A judge has told a mother that she cannot see the teaching materials shown to her daughter in a sex education lesson.
According to The Times:
Clare Page, 47, lost her case to have the details divulged under freedom of information law.
She said she would continue her fight to obtain the lesson plan used by School of Sexuality Education, a charity that provides classes to about 300 schools.
Page began her campaign after her daughter, then 15, came home from Hatcham College in New Cross, southeast London, saying that she had been taught to be “sex positive” and that heteronormativity was “a bad thing”.
School of Sexuality Education refused to provide the content of its lesson and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) supported its decision, ruling that the charity’s commercial interest in keeping the lesson contents private outweighed the public interest in publishing them.
Page appealed, but the first-tier tribunal upheld the decision. She said that she was taking legal advice over whether to pursue the matter at an upper-tier tribunal.
“What the ICO and the judge are trying to suggest is that I as a parent may have had a right to see the lesson plans but that doesn’t mean it could be seen by the world at large,” she said. “I believe all state-funded school resources should be published, citable and open for public or regulatory scrutiny.”
Page said that she wanted to be able to share the material with bodies such as Ofsted or the Department for Education if she felt it raised safeguarding concerns.
