The Importance of Special Educational Needs Assessment Concerning Trans-Identifying Children in UK Schools: The Role of Educational & Child Psychologists

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to promote the relevance of Special Educational Needs (SEN) assessment to gender-distressed children as a means of accommodating this group in UK schools. It is also to compare this open process to the unaccountable influence of Gender Ideology (GI) charities currently operating within the UK educational system. UK educationalists have raised concerns regarding the dominance of critical social justice theory (CSJT) applied by GI charities. An examination is offered of whether this tends to overwhelm the significance of SEN in the gender-distressed educational population that approaches such as the NHS’ ‘watchful waiting’ might better reveal.

Educational & Child Psychology (ECP) university-based training courses and local authority (LA) ECP services have developed somewhat unchallenged ‘gender-affirmative’ attitudes towards transgenderism primarily from advice received from LGBT+ charities such as Stonewall; Just For Us; and Pop’n’Olly etc.  However, they have vested interests in promoting an agenda that heavily dissociates gender from biological sex and influences the school science curriculum accordingly. This process is progressing unabated and is far from representative of the complete breadth of views on the subject. Educational & Child Psychologists (ECPs) need to be free to debate these issues openly but are discouraged from doing so by being cast as ‘transphobic‘. As a profession, Educational Psychologists (EPs) need to develop an open space to discuss these issues to be fully confident child protection issues are not being overlooked or ‘overshadowed’ (Cass 2022) in favour of ‘social justice’.

There are already procedures and strategies in place such as using the Education Health & Care Plan (EHCP) assessments under the arrangements of Part 3 Children & Families Act (CFA, 2014), which can recommend approaches already well rehearsed for other special educational needs (SENs). These are more than adequate for the successful inclusion of gender-distressed pupils into mainstream educational settings without the unaccountable interference of charities with their own agendas. 

Using such statutory assessments is a pragmatic way to satisfy the call for more ‘comprehensive multi-disciplinary assessments’ that the draft DfE “Gender Questioning Children” (GQC) promotes, as of course, does the Cass Review: ‘There is limited evidence of mental health or neuro-developmental assessments being routinely documented, or of a discipline of formal diagnostic or psychological formulation’ Cass, 2022. This recognises that transgenderism is fundamentally a psychological issue that needs psychological assessment before any intervention or support is planned. ‘The ‘Dutch Approach’ suggests that these needs should be addressed prior to or alongside initiation of any medical treatments’ (Cass 2022), and in this author’s view prior to or alongside initiation of any ‘social transitioning’ intervention. The overshadowing of important issues that may need separate pathways other than ‘affirmation’ have already been outlined in Cass’ Interim Report 2022, e.g. over-representation of looked after children; potential risks relating to safeguarding; many being neurodiverse; wide range of psychosocial and mental health needs; some detransitioning; the link between same-sex attraction and transgender identification; concerns regarding single-sex spaces, and why ‘the largest group currently comprises birth-registered females first presenting in adolescence with gender-related distress’ (Cass, 2022, p. 16).

The purpose here is to raise questions against the wholly uncritical support that ECP training courses and local authority ECP delivery services appear to be giving to a ubiquitous ‘gender-affirmative’ approach, now clearly at odds with draft DfE GQC guidance and the Cass (2022) review. It is also to counter the clear bias towards critical social justice theory mirrored by EPs’ professional association, the Association of Educational Psychologists (AEP), in their feedback on DfE GQC guidance consultation.

Many individual EPs are expressing concern on how to deal with the assessment and placement of this group without the hostile responses from Stonewall and similar gender ideologues. More positively, reference is made to the research opportunities that this group might offer the ECP enterprise.

