Why Bridget Phillipson is the worst Education Secretary in reminiscence – from harmful trans steering to her assault on academies and personal colleges: JULIE BINDEL

A child’s first day at school is challenging enough. But now parents must worry that their four-year-old may come home in the afternoon professing to be a different gender.

This might sound far-fetched, but under new guidelines announced by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, teachers will be allowed to affirm the gender choice of any child.

I’ve seen the danger this kind of approach can lead to.

A couple of years ago I met an 18-year-old girl named Aurora for a podcast series on gender ideology. 

At the age of six, Aurora started to wonder – as some young children do – whether she might in fact be a boy. After all, she liked playing with trucks and joining in with boys’ games. 

But rather than allow the phase to pass, Aurora’s teachers intervened, affirming her delusion and commanding her parents to do the same. Unbelievably, they warned her mum and dad that, fail to do so, and their daughter may kill herself. 

Aurora believes her primary school teachers destroyed her life. And it is only now, cresting into adulthood, that she realises the damage that was done.

So when I read the Government’s new trans guidance for primary schools, released on Friday as a draft and now open to consultation, I sensed the hand of gender activists, whose chief concern is not for child welfare but for political ideology.

But let’s not be surprised by Phillipson’s relaxed attitude to safety in the classroom, given her department’s recent directive to headteachers, as revealed in today’s Mail on Sunday, not to expel children caught carrying knives.

It is, apparently, better for them to be kept in school, while the wellbeing of their classmates and teachers takes a back seat.

Following her absurd Marxist attacks on the successful academy system, her VAT raid on private schools and her wilful ignorance of free speech issues on university campuses, her latest interventions prove she is not only the worst, but the most dangerous Education Secretary in living memory.

As someone who has dedicated their life to protecting the rights of women and girls, I have been astounded that the women in the Labour Party are even worse than the men when it comes to putting their own careers ahead of the public interest. 

Because make no mistake, Phillipson’s Left-liberal agenda is politically expedient if you’re hoping to make a dash for the party leadership, but it’s not going to improve education standards or keep children safe.

Let’s start with the latest trans guidance. 

While Phillipson reaffirms that single sex spaces in schools are for children of that sex only, and that teachers should not indulge a gender-questioning child’s every whim and instead ‘consider the impact on all those affected’, the Education Secretary proposes slippery get-out clauses.

The previous Conservative draft – drawn up in 2023 by then equalities minister Kemi Badenoch – was clear and sensible: ‘Primary school-aged children should not have different pronouns to their sex-based pronouns.’

Labour’s re-wording tells schools to exercise ‘particular caution’ and endorse full social transition, including pronouns, ‘very rarely.’

‘Very rarely’ is deliberately ambiguous, for who wouldn’t consider their case ‘very rare’, unless their school is deluged with trans-identifying children? 

Yet more alarmingly, teachers are not obliged to inform parents if a child wants to change gender. While Phillipson agrees this should happen in the ‘vast majority of cases’, she permits secrecy if telling the parent will ‘harm the child.’

Again, ‘harm’ is a broad term encompassing physical and emotional abuse, which has been levelled by activists at parents who do not affirm a child’s chosen identity.

So, far from giving teachers clarity and shutting the door

on this most pernicious of delusions, Phillipson has kept it dangerously ajar.

The pronoun police can already count among its many victims maths teacher Kevin Lister, who was sacked from New College Swindon for using gender-neutral language rather than endorsing a trans student’s preferred pronouns; and Joshua Sutcliffe, who was banned from teaching in 2023 for ‘misgendering’ a pupil. 

Phillipson’s guidance stirs new life into this witch-hunt.

Of course, Labour isn’t arguing for primary-aged children to change sex. However, I know from interviewing countless parents that affirming a child’s gender imaginings at a young age inevitably leads on to puberty blockers and irreversible sex hormone therapy later in life. 

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that if you tell a child they’re born into the wrong body their entire life, they’ll try to address that medically. And as we know, many of those who do take chemical action end up with deep physical and psychological scars.

Therefore, it’s wrong to paint Phillipson’s trans guidance as harmless. Affirming gender delusions, even in ‘rare’ cases, is a slippery slope, which leads not to education, but indoctrination.

Then there’s higher education. Our university sector has been captured by activists of all stripes acting as judge, jury and executioner, shutting down free speech, stifling debate and running campuses like their own fiefdoms.

At the start of last year, Phillipson promised to get a grip on the problem and protect academics from the entitled, ignorant students ready to cancel them for ‘hate speech’.

And yet, less than a month ago, 370 academics – including Nobel laureates – wrote to the Education Secretary accusing her of failing to protect freedom of speech in universities and of kicking the scheme ‘into the long grass’.

I believe Phillipson, somewhere deep down, genuinely does want to see free speech on campus. But yet again, it’s not something she is willing to legislate for lest it ruins her own shot at the big job. Selfishness before duty. Self before country. And there’s more.

Her Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is nearing Royal Assent, is a politically motivated assault on academies.

Around 41 per cent of schools in England are academies, serving 54 per cent of the student population. They have a level of autonomy outside of local education authorities that means they can make proactive decisions on curriculum, staffing and timetabling without having to follow dogmatic national guidelines.

Their success is evident in our PISA scores in maths, reading and science, which have been consistently above the average for advanced economies over the past 20 years. 

England, where academy freedoms have been embraced with particular gusto, outperformed the other home nations in the last cycle of testing in 2022.

Phillipson would risk all of this for slavish centrism.

It’s the same politics that has driven her to remove VAT exemption on private schools – an act of class spite that penalises aspiring working-class parents the most, and those of children with specialised needs that cannot be met in the state system.

The Education Secretary is lucky that the failings of her colleagues have largely kept the spotlight from her department over the past 18 months.

But the spotlight is on her now. And far from jockeying for the prime ministership, Phillipson’s cavalier approach to pupils’ future performance and welfare should warrant the sack.