The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-10)

2 2GN The Sunday Times April 10, 2022

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department issued guidance in 2020 on gender awareness and the curriculum, which said teachers should not tell children that they might be a different gender, based on their personality or the

Trans

guidance

plan for

schools

clothes they want to wear. However, the new guidance is expected to be more comprehensive and cover how teachers should address practical issues. While the DfE has made no decisions on what the guidance will say, sources signalled it would also focus on the importance of biology and sex, rather than gender identity. Tomorrow a group of 12 teachers will announce guidance to help address the rising number of boys and girls who want to change their gender. The guide has been produced by a working group of teachers from state

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schools in England representing an organisation called Teachers for Evidence- Based Education. They plan to publish it online and are emailing it to ministers, MPs and head teachers. Copies will also be printed and distributed to schools. The group is supported by Kiri Tunks, a teacher and a co- founder of the lobbying organisation Woman’s Place UK. They say they are publishing their Teachers’ Guide to Sex and Gender amid growing concern that lobby groups are encouraging children to think they are transgender. Equality groups

set up by pupils in schools have successfully campaigned for gender- neutral lavatories, for teachers to use gender- neutral pronouns such as he/ she or they, and for all sports to be open to all pupils. St Paul’s Girls’ School in west London is one of several girls’ schools that has drawn up a “gender identity protocol” that allows pupils to be called by boys’ names and wear boys’ clothes. Some schools have adopted policies allowing children to “socially transition”, sometimes without telling their parents.

Johnson’s angry LGBT adviser says: take

the politics out of transgender debate

Harry Yorke Deputy Political Editor Boris Johnson’s LGBT adviser is dismayed at the shelving of a ban on transgender conversion therapy and has called for a royal commission to recommend policies free from political interference. Last week the prime minister U-turned on a promise to outlaw conversion therapy. After a backlash, he reinstated the policy, but only for lesbian, gay and bisexual people — not trans. There have been concerns that banning conversion therapy for people questioning their gender identity could inadvertently criminalise counselling. However, Lord Herbert of South Downs, the prime minister’s special envoy on

gay rights, warned ministers against conflating helping people with “reactionary ideology that can do irreparable harm”. Speaking for the first time since the controversy, he also criticised the LGBT lobby’s reaction to Johnson’s decision to exclude trans people. Herbert, 59, singled out the charity Stonewall for stoking the anger, which resulted in the cancellation of the UK’s first international conference on LGBT rights. The Safe to Be Me conference in June would have brought together politicians, businesses, activists and faith leaders to discuss how to advance LGBT rights globally. Herbert accused Stonewall of orchestrating a boycott and then shedding “crocodile tears” for the consequences.

The former police minister and first openly gay man to be elected as a Conservative MP also said it was wrong for Johnson to be branded transphobic for expressing concerns over trans athletes in sport. Herbert said the prime minister’s views reflected “disquiet across the political spectrum” that could not be “swept aside”. To prevent the debate on trans rights descending to a “toxic” level, Herbert called for a royal commission. He said it would act “dispassionately” to collect evidence on “contested areas” such as the involvement of trans men and women in single-sex sports, safe spaces for women, and gender identity services for children. It should, he added, be led by a senior judge,

comprise members who are “truly neutral”, and be founded with “cross-party support and without predetermination of its direction or outcome”. He called on Johnson to ignore those seeking to make trans rights a dividing line in British politics. “Some may tell the government that this is a political opportunity for a wedge issue, but this would be deeply unwise,” he said. “It is one thing to make an issue of statue-toppling and historical revisionism, another to appear to be attacking minorities and vulnerable people. It is also a misreading of public opinion. People want to hear solutions: they don’t see these issues through an ideological lens... we have to find a way to take the heat out of this debate.”

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fundamental contract with the public, that an ambulance would arrive swiftly, had been breached. He said some patients were making “their own way” to hospitals rather than waiting for paramedics. On top of this, waiting times in A&Es across England were “an order of magnitude” worse than anything previously experienced. Boyle, a consultant in emergency medicine at Cambridge University Hospitals, said: “People are dying because ambulance response times are too long. The basic tenet is that you call an ambulance and it arrives for things like strokes and heart attacks within 18 minutes — it is now taking on average 70 minutes and in some cases much longer — that contract with the public is broken. “The waits have been the longest we have ever seen, this is the worst winter we have had to deal with.” He called on Sajid Javid, the health secretary, “to value urgent and emergency care in the same way he appears to value other parts

