Message from The Welsh Resistance

Urgent action needed!

The children of Wales urgently need your help. On Tuesday the Welsh Government will rush the Senedd vote for a new Relationships and Sexuality Curriculum, allocating just 30 minutes for debate and with very little time for anyone to consider the changes. The Welsh Government’s revised RSE Curriculum Code can be found here.

Despite major changes since the summer consultation, this curriculum is still very far from what any good parent would wish for their children, but it is due to be rolled out next year nonetheless. Action is needed now. 

Please write to all your political representatives for Wales and raise your concerns this weekend. 

The new curriculum will be mandatory for all children from the age of 3 to 16 years old, and there are major issues still to resolve:

• Recognition of Human Reality Women, girls, female, men, boys and male are given zero mention at all, with only reference to some bodily functions like menstruation. The curriculum has no chance of effectively educating children and young people in relationships or sexual health, or protecting women and girls from the higher risk of sexual violence they experience, without acknowledging that they even exist. The curriculum especially renders women and girls more unspeakable and unspoken, and thus even more vulnerable in an already unequal society. 

• Age Inappropriate Would you want your three year old forced into compulsory ‘sexuality education’? Sounds almost paedophilic, but if you live in Wales, that’s the title of your 3 year old’s new curriculum. Ask your representatives to rename it to prevent abuse. 

• Child protection Safeguarding and child protection isn’t given a mention at all. Ask your representative to centre child protection in this curriculum. 

• Political The curriculum still uses the contentious acronym “LGBTQ+”, despite the objections of significant proportions of the people forced under that umbrella. Ask the Welsh government to stop force teaming disparate groups of people, especially to achieve questionable political aims, including the erosion of women’s recognition, personal boundaries and legal rights. 

• Ideological Bias Ask your representative to demand both the curriculum code and the guidance are subject to Senedd approval after further improvements. This time round, the government hasn’t shared the curriculum guidance, just the code and it is unclear why. The risk of them sneaking all the harmful ideological and political material they removed after the consultation into the guidance is extremely high. 

• Third parties Ask your representatives to insist that third parties must be properly vetted, approved and assessed by ESTYN. There is a serious risk that schools will use unregulated organisations to introduce the most sexually explicit content a child will ever see in class. Because the curriculum code and guidance are unclear, ideological and lack robust safeguarding protocols, schools are very likely to be exploited by organisations with harmful and political intent. There are hundreds of those organisations and they are already trying to weasel their way into a school to profit from children near you. See Safe Schools Alliance for more info. 

If you live in Wales, please don’t hesitate to send an email to your five regional Senedd representatives. Find out who they are here. 

If you don’t live in Wales, you can still help. Share social media posts, follow and retweet @merchedcymru and use the hashtags #RSEWales #FactsNotIdeology, and whenever you can, speak to people you know in real life about these issues.

For more information on action you can take, see Merched Cymru’s analysis here, and Martha Gwion’s superb blog here.