A primary school teacher is taking legal action against Nottinghamshire County Council to court over claims that she was sacked after refusing to use a 8-year-old pupil’s preferred pronouns.
The teacher claims that, two years ago, the school where she worked decided to facilitate the social transition of a girl who wanted to be treated as a boy.
The school instructed all staff to always refer to the girl with male pronouns and a male name, and said that she should use the boys’ toilets and dressing rooms.
The teacher said that she repeatedly raised concerns about the pupil’s welfare and followed the school’s whistleblowing procedure to raise safeguarding concerns about the girl’s social transition.
The schools response to the concerns raised by the teacher was to write to her to inform her that the child would be moved to a different class “to safeguard him from any potential harm”, according to the teacher’s employment tribunal claim. She claimed that she was later suspended and put under disciplinary investigation for her alleged “ongoing refusal to follow a management instruction”.
The suspension was only lifted when the teacher agreed to make to avoid unnecessary contact with the child and to not use any name or gender-specific pronouns if interacting with the child.
Still feeling that there were safeguarding concerns over what was happening with the child, the teacher then tried to raise those concerns with the school’s governors and the local authority, citing scientific evidence that encouraging young children to socially transition carries significant risks for their health and welfare.
However, her concerns were dismissed by both the governors and the local authority. The teacher claims that she was sacked for gross misconduct after she shared information about the child with her lawyers in preparation for a judicial review claim against the school and the council. In addition to dismissing her from her job the school also reported her to the Teacher Regulation Agency for an alleged confidentiality breach, which means she could face a lifelong ban from the profession.
She has now brought an employment tribunal claim against the local authority that runs the school, claiming unfair dismissal and religious discrimination. The employment tribunal is expected to hear the claim in August.
There needs to be clearer guidance from the authorities over the issue of the use of transgender pronouns, not just in primary schools but also in high schools. The Government claim they are looking at this issue and will release new guidance soon.
No teacher should feel pressured to use the pronouns that a child chooses to use. An 8 year old is not mentally or socially developed enough to make such a important decision over their gender and they should not be encouraged to make such potentially life-changing decisions.
In Scotland the Scottish Sentencing Council say a young person’s maturity should be taken into account when assessing the extent to which they can be blamed for their actions when they are under the age of 25 because research saying imbalances in brain development explain risk-taking and emotionally driven behavior which can lead to illegal activity. Yet we are supposed to believe that children as young as 5 are capable of making life-changing decisions over their gender.
Instead of pandering to these ideas by children with immature mental development we should be referring these children to mental health services for assessment. It has been shown in many cases that the desire to be “trans” is actually driven by various underlying mental or emotional conditions.
Some schools have even been allowing children to change their gender without any involvement of the child’s parents. This has to stop, with the restoration of parents’ rights to have full knowledge of what is happening with their children and the right to be involved in that process and control what is happening.
We are seeing an increasingly radical program being rolled out in schools when it comes to education around sex and gender, with ridiculous claims to taught in some schools that there are in excess of 100 genders and a heavy emphasis on promoting LGBT+ themes. This should be rolled back with an emphasis on promoting the truth that there are only two genders and a conservative approach to teaching sex and sexuality. Young minds face being influenced into certain ways of thinking before they are developed enough to make decisions for themselves.
Teachers need to be offered robust legal protection to be free to speak out when they have concerns about the welfare of individual children or about what is being promoted within schools. Just now there is a culture of fear within our educational establishment, right from nursery classes to postgraduate education, when it comes to teachers being able to voice their concerns. This climate of fear is damaging our children’s futures.
