Safe Schools Alliance UK
Safe Schools Alliance UK is a British organisation that describes itself as a grassroots movement campaigning to uphold child safeguarding in schools. It is run by volunteers with backgrounds in education, nursing and child protection, and says it represents parents, grandparents, teachers, school governors and healthcare professionals.
What you will find
The organisation focuses on two themes: the introduction of gender identity policies in schools and relationship and sex education materials that it considers unsuitable. It has brought legal proceedings, including against Oxfordshire County Council and the Crown Prosecution Service. More about schools and young people can be found elsewhere on this site.
Why it is on this list
It is a campaign group with a gender-critical viewpoint. Its materials are useful for following the British debate about schools, the Equality Act and legal frameworks, but they present one side of that debate.
Organisation and principles
The organisation says it represents people from more than thirty British education regions and has no religious or political affiliations. The names of the volunteers who lead it and a founding year are not listed on the organisation's page. Safe Schools Alliance says it works with schools and educators to ensure that school policies reflect the safety of all pupils, while taking account of the protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. The group formulates its two concerns in stark terms: the introduction of what it calls gender identity ideology and its consequences, particularly for girls, and educational materials that it believes sexualise children.
The two legal cases
The case against Oxfordshire County Council concerned the Trans Inclusion Toolkit for Schools from 2019. In 2020, Safe Schools Alliance supported proceedings brought on behalf of a teacher, a parent and a thirteen-year-old girl. They argued that the guidance was unlawful and failed to protect girls' privacy. The High Court granted permission for a judicial review. In May 2020, the county council withdrew the toolkit and decided not to defend the proceedings. The second case concerned guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service for schools on bullying and hate crimes against LGBT pupils. Following legal action on behalf of a fourteen-year-old girl, the Crown Prosecution Service removed the guidance from its website in 2020. Both cases therefore ended because the authorities withdrew the document, not with a court ruling on its content.
Criticism and assessment
In May 2020, the British LGBT news site PinkNews described the group as an organisation seeking to exclude transgender children from toilets. The Alliance itself refers to child protection. Anyone using the site is therefore reading the arguments of one party in a legal and political conflict. The group operates in the same field as Transgender Trend, and Policy Exchange's report Asleep at the Wheel addresses the same questions about schools.