Schools: Safeguarding

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Roberts of Belgravia for his important historical perspective.

I join others in thanking my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington, not just for securing this important debate but for her courageous commitment to facilitating balanced and well-informed consideration of such vital issues as protecting the integrity of women’s sport, defending women’s and girls’ rights to safe spaces, and exposing, in many cases, the unintended consequences for women and children of the affirmation of gender self-identity, whether in our prisons or the classroom. I say “courage” because, sadly, that is essential to brave the bile and vitriol which anyone who has the temerity to challenge the cancel culture extremism seems to attract. We need only look at how JK Rowling, Maya Forstater, Kathleen Stock and Joanna Cherry KC MP have been treated to know just how true that is.

It is hard to think of anywhere where the extremism, in terms of the intensity of the battle that we have heard about during this debate going on for the hearts and minds of our young people, is more acute than in the classroom and schools. To all intents and purposes, they have become a battleground. Anyone who has been through adolescence knows that it is torment enough without the complexity of considering whether you have been born in the wrong body or should change your gender.

I am not a parent, nor will I ever be one. The very strong probability that any child of mine would have the same condition that I have precludes that possibility. Others with brittle bones make different choices and I respect them for that, but I know I am not strong enough to risk visiting on anyone the pain, shame and discrimination that I have experienced as a result of it. But an inability to speak as a parent should not disqualify me, or anyone else, from voicing concern about the threat posed to the integrity and effectiveness of safeguarding guidance by advice from lobby groups that information about a child’s distress—perhaps about their gender—should be kept confidential from parents, family and other agencies, and that teaching materials should be treated as confidential and not shared with parents. Surely, that directly contradicts safeguarding guidance on information sharing.

As a disabled person, I have a personal vested interest in safeguarding progress towards greater equality, whether on the protected characteristics of disability, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Progress on each invariably impacts on the whole. Moreover, I am sure we all have reason to be grateful for the courage of people such as Simon Fanshawe, not just for co-founding Stonewall in 1989 but more recently for reminding us that

“Spaces have to be safe for disagreement, not from disagreement”—


in other words, and I paraphrase, that cancel culture is counterproductive because extremism engenders extremism, which puts progress towards equality as a whole at risk.

What I find remarkable is the extent to which the equality landscape has been transformed in the almost three and a half decades since Stonewall’s foundation, in no small part due to its formidable campaigning. I say “equality landscape” because I would not be in the least bit surprised if many people saw issues such as equal marriage as almost a key performance indicator of society’s attitudes towards equality per se. That is undoubtedly to Stonewall’s credit, but having played so crucial a role in securing that progress, surely it has an equally key role to play—indeed, a responsibility—to safeguard progress towards greater equality. I am not sure it appreciates that. In fact, Stonewall’s ostracisation of Simon Fanshawe and its unfortunate association with an aggressive, polarising cancel culture, the promotion of gender self-identity in our schools, and, at best, an indifference to the erosion of women’s and girls’ rights to safe spaces suggests the opposite.

That is such a shame, because the extremism generated is inevitably provoking a backlash across the piece. In my experience as a disabled person, such a climate is legitimising regressive attitudes towards and treatment of disabled people, which I thought was ancient history. Progress towards equality is so precious. History shows that it is also incredibly fragile. That is why safeguarding progress towards equality for future generations depends on our safeguarding the current generation of children and young people in school today.