Roger Kiska analyses the new anti-bullying guidance from the Church of England, exposing its false premises and the dangers it poses to education
The Church of England is currently rolling out updated anti-bullying guidance built upon the foundation of intersectionality; by this the guidance means that we are all marginalised or privileged by the intersection of multiple aspects of our personal characteristics and identities such as class, religion, ethnicity. Part C of the guidance, on race-based anti-bullying, which is deeply steeped in intersectionality and critical race theory rather than a biblical worldview, is currently being consulted on until the 12th of May.
Theological Concerns
Flourishing for All was first published in September 2024, and amended in April 2025. The basic theological premise which the guidance is based on is three-fold:
(1) we are all created in God’s image;
(2) we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves;
(3) this means that we should love every child, regardless of their protected characteristics.
However, the fatal flaw in the guidance is defining human flourishing as allowing every child to fully explore and experience whatever their protected characteristic entails.
This means promoting that a same-sex attracted pupil should live out the fullness of their sexual orientation or promoting that a gender questioning pupil should live out the fullness of being transgendered, rather than teaching them to understand themselves from a biblical definition of identity.
Part of this project requires shaping the entire school environment, including the curriculum, around changing hearts and minds to empower pupils to accept, advocate for, and celebrate ‘human flourishing’ as defined by the Church of England. The Scriptural justification provided is 1 Corinthians 12:26, that when one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers. John 10:10 is also cited prominently: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
The problem is that the Church of England fully divorces human flourishing from its Christian meaning, which is living out God’s purpose for our lives. It does not mean encouraging children to embrace every life choice that comes into their heart, particularly those which are contrary to Church doctrine or the children’s best interests. Nor does it mean teaching other children how to encourage them in this vein. The biblical teaching is not only that we are made in the image of God, but also that we are fallen into sin and in need of Jesus Christ as our saviour.
Spiritual Dereliction of Duty
The guidance, in this sense, is in direct dereliction of the Church of England’s duty to spiritually nurture the children in their care, leading them towards God’s stated Biblical will for their lives and not away from it. 1 Corinthians 12:26 speaks about the Body of Christ living in accord with God’s will. This means, as 1 Corinthains also says, that we are not to associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister in Christ but is an unrepentant sinner.
The guidance is right that Christ challenged prejudice towards the afflicted. What the guidance forgets is that in doing so, He also never embraced the sin of the afflicted. Far from it, he challenged it, and commanded that ungodly behaviour be stopped. In John 8, the Evangelist writes about the incident of the adulterous woman being brought before Jesus. While Jesus calls out those who would stone her by pointing out their own sin, he does not let the adulterous woman off the hook. He tells her to go and sin no more. That is the authentic gospel of Christian love.
John 10:10, which the guidance views as representative of their concept of human flourishing, actually condemns the Church of England’s position. John 10 speaks of Jesus as the good shepherd. That same parable speaks of false teachers and worldly people as being thieves who seek to steal and kill the souls of the innocent flock. It is hard to conceive of the Education Office’s spiritually embellished call to lead lives which are not in accord with either Scripture, nor Church doctrine, as being anything but being consistent with the description of the antagonist in Christ’s parable.
Closed Debate
The guidance purports that its sole agenda is the prevention of bullying. However, this is intellectually dishonest. By basing the entirety of the guidance of contentious and partisan political theories like intersectionality (the idea that some people are privileged because of their skin colour, sex or religious affiliation, while others are victims to differing degrees depending on the number of minority protected characteristics they have), critical race theory (a theory that the UK is systematically racist and that this is woven into every element of life, law and culture and acts to perpetuate racial victimisation), and minority stress theory (the idea that persistent racial prejudice (including intended or unintended microaggressions) can lead to psychological trauma), it is clear that the purpose of the guidance is to be a factory for woke thinking.
While other parts of the Western World, including the corporate class, are shedding and abandoning these principles with a sense of urgency, the Church of England is embracing them and using these theories as a framework for how it seeks to educate. Staff are to be trained with diversity, equity and inclusion education. Chaplains are to be taught to be welcoming and accommodating of children’s desires to follow whatever lifestyle choice they choose. Pupils are to be taught inclusive language and how to be social justice warriors for racial and LGBT causes. The guidance really needs to be read to be believed.