Background

In the early 20th century English-speaking world, US ‘Black Consciousness’ was perhaps the first to promote the notion of ‘waking up’ to a new political outlook. This phrase also mirrored the vernacular of the labour movement at the time. In 1918, a US union magazine gleefully announced a new deal with management: ‘After being asleep for a long time… we finally woke up’ (Bloomberg, 2023). That word has been appropriated and re-imagined in a rapidly changing manner ever since, complicated by it being non-standard English it ‘reflects a larger way in which so much of our discourse is ironic or performative’ (Romano, 2020). From the US it has further acquired a distinctly British resonance and has intertwined with terms such as ‘politically correct’, ‘virtue-signalling’ and ‘identity politics’ (Lopez, 2017; Neiman, 2023). The word ‘woke’ further developed into ‘institutionalised political correctness’ in circumstances relating to the UK Rotherham Council child sexual abuse scandal (Ministry of Housing, 2015).

Drug Analyst Dr Angela Heal (2003) identified the widespread abdication of public service responsibility in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, UK due to the ethnicity of perpetrators that undertook organised child sexual abuse in 2002-2007. Theresa May, Home Secretary speaking in 2014 as the ‘Jay Report’ was released, accused Rotherham Council and other authorities of ‘institutionalised political correctness’, inadequate scrutiny, combined with a fear of being regarded as racist.

Some observers take these separate meanings to match English class division, in this context between dominant liberal elites within public services and the working people with whom they engage, but from whom they have increasingly become out of touch (Goodwin, 2023a; Goodwin, 2023b). Even more recently it has itself been referred to in another term: Upper-class people don a luxury belief to separate themselves from the lower class’ (Goodwin, 2023c; Henderson, 2019). More generally, these terms are characterised as mirroring critical social justice theory (CSJT) (Fook, 2014) drawing, as it does, on the critical theory practised by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse (1941) and Theodor Adorno (1944). But this perspective is not without its critics (Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020) who find that post-modernist deconstruction, with its emphasis on hierarchies and social relativism (Derrida, 1976; Foucault, 1972) has itself become, paradoxically, susceptible to authoritarian implementation. So, these CSJT meanings originally pointing out the power relationships within public institutions of patriarchy and white supremacy etc. have, to some degree, fallen foul of their own analysis since they now powerfully dominate UK public services.

Official data suggests there are 262,000 transgender people in the UK. Given that the overall population is around 70 million, 1 person in 270 is transgender. This is less than 0.5% of the population of the UK but equates to nearly 37,000 of the UK children and young people within the school population. However, the ONS themselves note (Nov 2023) ‘we cannot say with certainty whether the census estimates are more likely to be an overestimate or an underestimate of the total number of trans people aged over 16 years in England and Wales’. Although the majority of transgender individuals may themselves wish to lead their lives in quiet dignity, it is now apparent that a core of gender ideology (GI) charities have had a profound impact across all aspects of public policy, language, culture and education, helping drive what has come to be called identity politics. Within the educational system, this begs the old pedagogical question: Who should decide the content of lessons on sex and relationships? Teachers, governors, parents? This question has a long history and remains contentious, especially with regard to the newly mandated Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) curriculum (Department for Education, 2019). 

The question has now morphed further into a less ambitious one: Do parents at least have the right to know what their children are being taught in RSE sessions?  Ms Clare Page (2023) raised the question in 2021 when her daughter returned home announcing she was ‘sex positive’ and telling her mother she had been told ‘heteronormativity’ was a ‘bad thing’.  Ms Page had discovered that her daughter’s school was one of around 300 schools using resources provided by the School of Sexuality Education, a UK gender ideology charity. The judge told her that she could not access the teaching materials (i.e. toolkits) in advance of use in her daughter’s RSE lessons, ruling that the charity’s commercial interest of intellectual property outweighed the public interest.

UK gender ideology charities firmly prioritise gender self-identification or ‘gender affirmation’ over biological explanations of sex differences. This is of concern within public sector service delivery since activities characterised by such institutionalised political correctness or ‘luxury beliefs’ (Goodwin, 2023c) are now applied in an overreaching, and didactic manner, dismissing any gender-critical or other views as transphobic. The impact of this is difficult to fully assess since we may never know the numbers of transgender individuals who were subject to an unconditional environment of ‘gender-affirmation’ during their educational career only to regret in later life the irreversible decisions they were encouraged to make at the time, sometimes involving puberty blockers (gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues – GnRHa) and ‘sex re-assignment’ surgery.  However, there is evidence that 94% of those who socially transition in early childhood maintain their transgender identity into adolescence (Olson et al. 2022)

It is perhaps more convenient to refer to all these aspects relating to ‘gender-affirmation’ as CSJT (critical social justice theory), their underlying theoretical position, a term which shall therefore be used as a collective description of the theory and content of GI charities toolkits in the remainder of this article.  Similarly, gender-critical views will be left to imply a biological definition of sex and a more ‘watchful waiting’ (Zucker & Bradley, 1997) approach to transgenderism in schools.

Critical Social Justice Theory and the Contradictions It Generates in UK Equality Law

Regarding the application of CSJT to gender identity some commentators (e.g. Forstater, 2023) find the tension between women’s rights and trans rights is, in reality, a series of clashes involving the human rights of freedom of expression (Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Council of Europe, 2010) and the right to privacy (Article 8). 

A legal development appeared to be initiated recently in Parliament (Hansard 12 June 2023) when a House of Commons debate took place about the use of the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in the UK’s Equality Act (EA) 2010. MPs discussed how to protect transgender people and, at the same time, defend same-sex relationships and women’s rights to single-sex spaces, sports, healthcare etc. During this wide-ranging debate, it was noted that there is a clash of definitions with regard to ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ within the Equality Act 2010 that is at the heart of the transgender conflict. As Tonia Antoniazzi (Labour Gower, 2017 – present) noted: ‘[the debate] will mark the difficult lines between which individuals’ and collective rights are drawn…If we do not say that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex, we may as well scrap the protection of sexual orientation.’ (Column 2WH) This point was contextualised in relation to the ‘public sector equality duty [PSED] to consider the needs of women separately from those of trans women’ but also in terms of same-sex-attracted people ‘[having] opportunities to associate with each other’ (Column 3WH).

There have been some legal resolutions of these differences. E.g. the British Government blocked the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill (2022) in order to support biological definitions of sex rather than self-identified gender. Similarly, the UK charity for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights, LGB Alliance, won a recent tribunal hearing.  Mermaids, a UK GI charity had accused LGB Alliance of ‘impeding the work of organisations (particularly charities) that work for the benefit of trans people’ by promoting biological definitions of sex. LGB Alliance understandably emphasised that same-sex attraction is dependent on such biological distinctions and therefore could find Mermaids’ position paradoxically homophobic.

Nevertheless, these examples are exceptions to a now pervasive cultural shift. The UK Equality Act (EA) 2010 attempts to protect transgender people and at the same time defend same-sex relationships and women’s rights to single-sex spaces, sports, health care etc. It specifies nine protected characteristics.  These are age, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, disability, sex, sexual orientation, and gender reassignment. Sex was widely understood in the context of the EA 2010 to mean equality for women as a sex class, while gender reassignment was defined as: ‘A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex’.

So, on the one hand, ‘sex’ in EA 2010 was widely understood to mean equality for women by protecting rights to single-sex spaces, sports, healthcare etc. as members of the biologically female sex. However, at the same time, protection was afforded to another group based on the idea that sex is not immutable but changes the instant a person announces or proposes their new identity. The fact that the latter is based on a notion that contradicts biological science appears a secondary issue or as Williams (2023) has put it: ‘The assumption that “gender reassignment” means “a process to reassign your sex” only reinforces this magical thinking’. In this way, the Equality Act 2010 offers protection on the firm basis of biological sex to one group and of sex as an infinite spectrum to the other, masked by the ‘gender reassignment’ term.  This flaw has subsequently been mirrored and locked into the very framework of the 2010 Act in the UK Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED – section 149(1) EA, 2010) to which academy schools and those maintained by the local authority are subject.

