THE Government’s latest consultation document on the safeguarding of children carries the high risk of exacerbating legacy contradictions between sharing and hiding information from parents.
Early in 2023, Policy Exchange found that schools are violating safeguarding principles in service of gender ideology, for instance with teachers keeping secret from parents medical information or behavioural issues at school.
In December 2023, the Conservative government proposed that teachers are not obliged to use a child’s preferred pronouns, or to permit both genders to use the same single-sex spaces. The Department for Education obliged teachers to inform the parents of children about any gender dysphoria expressed at school.
The Government closed its public consultation in March 2024 just before the general election campaign.
This helps to explain why, in May 2024, the same government did not write parental rights into its updated guidance on ‘information sharing’ for safeguarding.
The well-established ‘seven golden rules’ start with an obligation on teachers not to keep children’s secrets, saying: ‘Protecting a child from such harm takes priority over protecting their privacy . . .’ And yet parents are not mentioned in the seven golden rules. The information sharing is framed between public authorities.
Worse, this same guidance contains loopholes for hiding information from parents.
The caveats are superficially justified to protect children from abusive parents, but are too under-specified to prevent teachers from protecting children from trans-sceptical parents.
Midway (page 12), the guidance contains the following: ‘If you have concerns about a child’s safety and have decided to share information to protect them from a risk of harm, whenever it is safe and practical to do so, you should engage with the child, their parent(s)or carer(s) . . . unless seeking to discuss a potential concern would put the child or others at risk of harm.’
The next paragraph confirms: ‘You should not inform the child or their parent or carer about your decision to share information if doing so could put a child or others at further risk of harm.’
Yes, we should protect children from harm. But ‘harm’ is under-operationalised, and open to abuse as an excuse to cut out parents — even to punish parents for disagreeing with teachers, while pushing harmful ideologies on children.
In 2024, Dr Hilary Cass reported that some teachers encourage children to transition at school without informing their parents. This creates ‘an adversarial position between parent and child’ which worsens an already fraught and confusing – and ideological – issue.
Cass concluded that gender transition (even in the form of pronouns alone) is ‘not a neutral act’ and should not be kept secret from parents.
The Labour Government has waited almost two years to release for public consultation its own safeguarding guidance. It comes after a year in which some teachers and education authorities have clearly abused ‘safeguarding’ concerns to hide information from parents, to punish parents for raising concerns about their children’s education and for holding views outside of the ideological consensus that dominates education.
‘Safeguarding’ is even weaponised against teachers who don’t adhere closely enough to the leftist political groupthink. It encourages teachers to push transgenderism, performatively, to protect their jobs and earn promotions.
The Department of Education’s latest draft guidance does confirm some unambiguous rules which offer clarity. Pupils will not be allowed to use toilets or changing rooms designated for the opposite sex, and children of both sexes should not be sleeping in single-sex spaces on school trips.
Yet the old contradictions and escape clauses are still there, albeit buried within 200 pages of guidance.
On page 68 the Government has slipped in several escape clauses into a section on ‘social transition’ — meaning a change of name, pronouns or school uniform associated with the opposite sex.
A subsection on parents starts off reassuringly: ‘Parents and carers have the leading role in the lives of their children, and this area should be no exception.’
Except that there are exceptions.
Here’s the first: ‘However, in the rare circumstances where involving parents or carers would constitute a greater risk to the child than not involving them, the school or college should involve their Designated Safeguarding Lead to determine what action is needed to safeguard the child, before the parents are contacted or any decisions are taken.’
A second exception is articulated in the next paragraph: ‘In cases where a child confides in a member of staff about their feelings but does not ask the school or college to make changes to how they are treated, there is no reason to break any confidence unless there is a related safeguarding risk.’
‘Safeguarding’ and ‘harm’ are subjective standards that ideologues are apt to exploit.
Of course children should be protected from abusive parents. But children should be protected from abusive teachers too, such as those who push children into the fantasy of adopting a gender at odds with biological reality, setting them on the road to chemical castration and irreversible surgery.
The guidance contains no admonishment of transgender-pushers, and no specification of which parental views qualify or don’t qualify as ‘harm’ or ‘risk’.
The guidance repeatedly uses ‘harm’ or ‘risk’ to justify the omission of parental notification and without adequate definition or operationalisation. For instance, on pages 144 and 145 is the bizarre statement that even when a family is referred ‘to local authority children’s social care, schools and colleges will generally inform parents or carers, unless there are compelling reasons not to (if informing a parent or carer is going to put the child at additional risk)’.
This paragraph is clearly inadequate as guidance. It permits the state to intervene in a family — a drastic step — and yet permits local authorities to keep parents and carers in the dark on an undefined, un-operationalised standard of ‘additional risk’.
The guidance doesn’t even adequately operationalise ‘abuse’. On page 14 it repeats a common definition of ‘abuse’ from other guidance, which ‘includes neglect of, or unresponsiveness to, a child’s basic emotional needs’. This is true, but it is dangerously under-specified, leaving ideologues to include parental scepticism of gender dysphoria as ‘unresponsiveness to a child’s emotional needs’.
If a parent disagrees with a child, teachers and social workers may leave parents uninformed in the service of ideology disguised as safeguarding. Children could claim fear of ‘harm’ as a way to keep their parents in the dark or to intimidate parents who are simply parenting in a way with which the child disagrees.
The final guidance needs to warn clearly against weaponising safeguarding to disenfranchise parents.
Where the draft guidance does so far admonish, the admonishment is astonishingly badly written and bad writing is open to misinterpretation or, worse, manipulation.
On page 116, it says that during an investigation of a ‘safeguarding’ concern, teachers should remain mindful of a ‘very stressful experience for the adult subject to the investigation’ even though the ‘welfare of a child is paramount’. All well and good.
Yet the paragraph concludes with this slippery sentence: ‘Information is confidential and should not ordinarily be shared with other staff or with children or parents who are not directly involved in the investigation.’
This sentence, combined with the loopholes permitting teachers to keep secrets and ignore parents, could be misinterpreted (at least) as permission to hide an accusation from the subject.
Indeed, some local authorities are already investigating and judging parents without their knowledge, until they receive a ban from school property or from attending their child’s sports games. Since the process is opaque, and the documentation is not shared, such parents have no way to challenge or appeal, except through civil suit.
Where is the admonishment against trial in absentia and ex parte?
With so many vague terms, loopholes, and lack of admonishment, the latest guidance on the safeguarding of children is open to abuse.
Editor’s note: You can watch Bruce Newsome in discussion with Dr Tony Rucinski of the Coalition for Marriage on the question of whether the Government’s safeguarding programme is more about social control and social engineering than the actual safety of children:
