In 2019 the Conservative government introduced a requirement that schools teach children about the concepts within gender ideology via new Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) Guidance.
What has happened over the following years is a case study in how complex systems respond to quackery. The two main drivers of the systems response were financial incentives and an axe to grind.
Easy money incentivised any number of grifters to gear up with a silly story to flog to school children. It wasn’t difficult because with no science or evidence behind the idea of gender ideology you can just make stuff up. So people did.
Those with an axe to grind, the real gender ideologues, began to lay it on ever more thickly. Not just a vulnerable few, but before long ‘everyone’ had an inner gender identity. Pansexual, aromantic, greysexual flags flourished. New remembrance events were invented – the most important being IDAHOBIT (May 17th).
The third ingredient that has enabled gender quackery to flourish in schools has been invisibility. Before the advent of ‘Ed-Tech’, embedding it would not have been so easy. Education technology has driven a ‘worksheet’ approach to curriculum delivery whereby teachers in a hurry can download a few slides from online curriculum resource providers. In turn, these providers generally rely on subscriptions to make money. The result is that their worksheets are necessarily hidden from public view as part of the business model. The resulting public invisibility that is an inbuilt part of the model has been a disaster for resource and curriculum quality and accuracy. The whole approach and its impact needs to be exposed and challenged at a policy level.
Campaigners against teaching children gender ideology at school have generally adopted a two-pronged approach. They have called for a revision to the RSHE guidance to remove the concept of gender identity from the curriculum. And they have campaigned for resource visibility on the assumption that this will bring derision and anger down on the heads of those promoting quackery to school children.
Therefore it was interesting to be sent by a parent an example of a school hosting a great deal of its RSHE curriculum on its website, including its approach to gender ideology. The school is Chelmsford County High School for Girls – a “highly selective state grammar school for girls” where “academic standards are extremely high”.
The relevant materials are intended for Year 8 girls aged 12 to 13. It is interesting that the school is not embarrassed by them and also that parents have presumably not kicked up a fuss. In situ, being used by a school, they are evidence of the low quality and awful quackery that is flourishing in this area. They are also evidence that simply creating visibility does not solve the problem.
It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall to see a teacher coping with this:
The next slide illustrates the dreadful quality of so much of this material, clip art, clashing colours – and what does it actually mean? That we are all partly male and partly female? That is so grotesquely narrowing and essentialising. And even then – being a man with a pink leg? A woman with a blue arm? We’re not really meant to make sense of it. It really is just stupidity being shown to school children.
Next up is more grotesque essentialising and stereotyping. Girls, unless they identify as boys, should feel their female/woman/girl-ness as part of a so-called gender identity – and vice versa. But people don’t feel like this. We are confusing and lying to children.
This is also lying to children:
All credit to Chelmsford County High School for displaying this material. It is such poor quality and flagrant pseudoscience that it does make you wonder about the school’s wider commitment to accuracy, quality, truth-telling and safeguarding.
But it also makes clear that the problem comes back to the Government and its curriculum guidance. The bottom line is that the Government told schools to teach children pseudoscience. Schools responded. Grifters grifted. Our shared commitment to teaching children the truth in the face of an instruction not to has been publicly tested.
So now schools need a new instruction. The RSHE Guidance needs to be revised. Children should not be taught about the concept of gender identity in schools. Or if they are, it should only be as a case study on quackery. Quackery harms – and state-sanctioned quackery harms the most.
Caroline Ffiske is a Director of Conservatives for Women. Find her on X.
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