Intersectionality between Pupils with Transgender Identity and Special Educational Needs (SEN)

The critique of critical social justice theory (CSJT) has immediate relevance in the educational enterprise since it is extensively applied across categories of non-transgender and gender-distressed pupils by GI charities. However, since these groups are rarely deconstructed further within UK educational contexts, the question is raised: does CSJT tend to ‘overshadow’ significant intersectional differences within the ‘transgender’ school and college population that a more nuanced theoretical analysis and perspective might reveal?  For example, in contrast to the ‘gender-affirmative’ model towards gender-distressed children but common within UK clinical settings, could the approach termed ‘Watchful Waiting’, recommended by Zucker & Bradley, (1997), be regarded as more appropriate? Additionally, how does the general population of ‘non-transgender’ and ‘transgender’ groups each intersect with Special Educational Needs (SEN), and similarly how do black and minority ethnic (BME), ‘non-transgender’ and ‘transgender’ sub-groups each intersect with SEN in terms of differences in educational attainment? 

What appears missing from the debate around the broad effects of CSJT within educational settings is that paradoxically it currently appears to lead to the masking of different transgender intersections with SENs.  What are the relative cost-benefits of self-identification of gender in terms of educational attainment? This is especially relevant between girls identifying as boys vs. girls, but CSJT activists appear more concerned with boys identifying as girls who demand access to single-sex spaces. Research into boys identifying as girls could determine whether girls’ extensively reported (Ofsted /Equal Opportunities Commission 1996) out-performance over boys remains intact across gender self-identification. The gender divide (Ofsted/Equal Opportunities Commission 1996) defines difference on the basis of biological sex, it would be interesting if boys mitigate their relatively poor performance by opposite gender identification and how does gender self-identification intersect with ethnicity and heteronormativity in terms of educational attainment? Such comparisons may be possible in the future but currently, sample sizes are too small (or too hidden) to adequately answer these important questions. Such research is likely to confirm that different gender-based expectations have a more powerful effect than biological sex. This is therefore likely to add to the negative views of both the DfE GQC and Cass informed guidance of the dangers of ‘social transition’ (i.e. embarking on a pathway to irreversible medical transition; the ‘overshadowing’ of other, more subtle factors), in this case, the largest group (i.e. girls identifying as boys) would also suffer the potential drop in educational attainment levels.

Children and young people (CYP) with additional needs generated by gender distress and ‘gender dysphoria’ can access specialist assessment (e.g. Educational & Child Psychologists following British Psychological Society guidance, 2019) through Statutory Assessment (SA) of Special Educational Needs (SEN) legislation within Sec.20 Part 3 UK Children & Families Act (CFA, 2014), and Department for Education (2015) a process which will also include the parents’ and children’s views. The CYP in schools and colleges with ‘gender incongruence’ who are comfortable with their choices, can be regarded as outside the remit of SEN legislation, requiring no more resources than already available within up-to-date educational settings. The SA process concludes with the drawing up of an Educational, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) under Reg.11 Part 2 of The Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations (Government UK, 2014), which often includes arrangements to access additional Special Needs (SN) support. 

The most common type of need amongst pupils with an EHC Plan is autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).  The second most common type of needs among pupils with EHC Planplus Special Needs (SN) are speech, language and communication. The third most common type of needs among pupils with an EHC plan are Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs (Department for Education, 2023). The need for different pathways for processing ‘gender incongruence’ vs. ‘gender dysphoria’ is further supported by recent changes in definitions that separate them in terms of the distress experienced by the latter group alone. This distinction is therefore reflected in the different ways these two groups intersect with those with SENs.

The internationally recognised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) provides for a diagnosis that was renamed from gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria, after criticisms that the former term was stigmatizing. The DSM-5-TR defines gender dysphoria as a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, lasting at least six months, as manifested by at least two of a list of many thoughts and behaviours e.g; ‘A strong desire to be of and treated, as the other gender’.  The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision (ICD-11R) brings primary focus onto the experience of incongruence between experienced gender and sex observed and recorded at birth. In ICD-11, distress and functional impairment are described as common associated features, particularly in disapproving social environments, but are not required for diagnosis of gender incongruence. In contrast, DSM-5 does require clinically significant distress or impairment for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. This, therefore, brings the latter difficulty into close association with SEN children placed within the Social Emotional and Mental Health group (Department for Education, 2018).  It is proposed here that SEMH needs have much in common with children’s needs generated by their diagnosis of gender dysphoria with its defining feature of distress. 

