Non-Normative Gender and Sexual Identities in Schools: - Schools Out

Questions
1. Could you please tell me the remit of your organisation and your role
within it?
2. Recent research has clearly highlighted the problems in schools faced
by LGBT pupils and staff and there are a number of policies, statutory
and non-statutory, and campaigns, which have the potential to help
alleviate these issues.
How useful do you think these policies and campaigns have
been/are and where they are not useful, why do you think this is?
Prompts:
Examples of Policies:
Homophobic Bullying. Safe to Learn: Embedding anti-bullying work
in schools (2007)
Gender Equality Duty and Schools (2007)
Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (2006)
Stand Up For Us: Challenging Homophobia in Schools (2004)
Every Child Matters (2003)
Bullying: Don’t Suffer in Silence (2002)
Sex and Relationship Education Guidance (2000)
Examples of campaigns:
Stonewall’s Education for All campaign launched 2007
National Healthy Schools Programme, launched 2005
DfES Make a Difference Campaign, launched 2004
My view: I think that the recent policy (DCFS, 2007) is excellent and
needs to be made statutory and utilised by all schools. The plan to do a
School Report every 3 years good as it can work as a monitoring tool,
but reformulation of policy is now not necessary, we need to focus
on implementation. Where policies are not useful it is because they
are not understood and they are not required to be understood –
policy will not work without both stringent application and monitoring