Pupils at 5,000 CofE schools get forms to report trans bullying
CHURCH of England schools are to be supplied with tick-box forms allowing pupils and teachers to report transgender bullying.
The forms will give those in nearly 5,000 schools – including a quarter of all primary schools – the means to report pupils, teachers or any other adults who are perceived to be bullying.
A template form gives school staff 11 tick-boxes in which to identify the kind of bullying they say they have seen or suffered – and name a culprit. Options available include ‘gender identity – transphobic’; ‘gender – sexist bullying’; ‘sexual orientation – homophobic’; ‘sexual orientation – biphobic’; alongside boxes for religious, racist and culture or class bullying.
It says that all bullying or ‘prejudice-related incidents’ should be recorded.
Similar report sheets will also be made available to pupils to fill in themselves, which they can hand to a member of staff or put in a ‘bullying box’ in the classroom.
The forms are part of the Church’s new campaign to stamp out transgender and other kinds of bullying. They are being distributed against a background of looming legal action by Oxford teacher Joshua Sutcliffe, who says he has been wrongly disciplined for addressing a transgender pupil by the wrong sex.
The forms for staff ask those who complain to name the alleged ‘person responsible for bullying’ together with the ‘target’. Witnesses, supporting evidence and details of anyone else involved are also to be supplied.
The bullying report forms have been prepared to accompany the CofE’s new guidance on ‘challenging homophobic, biphobic and transphobic [HBT] bullying’ in its schools, which together have around a million pupils.
The anti-bullying code drew wide attention after it was published last month, instructing teachers that five-year- old boys should be able to wear high heels at school in the name of ‘creative self-imagining’. Children, the new rules say, should not be required to wear uniforms that ‘create difficulty for trans pupils’.
Complaint forms have now been issued to ensure the rules are enforced. All reports must be logged and in some cases could end up being passed on to council Children’s Services officials, the guidance adds.
‘All incidents reported via a form should be recorded centrally,’ it says. ‘The data collected should be regularly monitored and analysed by staff responsible for antibullying. They should analyse any trends in HBT bullying.’
The new rules make clear that the report system must apply to primary schools, which teach children between the ages of five and 11. ‘In order to make sure pupils do not progress to secondary schools thinking discriminatory language and behaviour is acceptable, all forms of HBT bul- lying must be challenged at primary school,’ the guidance says.
Andrea Minchiello Williams of Christian Concern said the antibullying guidelines have themselves become a tool of bullies.
Mrs Williams, a barrister and member of the Church of England’s parliament, the General Synod, said: ‘Rather than taking the proper course of protecting children against bullying, this is the policing of thought.
‘Anyone who questions this guidance risks being cast as a bully, and their career will be at risk. These people have become bullies themselves – they are pushing children and teachers to accept their ideology and think as they do.’
A transgender group has demanded the abolition of gender as a legal concept and called for sex-change hormones to be given over-the- counter to children.
The Edinburgh branch of Action for Trans Health says gender records should only be for ‘equalities monitoring’ and demands ‘free, universal access to safe hormones at any age’.
‘It must be challenged’