Therefore, although some aspects of SA processes are not without critics, (e.g. Buck & Youngman, 1996, Buck, 1998, Buck, 1999, Buck, 2000a, Buck, 2000b, Buck, 2000c, Buck, 2015) it would seem wholly consistent with past UK Statutory Assessment of SEN practice to include gender dysphoria into the Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs group of SEN procedures (DfE, 2014).  Equally, due to their defined lack of distress, gender-incongruent young people would have needs that lie outside the protection of an EHC Plan but are likely to prompt the review of whole-school strategies already in place, e.g. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, anti-bullying procedures, VIth Form ‘buddy’ support etc.

It should be noted that the proposal here to accept a medical diagnosis for gender dysphoria is limited to its necessity in accessing SN support via SA processes. It does not imply support for the medicalisation of gender distress via the administration of puberty-blocking medication (GnRHa) or surgical re-assignment. It is proposed here that these interventions remain a decision for post-compulsory education and adulthood, and this is now reflected in current NHS guidance (NHS England. 2023) and The Cass Review Interim Report (Biggs, 2022; Cass, 2022).

Although primarily focused on the individual pupil, EHCPs often have strategies to facilitate their inclusion into mainstream settings and so impact whole-school approaches to their specific difficulties, i.e. the differentiated curriculum. Consequently, Educational & Child Psychologists’ involvement in meeting gender-distressed pupils’ special needs through SA procedures will further develop their existing role in these wider school-based issues. This will enhance the Educational Psychologists’ status as a point of first reference when schools are building their own RE\RSE courses, loaded as they are with psychological content. This would challenge the GI charities’ opaque activities in school governance associated with their toolkits for RE\RSE curriculum development and so confront their business model, perhaps even saving valuable school funding. Under DfE guidance (Department for Education, 2022) schools are obliged to ‘exercise extreme caution when working with external agencies’. Also, ‘schools should not under any circumstances work with external agencies that take or promote extreme political positions or use materials produced by such agencies’.

Reconstructing Educational & Child Psychologists’ Responses to Gender Ideology in School Settings

As previously indicated CSJT may lead to the obscuration of different intersections with SENs, this is especially relevant at systemic levels for boys identifying as girls, in terms of practical demands across the school curriculum and estate. At individual levels, it is the largest group, girls identifying as boys that are of most concern in terms of their educational attainment. Although the sample size is too small to answer the question relating to attainment fully at present, in time and with proper data collection the potential for action research on the effect of gender on educational attainment is significant. SAs and the comprehensive generation of EHCPs that follows can offer an organised, comparative, and clean dataset collection. Further research and debate could be managed by Educational & Child Psychologists (ECPs) who have proven action research skills and who work in a context close to the EHCPs’ careful monitoring of their caseloads’ attainments. 

ECPs would, of course, also understand the necessity of taking an impartial position as far as their own agenda relates to this research question. Such research would prompt an investigation of whether educationalists need to look more closely at how gender socialisation impacts achievement. This is a task that GI charities have no known skills to achieve but they do already demonstrate a sometimes zealously held bias toward ‘gender-affirmation’ over ‘gender-critical’ approaches, which would interfere with the validity of any research that they might undertake. 

The interventions that GI charities make in RSE development referred to above obviously raise more questions about the propriety of their involvement in the sociopolitical question of who should control the school’s curriculum.  It is ironic that a centralised mandatory implementation of Relationships Education still leaves schools with much to do regarding practical lesson-content planning, appropriate to each age group. Politicians motivated to enforce this mandatory Relationship Education might first need to challenge this gap in provision currently being exploited by some GI charities, operating with limited accountability even though their toolkits are having an impact on school governance itself. 

