Steve Beegoo, Head of Education, comments on the BBC’s recent backtracking of promoting LGBT ideology in its sex education resources.
The BBC has removed content promoting LGBT ideology from its primary resources for home schoolers.
There had been criticism over the promotion to children that “there are over 100 genders if not more,” to quote the teaching recommended for 9 year olds. Thankfully, what has replaced these resources, which had been made available for home education during school closure, is the message, “Sorry we are having difficulties showing you the page you asked for.”
Over the last few years, the BBC has continued to allow an extreme political trans activist agenda to be promoted to children, such as through the ‘I am Leo’ film. The corporation has taught children to use ‘preferred pronouns’, telling them there are over 100 gender identities and encouraging them to believe that boys are really girls, and vice versa. This trans activism has yet to be curtailed and it is all at the license fee payers’ expense. In the BBC’s public response to removing resources they disturbingly state, “We will continue to support teachers on this important topic in other ways.”
As the summer term approaches, schools in England are preparing to provide the mandatory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) which had been postponed. At a time of huge pressure for schools, many have struggled to, or have refrained from, providing the mandatory full consultation of the parents on their RSE curriculum. Stonewall now claims to provide RSE resources to half of all secondary schools, and one in eight primary schools. The Welsh government is consulting on providing relationships and sexuality education to all children as part of widely criticised reforms. In Scotland, the promotion of transgenderism in schools has gathered pace, despite concerns leading to the resignation of MSP Andy Wightman.
Wherever you are in the UK, please support those like Christian Concern, which stands against the indoctrination of children through the media and through the school curriculum. This is especially important as the summer term heralds the mandatory commencement of RSE for all schools.
Schools should of course be teaching respect and tolerance of all people, and as part of their role in supporting the personal development of children they are, indeed, required to do so. However, they are also required to consult parents fully around the curriculum they are planning to adopt in teaching their children about relationships and sex.
Many schools, whether by design or through ignorance, have adopted lessons, interactive media or other resources that are damaging to a Christian understanding of personhood and are totally age-inappropriate. How sad that parents have often becoming unwitting accomplices to this, even through lockdown, through resources such as those provided by the BBC!
If you are a parent and do not feel you have been consulted about the RSE provision in your school, please write to your headteacher immediately before the summer term begins.
Mainstream resources
Such partisan and unwelcome resources are on the rise. Piers Shepherd from Family Education Trust explained to me recently a topical example of this in Hertfordshire:
“Herts for Learning, the largest school support company of its type in the UK, has promoted a book called ‘It’s All Ok By Me’. This was advertised in its monthly bulletin for chairs of school governing boards. The book is aimed at children aged 3-8 and claims it wants to help them ‘grow up in a world free from bias and discrimination.’ However, the book is deeply biased in favour of LGBT and transgender ideology and discriminates against families with a mother and father. All the book’s characters are naked, androgynous gingerbread people of no determinate sex or gender; though one character wears a Muslim hijab headscarf, and is the closest any character gets to being identified as male or female. The book contains the verse:
I want to be who I am,
I am who I want to be,
Whether I have two mums or two dads,
No mum or no dad,
It’s all ok by me.
“Completely excluded from this celebration of ‘diversity’ is any reference to the living arrangement in which the majority of children grow up: in a home with a mother and a father.”
The ‘I am who I want to be’ message is loud and proud through so many of the resources and media provided to our children. Whatever biology, family, or even God might have to say about personhood is seen as secondary. What must take prominence, it seems, is the ‘self’. The secular cult of the autonomous individual continues to have the allegiance of many educators, and this self-deification is taking root in children, leading to misery and confusion. Each one of us must be vigilant to the ongoing steady secular slide away from the security that comes from a Biblical understanding that we have been created by a heavenly Father. An essential foundation for the flourishing of children is that our identity should be found in relationship with our loving God and through family, not found in our unpredictable feelings and changeable wants.
A Christian way forward
Jesus was clear in saying, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them” (Matthew 19:14 NIV). The negative influences discussed come from those with, at best, a confused understanding of life, or, at worst, an anti-Christian agenda. Through their teaching, they hinder the understanding of the divine purposes for our bodies and confuse the healthy relationships for which our children were painstakingly designed. The Lord also said, “If you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6 NLT). But we can lead them and support them to find the one who forgives us and frees us from sin.
Christians are bringing the hope of Jesus Christ by creating excellent resources to be used in schools, many of which can be used by parents in lockdown. We have promoted over the last few months the excellent educational resources on the value of the unborn produced by the Centre for Bio-ethical Reform (CBR) and Lovewise. We have platformed the launch of Noah and The Nestling, a beautiful book for young children covering the same issue. We have been able to advocate for many appropriate and Christian values-based Relationship and Sex Education resources, which can be found on the ‘RSEauthentic’ website. We are seeing Bible-based resources being provided to schools through organisations such as The Bible Society, helping provide Christian assemblies and excellent free secondary school Religious Education resources. We can see a Biblical culture of life, the culture of Jesus Christ, shaping the character and health of our children.
May we do all we can to ‘Let the children come’ to Jesus without hinderance. And may we stand against the hinderances which are being so readily placed in their way.
