Furious parents whose daughters are afraid to use mixed-sex toilets at school have demanded that ministers rebuild separate facilities or face court action
Published: | Updated:
Angry parents whose daughters are afraid to use mixed-sex school toilets have threatened ministers with legal action unless girls' and boys' facilities return.
Thousands of single-sex blocks have been replaced with mixed-sex toilets as schools seek to accommodate pupils who say they are 'non-binary' or trans.
The move has provoked widespread complaints that mixed lavatories discriminate against girls and can lead to taunts, bullying and 'upskirting'.
Now parents have written to Education Secretary Lucy Powell warning they are prepared to go to court.
The families have commissioned damning new legal opinion which concludes that schools failing to protect the 'privacy, dignity and safety' of their pupils are open to legal action.
One father of a 14-year-old girl said she had started skipping school to avoid mixed-sex toilets.
'Her periods were very erratic and heavy. If she went to the toilet and tried to clean herself up, she had lads banging on the door saying: 'I know what you're doing,' he said.
'If all the blood hadn't flushed straightaway, the lads would follow with, 'Oh, you dirty cow'.
Thousands of single-sex blocks have been replaced with mixed-sex toilets as schools seek to accommodate pupils who say they are 'non-binary' or trans (File image)
'We weren't told they were changing the toilets to gender-neutral. It just suddenly happened. Several parents complained but we were just told, 'That's the way it is now'.'
A teacher survey suggests that at least a quarter of Britain's 32,000 schools have at least one set of mixed toilets, with a single room of cubicles and shared washbasins.
A minority of schools have no single sex toilets at all.
One signatory of the letter, Essex netball coach Nicole Marrington, said: 'One girl felt faint during training. I spoke to her mum who said the girl never drank enough water because she hated going to the toilet at school.'
The Women's Rights Network said: 'On our street stalls around the country, parents, grandparents, teachers and children tell us about schools with mixed-sex toilets so we know it's a widespread problem.'
Baroness Falkner from the Policy Exchange think-tank said: 'Headteachers may think they are 'being kind' – but allowing boys who identify as girls to enter girls' changing rooms, toilets and sports facilities means that these are no longer single-sex spaces.'
The Department for Education said: 'Our guidance is clear that schools must provide separate toilets and must not allow children to use facilities designed for the opposite biological sex.'
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.