A parent has spoken out about being blocked by a school from seeing sex education material that has been used to teach her child.
Clare Page, whose child attends Haberdashers’ Hatcham College in New Cross in south-east London, explained: “It began last September when the government introduced the new RSE regulation, so that’s relationships and sex education, and they made that compulsory, but there were some things that parents could choose to withdraw their children from.
“Our school responded by offering a lesson on consent and I elected for my daughter to receive that lesson, it seemed like a good idea. We weren’t told very much about it, it was just presented as something that would be of high quality by a trusted provider that has come in from outside the school, and it would meet DFE regulation, so fine.
“I suppose I was a little concerned when my daughter returned from that lesson and explained that she’d been told that we live in a heteronormative world, this is a really bad thing.”
In an interview with Esther McVey and Phillip Davies on GB News, she said: “These definitions are open to contention anyway, but largely speaking, the idea is that it’s a world that expects everyone to be heterosexual, or to be a man and a woman only and to have heterosexual relationships, and perhaps frown on other ways of going about life.
“They asserted that that’s the problem with our society and actually the way you should respond to that is to be sex positive in your attitude to relationships, so my thinking about that was that these were very ideological positions.
“And of course, in schools, teachers should not give their ideology to children as fact, you can give ideas and discuss them, but you shouldn’t. indoctrinate really. So I just asked the school, could I please see that lesson plan and understand the actual words, images that were used?
“The response was that the commercial interests of that provider would trump my interest as a parent to see the material and so it had to be kept secret for commercial reasons. That concerned me in the sense that if there was a provider who knew they were coming to teach children, why would they not want to show what they were teaching to parents as well?”
She added: “I made a Freedom of Information request to school and it was turned down. I also, at that point, had a good look on the provider’s website to try and understand where they’re coming from and found three really concerning things.
“The first is that the website was full of ideological claims, which breaks the Education Act, really. And then the second was that it had some really sexually explicit lesson plans which I actually can’t even describe on a morning TV show, and yet they were there on a children’s education website.
“And then the third thing is that they linked with live links through to their own private concerns on other websites, where they were selling sex toys, promoting 18 plus pornography, and giving sex advice about every kind of masturbation in the most graphic detail.”
Asked about the Information Commissioner ruling in favour of the school, she said: “Yes, that’s the really remarkable thing and I’m quite stunned by the Information Commissioner’s choice on this.
They have gone directly against what the DfE and the Secretary of State want, and against parents. I can’t think of any parent who would think it was okay to have secrets about what their child was taught.
“It wasn’t just the material actually, I asked to know who taught my child, the identity of the person so that I could know whether it was the person who has conflicting interests, and I was told that that also should be kept secret to protect their privacy.”
