education that is inclusive of LGBT young people and integrates them fully into the curriculum can help to reduce those risks. Research has shown that LGB young people are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviour, including unprotected sex. Sex education at secondary school will give pupils information about safe sex and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS. Young people need to be aware of the facts. They need to appreciate the importance of condoms and know how to use them properly. They need to be aware of post-exposure prophylaxis, pre-exposure prophylaxis—anti-HIV medications—and where they can find out more information.

LGB young people are also at risk online, being more likely than non-LGB peers to experience online victimisation and have online sexual conversations with people five years older or more. Studies have shown that gay and bisexual boys are particularly vulnerable to exploitation by those of the same sex. RSE will support young people to recognise the dangers of grooming and educate them to spot dangers online. RSE can support all young people to make sensible decisions about meeting up with strangers and using relationship apps intended for adults such as Tinder or Grindr, and, importantly, can teach them about consent, particularly informed consent.

RSE is not a silver bullet, but my hope is that it will help to address some of the wider issues LGBT young people also face, such as mental health issues and bullying. The evidence tells us that adolescence is the most difficult period for people who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. While attitudes have improved in the UK, it is still very difficult for young people to come out and access information from support services. LGBT pupils and their families will see their existence validated by RSE lessons. Young people will see LGBT people represented alongside non-LGBT people in educational materials. They will hear that in modern Britain, our families come in all shapes and sizes—single parents, adoptive parents, same-sex parents. They will learn, alongside their peers, of the joys of relationships as well as how to avoid the harms. Slowly and surely, we may begin to see some of the differences in outcomes that I mentioned shrink, and—hopefully in the not too distant future—disappear entirely.

I ask the Minister to ensure that teachers have the training and resources needed to deliver high quality LGBT-inclusive education. I urge the Government to hold firm and continue to publicly encourage primary schools to deliver LGBT-inclusive education.

I want to mention some of the myths and the excitement brewing around relationships education in primary schools. The main message in relation to children in primary schools being taught relationships education is that it is up to the parent to teach it; it is the parent’s choice to teach it. Of course it is, and we are looking at the parent doing that teaching every evening and every weekend. However, I campaigned for relationships education because I want to prevent harm to children. We must acknowledge that 90% of child abuse happens within the extended family. With the best will in the world, if a child has an abusive parent or close family member, how exactly are they meant to know that what is happening to them is wrong unless they get that one lesson where a teacher explains to them what abuse is and how to report it? It does not undermine the parents teaching whatever they want to teach in the other hours of the day, but that one lesson could save a child from harm and the lifelong impact of abuse.

Relationships education and sex and relationships education are about safeguarding and preventing abuse. I congratulate the Minister on all his work. He worked extensively to listen to all parties and all sides of the debate, and he has come up with a solution that is genuinely focused on preventing harm to the child, but, more importantly, creating a more tolerant and accepting society, which we all want.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to follow that inspirational speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), who spoke with real passion about how hate in society is rising, rather than decreasing. As a fellow football fan, I pay tribute to my football team, Manchester City—I seem to be mentioning them quite a lot this week—for all they do for the LGBT community in Manchester through getting rid of discrimination on the football terraces and promoting proper integration. My hon. Friend gave a really powerful speech.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) on securing this important debate and on such powerful testimony. I am sure every Member here wishes his researcher and his researcher’s friend well. We should all echo the thanks he gave to the health and wellbeing team here in the House, which helped him and which help other Members through a variety of issues.

Before I get into the bones of the debate, I have to say that, based on the hon. Gentleman’s inspirational speech, I will have to come out here as well: I am a Roman Catholic, which a gay friend of mine teased me about not so long ago. Honestly, we do not need collars to tell us that someone cannot partake in liturgy or sacrament, or believe in solidarity, subsidiarity, the preferential option for the poor or the universal destination of goods if they do not believe in the heart of the faith, which is human dignity. Someone who does not believe in the heart of the faith should not be able to partake in the rest of it.

We have seen much better direction under the new Pontiff, for he asked: “who are we to judge” anybody who is gay? For the record, I am the convenor of the Catholic Legislators’ network here in Westminster. The pontiff went on to say that a homosexual man or woman has the right to a family—to a father, to a mother, to a son—and their parents have the right to a son or daughter, and that no son or daughter should be cast out because of their sexuality. I think he was right to say that.

As a Mancunian, I had the great honour of delaying my departure to down here a few weeks ago, just before the recess, because the Governor of the Bank of England was launching the new £50 note at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. It has Alan Turing on it, who was obviously professor of mathematics at Manchester University, which is why that location was chosen. He is one of the greatest heroes in this country’s history. He cracked the enigma code at Bletchley, which led to the defeat of Nazi tyranny and ended the war early, saving countless millions of lives. How did we, as a society, go on to treat him—when he was living in Manchester and elsewhere—absolutely appallingly?

The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham mentioned what we did to gay people in the ’40s and ’50s and way before that. I think we were all proud—I was not a Member at the time—when the then Prime Minister Brown offered a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing. If anybody has a chance and a few minutes to spare, they should read the speech of Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, at the launch of that note. It was a powerful, moving testimony.

There is cross-party consensus on the need for inclusive RSE. This will not do my career any good, but I have to concur with my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) that the Minister has shown some incredible personal and political leadership on this. That is the last time I will say anything like that around the Minister. I think he has probably felt the love from some of us on the Opposition Benches, including the shadow Secretary of State—my boss—my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), because of this. I have said that now, so I will move on. There will be some criticisms later.

Figures from the “School Report 2017” show that 40% of LGBT pupils are never taught anything about the issue at school. We must provide comprehensive support for our teachers. Compulsory RSE was championed by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham, who is sat behind me, and was included in the Children and Social Work Act 2017 following her amendment. A huge debt of honour goes to her. I have issues with the Minister about how we get things on the curriculum in this country, and I am not sure my hon. Friend’s way is the best, but it is through her personal endeavour and tenaciousness over a long time that we are in the place that we are. It was also reflected in the proposals of the then Secretary of State for Education—the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening), who also worked very well on this—to make elements of personal, social, health and economic education mandatory in schools.

High-quality RSE will help to create safe communities—that is essentially what we are saying. Inadequate RSE leaves pupils vulnerable, particularly to abuse. I take up what the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham said about the Church and the priests. A famous Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, said that power is a gift from God. Abuse of minors has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality, as some people have said. It is an abuse of power. There are two types of power in our land—relational and coercive. That was all about coercive power. That point needs making strenuously.

The Government’s draft guidance clearly sets out the rights of parents and carers to withdraw children from sex education, but not relationships education. It also notes the role of parents in the development of their children’s understanding of relationships. For primary schools, the draft guidance states that headteachers will automatically grant a request to withdraw a pupil from any sex education, other than when in parts of the science curriculum. In secondary schools, parents will still have a right to request withdrawal from some or all sex education delivered as part of statutory RSE, which will be granted in all but exceptional circumstances. This will apply up until three terms before the child turns 16, at which point the child would be able to opt into sex education if they so chose.

[Sarah Champion]

This might seem like a small point, but I never got clarification on it— [Interruption.] Sorry; I was confused by the Minister. Will parents be told if their child decides to have that education in those last terms?

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. The Minister’s intervention was to indicate that we are running out of time.