UK Local Educational Authority (LEA) Educational & Child Psychologists might usefully intervene here via their consultation model of service delivery to schools. Given the seriousness of the life-changing goals of gender reassignment this could entail opening up discussions with school staff who might effectively be acting as signed-up GI transgender activists, and most significantly, who may well be missing the real long-term child protection needs for which they are more formally responsible. LEA Educational Psychology services (EPSs) may also be more able to give voice to the increasing evidence of some correlation of transgenderism with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) (Dattaro, 2020; Kaltiala, 2023).  In addition, Educational Psychology Services (EPSs) could highlight the possibility of the phase of adolescent experimentation ending in abandonment (Joyce, 2021) of the transgender identity, which in some cases might simply entail facilitating self-recognition of the young person’s gay status. The possibility of such a change of mind does not seem to be recognised in any of the GI charities’ fixed narratives. ECPs could enhance access to strategies already very well established for the wider brief of the inclusion of pupils with SEN.

The recent closing down of the UK Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), was deemed necessary due to inconsistent procedures for case management, consent, and safeguarding which were considered unsustainable, amongst other issues (Cass, 2022; Safe Schools Alliance, 2023).  This might provide a template for the level of intervention now needed to challenge the unaccountable third-party activity from GI charities, potentially active within the entire compulsory educational estate (Holford, 2023).

Schools may need to properly face the complexity of the conflicting rights of pupil groups (Forstater, 2023) within schools, especially with regard to single-sex spaces and the integrity of girls’ sports and health care etc. Should it be left unchallenged that GI charities are defined by their project to uncritically affirm the identity of gender-distressed children on a pathway that may finally include the use of puberty blockers (GnRHa) and/or surgical intervention to facilitate gender ‘re-assignment’ (Biggs, 2022)? These interventions are now recognised as irreversible (Cass, 2022; Transgender Trend, 2020) decisions for children to take even if Gillick-competent, which they may later regret as adults. It is also useful here to compare the current very different tendencies in psychological interventions between gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia, the latter almost always including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which aims to offer some mild, carefully balanced challenges to the clients’ thinking patterns and behaviour. There is a danger associated with the unreflective institutionalised political correctness of critical social justice theory whether from GI charities or public sector policy scribes, and such dangers are not trivial, as the events of the UK Rotherham Council child sexual exploitation (CSE) scandal demonstrated.

Heal (2003) identified the widespread abdication of public service responsibility in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, UK CSE grooming crimes which consisted of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in 2002-2007.  Heal was hired by South Yorkshire Police and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007. She has since described it as the ‘biggest child protection scandal in history’ (2006). From at least 2001, many agencies’ reports passed on names of alleged CSE perpetrators to the UK police and to Rotherham Council. However, the first group conviction did not take place until 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16. Theresa May, Home Secretary speaking in 2014 accused the authorities of a ‘dereliction of duty’. May blamed several factors, including Rotherham Council’s ‘disdainful attitude’ towards the children, ‘institutionalised political correctness’, and a culture of covering things up for fear of being seen as racist. Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994-2012, blamed a culture of ‘not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat’.  There was therefore substantial evidence apparent in the Rotherham cases of public sector professional groupthink. In 2018 ‘Operation Stovewood’ reported that there were 1,510 potential victims of sexual abuse overall in these events in Rotherham.

Conclusion

The concept of Special Educational Needs (SEN) has developed over many years, not least under the significant involvement of UK Educational & Child Psychology services and academics.  It has moved beyond its initial framing as being solely limited to the child’s personal characteristics through a consideration of the merits of mainstreaming versus segregation, and to now increasingly be involved in whole-school issues such as the differentiated curriculum. Guidance has always focused on prioritising the ‘least restrictive environment’ that can be provided for the individual child or young person while having to balance this with the important issue of the avoidance of the disruption to other children’s learning.

