BHCC Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit Version 5 (January 2025)
Brighton and Hove City Council have published their final and complete revised Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit Version 5 (confusingly still titled 2024 in BHCC papers).
The Toolkit and an accompanying briefing paper, authored by Deb Austin, Corporate Director – Families, Children, and Wellbeing and Cabinet Member for these matters Emma Daniel, will be debated and voted on at the Full Council taking place on Thursday 30th January 2025.
You can find a link to the Council Toolkit Version 5 here.
You can find a link to the Austin Report here The Cabinet Member, Emma Daniel, is politically responsible for the Toolkit and this paper. The Corporate Director, Deb Austin, is the Officer responsible for stewardship of this policy.
PSHE Brighton has reviewed both the revised Toolkit (Version 5) and the Austin Report. You can find a link to our analysis here.
In summary, the revised Toolkit contains some mealy-mouthed words about the need to avoid indirect discrimination of other groups, particularly people of faith and religion. It uses these words as an attempt to circumvent the Monaghan Advice published in 2024 (Advice of Karon Monaghan KC.pdf). Monaghan found the Toolkit Version 4 to be emphatically unlawful. Despite the adapted phraseology and caveats in the new Version 5, the revised Toolkit then blows open every risk related to safeguarding of children. It continues to fail to provide equal and fair treatment and protections of children based on both the protected characteristics of sex and, where applicable, gender reassignment, access to single sex spaces and services and it suggests that there’s no evidence mixed sex toilets are a risk to any girls. The revised Toolkit pays little, if any, attention to the matters set out in the Monaghan Advice.
The revised Toolkit is not compliant with The Cass Report (Final Report – Cass Review) which distinguishes between social transition (e.g. change of name and pronoun) pre and post onset of adolescence. This is completely missing from the revised Toolkit Version 5, a significant error. But the new Toolkit cite The Cass Report where it suits and it selectively quotes from The Cass Report, out of context and to offer a veneer of adherence to the Cass Report whilst in fact it pays little regard to it.
Throughout the new Toolkit Version 5, there is deliberate confusion and inappropriate interchangeable use of two concepts – the legally defined term of gender reassignment and ‘trans’, which the Toolkit defines as a much broader umbrella term but in various sections treats ‘trans’ as if it were the same as the legally protected characteristic of gender reassignment. The use of the term ‘trans children’ throughout is fundamentally flawed and fails to recognise that gender identity can be a continually evolving process amongst children and young people, a fact that is recognised in parts of the Toolkit, but which the rest of the Toolkit acts in contravention of.
One could contest that the section on PE and sports appears to be the most amended from the earlier draft versions of the Toolkit, but even this section of the final document effectively directs schools to act unfairly, unsafely, and unlawfully.
The new Toolkit is completely silent on how it expects schools to accommodate all children, including those with gender critical beliefs, which are also protected in law, and those staff in schools who are also legally entitled to hold gender critical beliefs.
The new Toolkit misunderstands the legalities around Gillick Competence, which is medical and not educational and is also determined in relation to point of time and specific issue. A child could be deemed Gillick Competent for one choice e.g. accessing contraception but not another e.g. accessing medical intervention such as cross sex hormones for gender distress. Schools and school staff are not competent to determine Gillick Competence for any child.
It is unclear that the new Toolkit has paid any due regard to prevent the classroom to clinic pipeline that has developed across the city. This most recently highlighted in a High Court case launched against the NHS (NHS faces High Court legal fight over cross-sex hormones prescribed to boy) which references the failure of school leaders, in a Brighton school to keep their child safe. This case is one of several cases that the public sector agencies in Brighton and Hove have been made aware of. They all begin with a child being socially transitioned in school by teachers and ending up in receipt of medical intervention by a local GP or the online service Gender GP.
It is unclear the role that Allsorts Youth Project will continue to have in schools, given they have had a free pass to provide “education” on gender identity and trans inclusion for many years, authored the previous and unlawful versions of the council’s Toolkit and are repeatedly cited by families as encouraging children to socially transition and facilitating those children to discover clinical prescribing services. Allsorts Youth Project have historically been a named referral partner of Gender GP. Gender GP are one private provider of puberty blockers. The Government has recently banned this prescribing indefinitely however no such ban currently exists on the private prescribing of cross sex hormones (Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice – GOV.UK).
There are concerns that the new Toolkit enables the framing of vulnerable children as ‘trans’ and therefore encouraging the determination of ‘exceptional cases’ requiring transition and being placed on a classroom to clinic pathway.
The new Toolkit states that it is not mandating schools to follow the policy and that it is up to schools to follow the law. It effectively is telling schools to follow the council’s recommended unlawful and dangerous practice whilst inoculating the council from being legally challenged directly. It’s a careful legal document that doesn’t really help in practice and appears to have been created to keep Brighton and Hove City Council out of court but allow activist teachers to carry on doing whatever they want. It places all legal liabilities squarely with individual schools and governing bodies and placing them individually at significant risk of Judicial Review.
Specifically in relation to the report authored by Deb Austin, Corporate Director – Families, Children, and Wellbeing, it is imperative that the council publish in the public domain, the following:
- The KC advice they claim to have received. Para 7.1 in the Austin Report says that the new Toolkit has been “sanctioned” by a KC, this is waiver of legal privilege. Given the contentious legal nature of the Toolkit, the council must publish the KC advice they have received.
- The Equality and Human Rights Commission response referred to, which the Austin Report says is available.
- Equality Impact Assessment undertaken by Brighton and Hove City Council prior to publishing the new Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit, version 5, publicly available January 2025.