responses to consultations

September 2010

The extent of sex discrimination in access to compulsory education in the UK - CSIE response to consultation for the European Commission, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities

CSIE believes that hidden discrimination in access to compulsory education is an issue in the UK. We take access to compulsory education to mean inclusive provision for children of all genders, at all levels of their school life. This includes children and young people who may challenge ‘conventional’ ideas of gender (including children who may identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, genderqueer, gender questioning, gender variant and transsexual, as well as supposedly masculine girls and supposedly feminine boys). We believe that these groups of young people suffer not only direct discrimination and abuse within school but also indirect discrimination through being invisibilised. CSIE recognises that enforcing equalities legislation can prove challenging and recognise that many young people themselves, as well as some teachers, have deeply entrenched ideas of acceptable behaviour and aspirations that differ depending on gender identity. CSIE suggests that schools speak about gender broadly, and in depth, at all levels of school life in order that young people may become what could be called ‘gender aware,’ and thus capable of recognising, responding to and preventing gender based discrimination in all of its forms (for example, biphobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism and misogyny). We believe that sex discrimination legislation needs to be understood more broadly as concerning the rights of people of all genders and see the consistent reduction of anti-sex discrimination initiatives into male/female binaries as failing to protect young people who may identify their gender in different ways. Until this wider remit is fully grasped sex-discrimination legislation is ostensibly unfit for purpose. We are delighted that the 2010 Single Equality Act, for the first time, offers legal protection to students who identify as transsexual but are keen that this narrow definition is also broadened.

March 2010

CSIE response to the Ofsted consultation on its Draft Single Equality Scheme

In its response, CSIE welcomed the goals that Ofsted has set itself around equality objectives. We added, however, that it is important to ensure that concrete data on life outcomes (social and economic) should be available to inspectors and used to inform their evaluation of schools and colleges; that with respect to outcomes there should be a fully detailed breakdown of categories within each equality strand (e.g. within “BME” or within “disabled”); that structures should be in place to prevent the emergence of a hierarchy of equalities in which one strand is more important than another; that children and young people with high level support needs (for example those said to have profound and multiple learning difficulties), mental health problems, NEETs etc. are not exempted from the equality duty to remove barriers (“all means all”); and that structures are in place to ensure that these are the shared perceptions and explicitly articulated values of all within the organisation.

January 2010

CSIE response to Salt Review (Independent Review of Teacher Supply for Pupils with Severe, Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties)

The crisis in teacher supply and training for children identified with SLD and PMLD is part of a larger crisis in the system, namely the poor life outcomes that are inseparable from the continuing existence of segregated schools. Present practices in teacher training and pupil assessment for this group are not related to the general aims of government policy on inclusion and equality for adults.

Children identified with SLD and PMLD are a part of ordinary life, and should therefore be a normal part of their local mainstream school, not the object of a separate pathology. The proposal to develop SLD schools as leaders in training is vitiated by the medical model on which segregation is based; these schools are not well positioned to help young people to have ordinary lives. “Best practice” in SLD and PMLD requires that teacher training be based, not on assessment relating to conventional attainment targets which these very children are (by definition) unlikely to reach, but on person-centred planning, i.e. on enabling children and their families to identify the things that are important to them. The particular expertise then required is that which is most relevant to helping them achieve those things.

The need for expert teachers in sufficient numbers, identified in the call for the Review, does not exist in isolation from the need for a strategy to develop expertise right across the workforce. Experience gathered from thirty years of inclusive schooling has demonstrated that SEN training is not a necessary qualification for good teaching, and that the best teachers of children in mainstream settings are those who are the best teachers overall. To help children and their families achieve the “ordinary lives” that are the aim of cross-governmental policy for adults, teacher supply and training should be re-modelled on the basis of person-centred assessments and plans, in mainstream settings.

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Page last updated: Tuesday 07 September 2010

responses to consultations