Parents raising serious concerns about the promotion of politically partisan ideas in school are being failed by the complaints system, a Peer has warned.
During a debate on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in the House of Lords, Lord Jackson of Peterborough urged the Government to ensure that parents have “a fair, effective and accessible means of redress”.
A recent poll of British parents for Parentkind revealed that many are concerned about the use of inappropriate content in Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) and want schools to teach there are only two biological sexes only.
DfE black hole
Lord Jackson warned the upper house that “the current system leaves vital legal duties unenforced and unenforceable” and “is, frankly, not fit for purpose”.
He explained: “The schools’ inspectorate, Ofsted, might seem the obvious backstop, yet its role is fundamentally misaligned with this task. Its inspectors are by profession teachers, not lawyers, and they are not equipped to make legal judgments on statutory duties.”
In theory, he said, “a parent could seek a judicial review to force a school to comply with the law”. But for the vast majority of families, he added, “this is simply not an option” due to the “crippling legal costs”.
He continued: “The remaining route is for parents to escalate a complaint to the Department for Education, but this is one of the problems that I want to highlight. The department has become a black hole — a place where parental complaints go to die.”
Susan’s story
To illustrate the present difficulties faced by parents in pursuing a complaint, Lord Jackson pointed to the experience of ‘Susan’, “a parent governor who questioned her school over the lawfulness of its proposed RSE policy”.
The Peer said: “Having exhausted the school’s internal process and got nowhere, Susan escalated her complaint to the department. The DfE says that its target response deadline is 15 working days. Fourteen months later, she got a classic Civil Service response, which told her that the core of her complaint could not even be considered by the department.
“This was despite this school engaging in highly controversial practices on one of the most divisive issues of the day, in breach of the law on political impartiality and of the guidance promulgated by the DfE itself.”
Christian parent governor Susan was dismissed for raising concerns with the trans-affirming sex education policy at her children’s primary school in Gateshead. With the Institute’s help she was reinstated following an order made by the High Court.
Accountability
Lord Jackson asked: “Does anyone believe that it is an acceptable state of affairs that parents acting in good faith on serious concerns about their own children’s education should be met with such bureaucratic inertia and incompetence? The consequences are corrosive.
“It allows important legal provisions, not least the duty of political impartiality, to be ignored or sidelined. This is particularly acute when it comes to the teaching of contested topics such as gender identity”.
He concluded: “This failure of enforcement creates a vacuum that allows activist groups to misuse the state school system to advance their own agendas. At the same time, it allows suspicion among parents to fester without definitive resolution.”
Consequently, he proposed that meaningful steps be taken “to restore accountability, uphold the will of Parliament and ensure that, when a parent has a legitimate concern that a school is breaking the law, they have somewhere to go”.
‘Reset’
Former Ofsted Chief Inspector Baroness Spielman endorsed Lord Jackson’s concerns, stating “how problematic dealing with complaints is becoming”, in part, she said, because of the “patchwork of law and regulation” in this area.
She added: “We need to reset the system and return to the expectation that the vast majority of complaints are considered and closed at local level.”
Lord Jackson withdrew his amendments – to “create a specific targeted right for a parent to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal” – with a view to returning to them at a later stage.
Responding on behalf of the Government, Baroness Blake of Leeds “accepted and acknowledged the issues and concerns being raised”, but dismissed Lord Jackson’s proposal. She informed Peers that the Government was working towards improving the school complaints system.
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