Celia Walden I don’t trust schools to teach my child about sex

I don’t trust anyone working in a sector that is fearful of the facts it is imparting

‘Education, not indoctrination.” It’s a sentiment that an increasing number of British parents have expressed to one another in private – and one I’ve written about in the past. Until last week, I’d never seen those words daubed across protest placards or heard them chanted on the streets.

So when I saw footage of the scenes that took place outside Parkfield Community School in Birmingham last Thursday I felt hopeful. Whatever virtue-signalling nonsense the education authorities had decided to fill our children’s heads with – that boys can menstruate, girls ejaculate and children of either sex are entitled to choose their gender – people were no longer going to stand for it.

Then I realised the 300-odd parents gathered outside the primary school were predominantly Muslim and were there to protest against “lessons on homosexuality and gender”. While the idea of teaching gender is as bemusing to me as teaching hair colour (sorry, gender is neither a concept nor a construct), I hope that every fair-minded person would agree with Parkfield’s assistant head, Andrew Moffat – who devised “No Outsiders” lessons “to teach children about the Equality Act and British Values” – and accept that, at the appropriate age, children need to be made to understand the importance of being tolerant of differences in sexuality.

And religion – an irony not lost on the online commentators who revelled in the virtue-signalling face-offs that any discussions about the Parkfield protest would necessitate, pitting, as it did, the LGBT lot against Muslims. “What will the Lefties do about this one? They won’t know which side to pick LOL!” I’d laugh out loud along with them if the bigoted vitriol on social media hadn’t drained all humour from the situation. Besides which, the Parkfield protest has thrown up an uncomfortable truth that goes beyond the kind of culture clash we’re going to see a lot more of in Britain – that we’ve lost faith in our schools’ ability to teach

the sensitive new subjects that they insist on teaching sensibly. If they’re going to take it upon themselves to drill modern moralities based around such nuanced notions as relationships, equality and sexuality into our children, alongside grammar and maths, we need to be confident that they do so in the right way. And I’m not sure there is a right way for a stranger with an agenda to do that.

This lack of trust is now so widespread that next Monday a motion will be debated in Parliament “to give parents the right to opt their children out of Relationship and Sex Education” when the subject becomes compulsory in schools across England in September 2020, after a petition set up by Dr Kate Godfrey-faussett, the chartered psychologist, was signed by more than 100,000 parents.

I was one of those parents. I don’t trust anyone working in a sector that is fearful of the facts that it is supposed to be imparting to know when my daughter will be ready to be told about the birds and the bees – much less how best to do so. And presumably, it’s now all about the bird-who-was-actually-asquirrel and the bee-who-identifiedwith-flies learning to make sweet peri-sexual, maverique, aporagender, dyadic love together in a mutually respectful way. At a time when identity and sexuality needs to be marker-penned on our foreheads – rather than assumed, intimated or inferred in the way it has been in the past – parents should surely have the greatest weight on such matters.

Of course, in order for that to happen we’ll have to stop deferring parental responsibilities to the state, and step in when we feel uncomfortable with the way in which our children are being taught ideas and moralities that are too complex to be reduced to a school subject. We’ll have to decide how best to teach principles like those laid out in Parkfield’s “No Outsiders” scheme to children coming of age in a very different world to the one in which we grew up, accept that our children will probably need to know a little more than we did, a little earlier – and then do our best to educate, not indoctrinate.