of the health service”. Boyle said: “[ Javid] needs to see these figures and know there is a lot of human suffering ... that is avoidable and fixable. It requires significant political will, investment and system wide co-ordination.” Steve Black, a data scientist who co-wrote the study, said: “The situation is likely to be much worse than when we did our study and the mortality implications of that are going to be very, very bad. “I think 1,400 deaths a month, almost 6, between November and February, would be a conservative estimate. It could easily be much worse. I don’t think apocalyptic is an exaggeration to describe how bad the situation is.” In a sign of concern over the harm being experienced by patients, NHS England has told hospitals to consider relaxing rules on isolating Covid-19 patients if it would create more beds. A letter to hospitals in the east of England accepted this could lead to an increased spread of the coronavirus but that the risk “needs to be weighed against other

potential harms” including to emergency patients. Across England, ambulances are stuck outside hospitals unable to hand over patients, leaving fewer vehicles to respond to 999 calls. More than 20,200 emergency calls went unanswered for at least two minutes in January. Since the end of November, 324,400 ambulances have been delayed at A&Es. Patients with suspected heart attacks or strokes are waiting an average of more than an hour. In some instances, waits have been as long as four hours, according to NHS England data. The longest wait in an ambulance for a patient at A&E was 23 hours in February. Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said that A&Es were running “red hot”. He added: “It is now unclear that anyone in the centre of government feels the unfolding NHS crisis is their responsibility. NHS leaders and their teams feel abandoned by the government and they deserve better.” @ShaunLintern

A&E trolley waits ‘led to 5,800 deaths’

Shaun Lintern Health Editor Tom Calver

Beefed-up Ofsted

gets new powers to

shut illegal schools

Ofsted will be given new powers to enter and shut illegal schools after warnings that children are being educated in garages, exposed to extremist material and taught by offenders. Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, will legislate to make it easier for inspectors to turn up unannounced. They will be able to seize evidence to build better legal cases. The powers are expected to be in a schools bill that ministers hope will be in the Queen’s Speech on May 10. Amanda Spielman, chief inspector of Ofsted, said the reforms were necessary to curb the rise of unregistered schools, which she said failed to equip children with British values, basic numeracy and literacy skills, and left many “very segregated” from mainstream society. Alongside this, Ofsted is pushing for the government to empower magistrates’ courts to issue lifetime bans on people who run illegal centres and to create new legal definition of what constitutes a school. Anyone who runs an unregistered school is guilty of a criminal offence, which carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine. But there is ambiguity about what con-

stitutes both a school and full-time education. The government deems 18 hours of lessons a week to be full-time and an inde- pendent school any centre where five or more pupils of school age attend. Spielman believes the number of pupils at unregistered schools could have risen to “tens of thousands”, exacerbated by the pandemic. Despite investigating 850 suspected unregistered schools since 2016, only six prosecutions had been successful. “There is a real contrast between the powers we have and the powers that exist to investigate and prosecute other kinds of unregistered activities,” she said. “We can... be attempting to exercise right of entry while children are led out the back and everything to do with oper- ating an illegal school is being put away in cupboards. “It’s like an evacuation drill. Some of them have clearly got an established pro- cedure for what they will do if an inspector comes. “We can’t pick anything up, we can’t take things out. We can’t take a register, exercise books. We can’t legally search and see inside that cupboard when some- body might have tucked everything away.” She also highlighted safeguarding concerns, revealing that inspectors had found children being taught in garages

and old office blocks with “padlocked fire exits”. They have also found hanging wires, broken windows, discarded syringes and dirty kitchens. One school that was successfully prosecuted had books by an extremist author banned from entering the UK. A quarter of the suspected unregistered schools inspected by Ofsted have been religious. Just over half were Islamic. Spielman said that while only a “small proportion” were linked to “genuine extremism”, the wider concern was that there is a “large proportion where children are very segregated from mainstream society”. Many of the individuals educating the children were “unfit” to work with them. Despite the “miserable stuff ” uncov- ered by the inspectorate, Spielman said she had been frustrated by the repeated failure of ministers to legislate to enhance Ofsted’s powers. The government promised to do so in 2018 but the plans were sidelined because of Brexit and the pandemic. Zahawi is introducing a register requir- ing parents of home-schooled children to provide details to their local authority. He said: “So many home-educating families do a fantastic job but there are still too many children falling through the cracks.”

Harry Yorke Deputy Political Editor

The deaths of 5,800 patients could have been the result of long waits on trolleys in A&E departments in the worst winter crisis in the NHS. The figure is an estimate based on work in a peer- reviewed study published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in January. The authors have warned it is a “conservative” number and the situation could be worse. Researchers identified one additional death for every 72 A&E patients who had to wait for between eight and 12 hours for a hospital bed. The NHS does not publish data on true 12-hour waits but using the average rate of 12-hour delays collated by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) at 40 UK A&E departments, extrapolated to the whole of England, gives a figure of 5,800 deaths between November and February. Dr Adrian Boyle, president-elect of the RCEM, has also highlighted problems with ambulance response times. He said the

ONE IRLS s Little Mix call a day, we ask: hy does no one annabe in a girl and any more?

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The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-10)

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