Britain is becoming an appalling country in which to bring up children

Until I looked into the tragic case of Ruth Perry, the headteacher who took her own life after receiving an “inadequate” Ofsted rating, I hadn’t realised that the regulator automatically downgrades a school if there is a concern over “safeguarding”.

In the case of Caversham Primary School in Reading, where Ms Perry had worked for 13 years, it didn’t matter that the rest of the school was deemed to be “good” in every category apart from leadership and management. No matter what rating a school gets in other areas, if safeguarding is not up to scratch, then “inadequate” is the only outcome.

Which surely means that Ofsted is going to have its work cut out if damning new research by the think tank Policy Exchange is anything to go by. In its report, Asleep at the Wheel, it found that extreme trans ideology is so rampant in some schools that teachers are routinely letting pupils change their names or uniforms without even telling their parents. Most of the secondary schools that were surveyed are also teaching the controversial theory that individuals have a gender identity that can differ from their biological sex. And they are increasingly abandoning single-sex toilets and changing rooms, often without consultation.

As Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP heckled by her own colleagues for defending women’s rights in the Commons, correctly points out in a foreword to the report: “A generation of children are being let down, because well-established safeguarding standards are being compromised.”

It isn’t just deeply worrying that this madness has been allowed to permeate schools for some time now. Equally troubling are the determined attempts to dismiss these concerns as marginal, or indeed bigoted. So-called progressives would have you believe that this practice is only happening in a handful of secondary schools, but the Policy Exchange data exposes the reality that this ideology is widespread.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, its researchers asked 304 secondary schools in England about their policies on children who identify as the opposite sex and on changes of names, pronouns, hair and uniforms. Only 154 replied, but of them just 39 said they would inform parents as soon as a pupil expressed the wish to change gender. Only 75 of the schools said their designated safeguarding lead or a medical professional would be informed about a pupil wanting to change gender. Disturbingly, 104 schools said they taught the idea that people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex.

You would have thought that the recent closure of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock clinic, which was the subject of a damning review over how it treated children who believe they are trans, would have given schools pause for thought on this issue. But no. On they go, kowtowing to a vocal minority on Twitter who apparently have little genuine interest in children’s well-being.

All that this virtue-signalling has achieved is to turn Britain into an even more difficult place to raise children.Mothers like me now face a perfect storm. There is the struggle to bring up children in the first place, given the dreadful state of our ludicrously expensive childcare system. Then there’s the battle to protect them from whatever they might see online, with internet giants seemingly content for teenagers to be fed a diet of hardcore pornography and suicide videos.

There is the violence on the streets – exemplified by everything from the sweary schoolgirl on the bus who has twice gone viral on TikTok to nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel, shot dead in her own Merseyside home by drug dealer Thomas Cashman.

There is the impact of lockdown which – as some of us warned at the time, only to be ignored – has stunted not only the education but also the personal development of a generation of “Covid kids”.

If that wasn’t enough to push children over the edge, you have then got the hysterical climate change lobby, scaring them to death with doom-mongering talk of an environmental apocalypse, seemingly in denial of the huge progress that is being made globally on this issue.

And now we discover that schools are promoting extremist gender ideology which even many children seem to disagree with, judging by all the protests over gender-neutral toilets. Children are telling adults that unisex facilities are making them feel, to quote a Year 11 pupil at Oasis Academy Mayfield in Southampton, “extremely vulnerable and uncomfortable” and yet no one appears to be listening to them.

So is it really any wonder that, by some estimates, young people are more anxious and depressed than ever when they are living in a society that doesn’t seem to care about them at all?

Ironically, Labour – the so-called party of the young – is all over the place on this issue, with Sir Keir Starmer unable to say whether a woman can have a penis or explain Labour’s policy on reforming the Gender Recognition Act.

Rishi Sunak has now ordered an independent review into sex education after he was presented with a dossier of evidence showing the widespread teaching of gender fluidity as fact. It is partly the Department for Education’s (DfE) fault for giving external agencies far too much influence over the current Relationships Sex and Health Education curriculum. A sort of mania has taken hold when it comes to trans rights, and institutions like the DfE and the NHS should have maintained a sense of balance and perspective, rather than abrogate their duties to a shouty minority of hypocritical, intolerant zealots. The Twitterati should never be allowed to lead any debate, least of all this one.

But surely schools should also know what is common sense and what isn’t. The average headteacher should be more than capable of working out that it is not in the best interests of any child confused about their gender to allow them to change their names or uniforms without even discussing it with their parents.

Some schools seem to be saying that they don’t know what the guidance is. Is that really fair? As Suella Braverman wrote in this newspaper last summer: “I want to make it clear that it is possible, within the law, for schools to refuse to use the preferred opposite-sex pronouns of a child.

“Furthermore, schools and teachers who socially transition a child without the knowledge or consent of parents or without medical advice increase their exposure to a negligence claim for breach of their duty of care to that child.” She also clarified that schools have “a duty to provide single-sex toilets in schools, breach of which would be unlawful”. That sounds pretty clear to me. Britain is failing its children and the Asleep at the Wheel report must act as a wake up call.