Commenting on the Inspectorate’s publication detailing how sexual
harassment, including online sexual abuse, has become
‘normalised’ for children and young people, Dr Mary
Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education
Union, said:
"Sexual harassment is still trivialised and normalised throughout
society, and we urgently need to boost the focus around both
preventing and responding to the sexual harassment which happens
in every school and college. Listening actively to girls and
women staff is crucial.
"The Ofsted review finds a very similar picture to that revealed
by the work of the House of Commons Women & Equality
Committee and by NEU research with UK Feminista over recent
years.
"The NEU welcomes the importance Ofsted places on high-quality
training for teachers delivering RSHE, and its highlighting that
insufficient time is given to the subject. This is about getting
the balance in the curriculum right. Proper support for schools
to introduce the new RSHE curriculum can’t be done on the cheap.
Teachers in the review shared their concerns about being asked to
teach outside their subject specialism and we’d like the
Department for Education to engage with this staffing challenge.
"Ofsted talk about the culture in schools and we agree a
whole-school approach to tackling sexism is required, alongside
encouraging reporting and open discussion of what harassment is.
We support a much greater focus on sexual harassment in schools
using the whole curriculum. Students must feel empowered to
discuss and learn about sexism, report incidents and take action
for equality.
"The DfE can play its part by showing better leadership in terms
of the curriculum response and must increase its focus on the
social aspects of learning. Many curriculum reviews in other
countries have done so. One-off lessons aren’t going to be the
answer - we need training, and guidance, to build staff capacity
to understand, identify and tackle sexism on an ongoing basis.
There is very little on this in teacher training currently."