The Educational & Child Psychology (ECP) profession is in a pole position to take hold of the issue of transgenderism in schools and present some counterbalance to the almost exclusive dominance of critical social justice theory applied by GI charities. It is proposed here that the recognition of the intersectional overlay between transgenderism and special educational needs, which could engage the use of statutory assessment procedures would have a series of beneficial effects. These would include: (a) support relevant to the individual pupil; (b) the whole-school approaches to this issue, especially for single-sex spaces, sports, and single-sex healthcare; and (c) as a platform to base further research and debate by ECP professionals via careful monitoring of progression through their Educational, Health and Care Plans.  High on the priorities of research questions raised would be, How far does gender self-identification mitigate or further deepen disadvantage in terms of intersectional differences in educational outcomes?  How would answers to this inform the power or otherwise of the constructs of teaching and learning styles? Can educationalists simply accept relative differences in biological terms or should they look more closely at how differing socialisation of gender impacts on achievement? As indicated, improved data collection raises the possibility of the ECP professions’ research that could determine whether girls’ ubiquitous outperformance of boys is transferable across gender self-identity. 

Unfortunately, the Educational Psychology (EP) profession’s university-based training courses and local authority EP services’ senior staff show widespread support for ‘gender-affirmative care’ (Buck 2024a; Buck 2024b), reflecting the bias of the GI charities noted above. Their activity on EPNET (one of the ‘JISCMail’ email discussion lists for the UK Education and Research communities, supposedly an online open and public forum for the exchange of ideas and information for those working within the field of educational psychology) clearly indicates widespread and uncritical promotion of ‘social transition’, in other words they are actively briefing against both the new DfE guidance ‘Gender Questioning Children’ (GQC) and the soon-to-be-finalised Cass Report, despite both highlighting the poor evidence-base for outcomes of ‘gender-affirmative care’. Even more seriously, this clear bias towards critical social justice theory is mirrored by their professional association the Association of Educational Psychologists (AEP), in their feedback on DfE guidance ‘Gender Questioning Children’ consultation. This feedback formulates plainly irresponsible recommendations not to follow the DfE GQC guidance or The Cass Review. They do this by leaning heavily on the entirely unaccountable advice of Gender Ideology charities, e.g. the AEP feedback to the DfE consultation quotes from the GI charity Just for Us: ‘We recommend schools do not implement this draft, non-statutory guidance. We encourage teachers to stand for inclusion, not exclusion’. The implication that gender-critical commentary would ‘stand for exclusion’ is disingenuous or faux-naïf at best.

The multi-agency nature of EHCP statutory assessment procedures could provide a counterweight to EP training and local authority EP services’ current promotion of ‘gender-affirmation’ ideology, and the self-interested claims of GI charities that promote their client group’s ‘lived experience’ with surprisingly limited consideration for the rights of others. When it comes to the curriculum, it means misrepresenting basic biological facts. As for the school environment, it means children of one sex being permitted to self-identify into single-sex spaces and sports of the other, to the significant detriment of girls, in particular. For individual gender-distressed children, it means implications that set them on a potential pathway to making irreversible life-changing decisions, which therefore presents obvious safeguarding responsibilities for school staff.

A better approach for gender-incongruent children in schools would be to engage existing educational legislation and associated school policies on child protection, diversity, equality, and inclusion to protect them from any disrespect or bullying and to use Statutory Assessment procedures for the resources required beyond that to accommodate the tiny number of children identified as gender-dysphoric.

Therefore, it seems important for all these reasons that UK Educational & Child Psychologists and schools engage more directly with the conflicts in gender rights issues, and also to how, and from whom, content is transmitted into the RSE syllabi in schools. UK Educational Psychology Services (EPSs) are in a good position to exploit the protective nature of EHCPs for individual children and to support teachers to use their own judgement to help develop RSE for all pupils appropriately within the community they serve.  This may well start with encouragement for schools and parents to take a more nuanced, cautious, and even sceptical approach towards toolkits and other input from unaccountable Gender Ideology charities, as they are currently configured. 

Schools and parents might also be helped by Educational & Child Psychologists to conceptualise gender dysphoria as intersecting with SEN and to use Statutory Assessment procedures to meet the needs of this sub-group of children, to develop their learning, improve their mental health and enhance their safeguarding.

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About the author: Dr David Buck is a former UK Local Authority Educational Psychologist and Special Educational Needs Ofsted Inspector who now works in a private Educational Psychology consultancy. All views expressed are those of the author. David lives in Canterbury, Kent, UK.

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