Section 3.2.1 of the guidance goes so far as to suggest that chaplains should never express authentically Christian views about Christian sexual ethics in absolute terms, and that should they discuss such subjects, they should always qualify them by making it clear not all Christians adhere to such beliefs. They must also never preach in a way which jeopardises the guidance’s worldly view of human flourishing. The guidance seems to be either a direct or passively aggressive reference to the case of Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall who was dismissed from his role as school chaplain and reported to the government’s terrorist watchdog, Prevent, for a balanced and instructive sermon he gave at the school on identity politics, at the request of the pupils.
In relation to homophobic and transgender bullying, the guidance states that addressing HBT bullying proactively and effectively must take precedence over debates around human sexuality and gender that can be found within the Church of England and beyond. This is nothing more than justification for closing the theological debate and giving cover for their intersectional approach to education. This approach requires the mainstreaming of these themes through religious education, collective worship, staff training, pastoral care and the curriculum.
The guidance also suggests that parents need to be mindful that Church of England schools are protecting gender questioning children, and that the strong views of parents are misplaced when they may affect a child’s school life. This argument is a red herring. The anger of parents does not come from the fact that schools are trying to protect a specific pupil who is gender questioning; it stems from the all too common lack of transparency that accompanies socially transitioning pupils and the corresponding transgender affirming education that comes with it.
Purposeful Ignorance
The result of such narrow thinking is the creation of a purposeful ignorance. Indeed, as the guidance points out, hate crimes have quadrupled in the past 10 years. But that ignores the fact that the dominant culture during those years was exactly the type of victimhood thinking the Church wishes to propagate. This type of thinking has not solved the problem – it has exacerbated it.
It is also true that LGB and gender questioning children show a much higher propensity to self-harm and suicidality. The guidance, however, sees only one root cause, that being the lack of complete acceptance of their life choices. It completely ignores the possibility that something inherent in identifying as LGB or transgender may be the root cause of psychological distress. The source can be equally be unresolved sexual trauma. It can be a comorbidity that shares psychological characteristics with LGBT identity, but which has nothing to do with sexual attraction or gender congruity. Embracing a child’s perception of themself in such a situation leaves the comorbidity untreated and unresolved. A broken family environment or a toxic friendship group can also perpetuate confusion. It could even be elements of the lifestyle itself. Chalking up self-harming and suicidality solely to lack of acceptance is lazy and highly dangerous.
The guidance also falls short on the topic of race-based bullying. The guidance’s intersectional approach argues that white British national children are privileged, while all other children (including white Eastern and Central European children) are victims within a hierarchy of victimhood topped by those with the most minority characteristics. Far from supporting human flourishing, raising children to believe themselves to be victims or oppressors has the opposite effect. Telling pupils and parents that being ‘colour blind’ is part of the problem is ignoring the fact that we are all the progeny of Adam and Eve, one family created in God’s image as the bible teaches.
Perhaps most counter-productively, educating lower-middle class or impoverished white British children to feel shame over their skin colour or to tell them they are privileged likely risks multiplying any racial anger those children may feel. Attacking the problem by propagating shame and apportioning blame for aspects of a child’s life that were never in their control as the root cause of racism is foolhardy.
Lack of Legal Accuracy
The guidance also is lacking in legal accuracy, and this is a problem for an entity that educates millions of children. It certainly evidences a lack of seriousness. The guidance, for example, addresses the Equality Act’s prohibition of harassment as statutory grounds to challenge bullying. The guidance implies that harassment of someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity is unlawful. So it is, except when it comes to education. Parliament specifically exempted schools from the harassment provisions where they relate to sexual orientation, gender reassignment or religion or belief. Yet the guidance intentionally leaves the reader with the impression that no such exemption exists.
Moreover, the guidance is loose with its language. It suggests that gender questioning children are the same as gender reassigned children, the latter being a protected characteristic which can only be obtained by adults. The fact is they are not the same. The government’s draft guidance on gender confused children and Keeping Children Safe in Education essentially make the point that they are not the same thing.
