Daily Mail

Parents force primary to axe Pride parade

- By Sarah Harris

A PRIMARY school has been forced to hold an event celebratin­g Pride in private after parents threatened to stage a protest.

Heavers Farm Primary had invited families by letter to watch the ‘Proud to be Me!’ parade in the playground.

Staff wanted families to join in the celebratio­n of ‘the rainbow of things that make them and their family special’ with the school’s 750 pupils.

The primary school, in south-east London, has a number of children from LGBT homes and aimed to highlight the fact that there are many different types of families. Children had created posters and shields about what makes them proud.

But the afternoon event was axed at the last minute on Friday after headteache­r Susan Papas, 58, received warnings that a group of parents planned to stage a protest in the playground.

Instead, the school – which is rated ‘good’ by Ofsted – held an assembly and a low-key parade in the morning, with families invited into classrooms in the afternoon to learn about pupils’ work on diversity and inclusion. Some parents pulled their children out of school completely in protest at the activities. Twenty children did not attend due to the planned parade – and a further 90 failed to turn up at school without their families offering any explanatio­ns. Erica Chamberlai­n told the London Evening Standard that her five-year- old daughter Scarlett had been looking forward to the event. The 39-year- old from

South Norwood, who works in community developmen­t, said: ‘She’d been really excited about it, and what she was going to wear to it. The very nature of a Pride parade is to be proud – not celebrate it quietly and non-publicly.’

Another parent said: ‘The parade was about teaching the kids “love has no label”. Some parents have taken exception to this. They feel the school is shoving LGBT issues down the kids’ throats. This takes us back decades.’

Miss Papas, who has been th school’s headteache­r for 11 years, said: ‘We heard on the grapevine that some parents were going to come into school and actually protest whilst we were doing the parade. We thought in order to keep the children safe, we shouldn’t allow that to happen. I am really sad at the backlash against it.’

She said the reaction from some had been ‘disappoint­ing’, adding: ‘We do quite a lot of work on British values and tolerance and being inclusive and we planned an event this month, because it’s national Pride month, where we thought we’d look at children being proud of themselves and what makes them special. It’s something that was meant to be a fun thing to bring all the school together. We have had so many messages of support from many parents who are quite cross about this minority.’

One mother admitted taking her daughter out of school on the day of the parade. She said: ‘There were dozens of us who were upset and waited outside the school office to demand a meeting when we heard what was being taught.

‘We were going to write to the MP about it anyway but he turned up in the morning. So where can we go?’

Steve Reed, Labour MP for Croydon North, tweeted from the event: ‘With the wonderful staff and children at Heavers Farm – very proud of them for standing up for equality and diversity.’

Pupils at the school aged eight upwards also learned about different families, including what the terms gay and bisexual mean, as part of Pride month to help tackle use of homophobic language in the playground.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom