Nearly half of LGBT+ pupils are bullied in school because of their gender or sexual orientation. In fact, LGBT+ bullying is the most common type of bullying in schools. Just 27% of secondary school pupils believe it would be safe to come out as LGBT+ in their schools.
Despite this, a 2020 report shows that only one-fifth of secondary school students report learning about LGBT+ identities and homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying.
While schools are now required to teach LGBT+ content as part of Relationships and Sex Education, guidance from the Department of Education leaves it up to schools how and when they approach this content. There is no specific mention of the need to tackle bullying aimed at LGBT+ pupils as part of the curriculum.
Since Britain has never experienced anything quite like this before, figures like this are best treated as informed guesswork. But if they’re anywhere near right, it will take more than a few hours of tutoring to help children catch up. We should be considering a radical expansion of state education for years to come, involving structural changes to create more teaching time; perhaps longer days, shorter holidays, or (as the Social Mobility Commission has suggested) even allowing some children to repeat a school year. Recovery might feel less like getting back to normal, and more like inventing new ways of doing things from scratch, much as schools did in the early days of the pandemic.
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Video report by ITV News Wales and West Correspondent Rupert Evelyn
Primary school children in Wales could be back in the classroom in less than a month - alerting homeschooling families across the UK to the prospect of a possible wider return.
First Minister Mark Drakeford confirmed on Friday afternoon that schools could reopen on February 22 at the earliest as the nation s target date.
It comes as the weekly Covid-19 infection rate falls below 200 cases per 100,000 people, according to Public Health Wales.
Boris Johnson has already confirmed schools in England will stay closed until at least March 8, despite suggesting other lockdown restrictions may be eased earlier, by February 22.
HUNDREDS of teachers in Hampshire were absent because of coronavirus on just one day before Christmas, new figures reveal. The Association of School and College Leaders said the past few months had put English schools under enormous pressure, calling for education staff to be prioritised for the vaccine. Department for Education figures show 48 teachers and school leaders in Hampshire state schools were absent with either a suspected or confirmed case of Covid-19 on December 17. There were also 166 forced to isolate. This means 214 were off for Covid-19 related reasons on just one day – 2.5% of all teachers in schools that remained open.