The irony is that it took a Supreme Court decision on safe spaces and the definition of sex as based on biological markers for the Church of England to stop referring to pupils as transgender, instead opting for the moniker of LGB/GQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual/gender questioning). This is evident if one views the draft guidance before it was amended last month following the landmark judgment. The fact that secular government (the courts and the Department for Education) are what is pushing the Church’s guidance towards what is actually a more Biblically accurate pastoral approach, is damning. Even then, the Church of England still appears to be doing all it can to minimize the impact of the change in laws on how it applies its policies. Nowhere is this clearer than when it seemingly disapplies the entirety of the government’s draft guidance on gender questioning children to pupils who are already socially transitioning.
The guidance also deals with legal obligations side by side with ideological policy aspirations, making it appear as if the two are one in the same. For example, the guidance, especially in Part C on race-based bullying, is replete with the word microaggression. Microaggression is not a legal term, and is found nowhere in any statute or court decision relating to equality.
The same issue of misleading readers arises when the guidance discusses church schools’ public sector equality duty under the Equality Act. While it is true that schools are obliged to have regard to eliminating unlawful discrimination and harassment, fostering good relations and advancing equality of opportunity, the duty owed is not something concrete or tangible. Church of England schools can adhere to an authentically Christian ethos and still find themselves on the right side of the PSED. Other schools across the country have done so successfully. The premise pushed in the guidance, that the PSED requires the radically progressive approach the National Society for Education takes towards equality, simply does not hold up.
History of Parental Rights Abuses
As grim as the guidance is, the Church of England’s identity politics approach to education is nothing new. The Christian Legal Centre has been at the forefront of supporting those affected by the Church of England’s aggressively progressive policies. In 2017, Nigel and Sally Rowe, in the Isle of Wight, began the school year to find out their children’s primary school would be socially transitioning to young boys and treating them as females. When the Rowe’s queried the school, it wrote back after receiving advice from the Portsmouth Diocese, that any parent or child who couldn’t view biologically male children as female were transphobic and that the school would do their best to eradicate such prejudices from their pupils.
In 2019, a similar scenario played out in another Church of England Primary School, where information was being withheld from parents about the planned social transitioning of a child and accompanying transgender affirming education. The school brought in controversial campaigning group Mermaids to train teachers, and gave a presentation replete with misinformation about legal requirements surrounding gender questioning pupils. The result was that two school governors, Rev. John Parker and another, resigned their position in protest to the schools dogmatic approach.
In 2022, Christian parents Calvin and Nicola Watts were shocked to discover that their 8-year-old daughter was being taught radical transgender ideology, including being taught that a 3-year-old can be non-binary. Despite expressing their opposition to LGBT teaching being given to their daughter, transgender affirming ideology was introduced to the pupils at St Michael’s Church of England Primary School in Kent without prior consent or forewarning. The Watts’ subsequently removed their daughter from the school.
In 2023, Glawdys Leger was dismissed from her employment as a teacher at the Bishop Justice Church of England School in Bromley, Kent for expressing her Christian beliefs to her students about transgenderism and homosexual behaviour during a religious education lesson. The school also reported her to the Teaching Regulation Agency. Glawdys had become increasingly concerned about the level of promotion of LGBT alliance, gender ideology and DEI at the school. When the curriculum dictated that she weave these themes into religious education and into the classroom environment, she raised her concerns with colleagues and took steps to minimise the impact of controversial material on her pupils, like refusing to show an LGBT themed video during class which she viewed as objectionable. Her challenge of the TRA’s findings is now before the Court of Appeal.
These examples provided just a snapshot of the reality of Church of England schools today, with the Christian Legal Centre getting similar enquiries on a regular basis. During Pride Month, it is not uncommon for us to receive multiple requests from parents, teachers or governors a week.
Conclusion
The Flourishing for All guidance doubles down on its woke approach to education. To be clear, the approach to education put forward by the guidance has far more to do with moulding children into the Church of England’s hyper-politically correct image than it does anti-bullying. Parents who are serious about their children receiving a genuinely Christian education owe it to themselves to read the guidance for themselves and to see the Education Office’s vision of how they want their children to be spiritually, morally and politically formed. It is unbiblical and dangerous. Children deserve better than ideological education by stealth, under the guise of protecting them from bullying. Parents deserve more transparency and honesty as to the Church of England’s true intentions.
