One day, Clare Page’s 15 year-old daughter returned home from school reporting that a recent sex education lesson – which was supposed to be about consent – had taught that ‘heteronormativity’ is harmful and ‘sex positivity’ is a good thing.
Clare was understandably alarmed. The Education Act 1996 imposes a duty on schools “to prevent political indoctrination and secure the balanced treatment of political issues”, and this was a clear example of a contested – and indeed harmful – ideology being presented to her daughter as fact.
The lesson was provided by a charity called School of Sexuality Education (SoSE), which at the time had what Clare describes as “inappropriately explicit lesson plans” on its website, including links to a private company “which advertises sex toys, pornography and anal masturbation techniques to young people”.
Wanting to know more about what her daughter was being taught and the details of any link to websites promoting such things, Clare made a Freedom of Information request to the school. She was shocked when it was declined on grounds of commercial secrecy for the charity and privacy for the teacher.
Clare then referred the case to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and in a landmark decision that made national headlines, the ICO backed the school’s choice to keep the lesson details secret from parents, effectively prioritising the commercial interest of an education charity over parents’ right to know what their children are being taught.
Clare believes the ICO made an unlawful decision that fails in respect of the school’s public service duties, compromises safeguarding and undermines the trust that is essential to education.
She is now planning to appeal the decision at a tribunal, with the aim of overturning the ICO’s decision and establishing a ruling that the lesson resources used by schools should be fully accessible to parents, and that commercial interests should not override the rights of parents.
You can donate to Clare Page’s legal crowdfunder here.
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I wonder what will need to be added to next year’s edition…
If the censorship coming our way is implemented there won’t be a next year’s edition….
Yep. Labour will probably introduce an amendment to counteract crockery misinformation.
Ha! What a beauty I want one!
It’s a bit of satirical fun I know, bit it just doesn’t capture how I feel about the last two years – Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech. and the idiotic masses all conspiring (most completely unwittingly) to create a dystopian society where a law forced people to die alone, banned people from breathing too much fresh air, brainwashed all the lemmings into thinking they would kill Granny, deliberately pitted citizens against each other to create hatred against one group, killed childhoods (literally for some) created mandates that meant unless you gave your body to the state for experimentation then you couldn’t work etc. No, it somehow fails to capture the ridiculousness, the malevolence and the downright lunacy of the last two years. It doesn’t capture the frustration, the astonishment and the simmering rage that I know many of us feel. A lot to fit in on a plate I suppose! Perhaps a commemorative elephant might be a more suitable canvas? There’s certainly no longer a problem fitting one in any room these days.
A superb piece which captures the evils foisted upon us these last two years.
As I read through your post I thought – did we really allow all this, did we actually live with this medieval nonsense? It upsets me now just thinking back on what we went through. The sheer evil of it all is now difficult to comprehend.
God forbid.
The hardest thing for me to take was, still is, the complete feeling of helplessness. Of knowing that the world has lost its head, gone absolutely batshit bonkers, but of knowing there was little that could be done. It’s easy to forget these evil w*!@£$^s – might as well use some currency symbols while I still can! – played a long-in-the-making and disempowering hand. They had roleplayed all the scenarios, knew from current societal trends (supported by social media data), how this would unfold. They did their homework and then some. Most of us (I was definitely one) were too comfortable in modern life and were caught completely off-guard. That shock formed one of two responses, either total submissiveness or total bewilderment/astonishment/anger. It was (still is) the biggest fight or flight test of our lives. Being in the former group, the much smaller dissenting group, there was little we could do to quickly and peacefully fight back – we found against a globally coordinated system that ran so deep that virtually nobody could believe it even existed. A system that owns and orchestrates pretty much everything that we see, hear and touch; a system that is omnipotent. Don’t beat yourself up too much, to say we’re up against it is the biggest understatement that was ever uttered.
Completely agree. Another terrific post.
Each and every N95 self-muzzled housewife-activist out there who’s still righteously glaring at a heartless and indifferent world is secretly yearning for the good times, when everybody had to listen to their hysteric ranting about dangerous germs all around, to be brought down on us again. These people are a stark reminder that we’re really just temporarily out on bail and not free. Johnson has promised them that they can have it all right back if they can come up with a credible pretext.
It cannot be long now before books such as Laura Dodsworth’s ‘A State of Fear’ and Robert Kennedy Jr’s ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ are condemned to the banned list and ritually burnt outside Parliament.
I agree totally with the comments preceding. It’s a shame that this piece of craft is so expensive… £100-£200 buys quite a lot of energy, food and/or fuel…Perhaps DS could offer one as a prize in “Most Convincing Debunking Of Official Orthodoxy”-type raffle?