From Ambiguity to Accountability: Safeguarding, Law, and the Duty of School Governors in an Age of Evasion
The events of recent days in Brighton & Hove are not isolated administrative developments. They mark, rather, a decisive moment in the gradual reassertion of law over confusion, and of duty over evasion. On 18 May 2026, PSHE Brighton—an organisation with which the Archbishop of Selsey is closely associated as a founding member—issued an Open Letter to school governors across the city, accompanied by a Governor Safeguarding Briefing. The purpose was neither polemical nor ideological. It was juridical and pastoral: to recall those entrusted with the care of children to the clarity of their legal and moral obligations.
PSHE Brighton was established as a support and campaign group for families in Brighton & Hove concerned about the delivery of Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE) and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in local schools.¹ From its inception, the organisation has focused upon safeguarding, parental engagement, transparency, and the quality and evidential basis of educational provision relating to children and young people.² In recent years, it has increasingly become a focal point for families concerned that schools, local authorities, and third-party organisations have drifted beyond lawful safeguarding practice into ideological activism unsupported by robust evidence or clear statutory authority.
Within days of the Open Letter, further authoritative guidance was published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The release of the draft Equality Act 2010 Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions and Associations materially reinforced—and in key respects clarified—the legal framework within which schools and governing bodies are required to operate. What had previously been dismissed as merely contested opinion was now expressed in the language of statutory interpretation and regulatory guidance.
At the heart of the draft Code lies a statement both simple and profound: that in the Equality Act 2010, references to a person’s sex are references to their biological sex.³ The Code proceeds further, stating that the possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change a person’s sex for the purposes of the Act.⁴ These are not merely technical clarifications. They represent the reassertion of reality against abstraction. For years, institutions have behaved as though definitions were negotiable, as though language could be bent to accommodate sentiment, and as though law would simply follow culture wherever it drifted. The Code demonstrates the opposite. Law retains its own integrity. And when properly interpreted, it resists ideological capture.
The implications for schools are immediate and unavoidable. The Code affirms that single-sex provision is not only lawful but necessary where justified, provided it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.⁵ Among those aims are privacy, decency, the prevention of trauma, and the protection of health and safety.⁶ Here, the legal and the moral converge. What the law describes as legitimate aims, the perennial moral tradition has long understood as expressions of justice: the protection of the vulnerable, the safeguarding of modesty, and the ordering of social life according to truth. To disregard these is not merely to err administratively. It is to fail in duty.
Perhaps the most consequential clarification in the Code is its treatment of single-sex services. A women-only service is defined as a service for biological women, and where such a service admits trans-identifying males, it ceases to be women-only in law.⁷ The same principle applies to men’s services.⁸ This removes the ambiguity upon which many institutional policies have depended. The fiction that a service can remain single-sex while admitting members of the opposite sex is now exposed as precisely that: a fiction.
For schools, the consequence is stark. Policies that permit opposite-sex access to changing rooms, toilets, or other intimate spaces cannot simply be described as compliant. They must be justified. And where they cannot be justified, they must be corrected.
The Code does not deny the reality of those who identify as transgender. It affirms that gender reassignment remains a protected characteristic under the Act.⁹ But it also insists that individuals possessing that characteristic may lawfully be excluded from single-sex services where such exclusion is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.¹⁰ This is the point at which contemporary assumptions falter. The notion that affirmation must override all other considerations is shown to be legally unsustainable. Compassion does not require confusion, and still less does it require the abandonment of safeguarding.
What, then, of governors? Here the matter becomes unavoidable. Under Section 175 of the Education Act 2002, safeguarding is a non-delegable duty.¹¹ It cannot be outsourced to staff, deferred to external guidance, or obscured behind policy language. Governing bodies are responsible for ensuring not only that safeguarding arrangements exist, but that they are effective in practice.¹² The EHRC draft Code reinforces what the Open Letter already made clear: that decisions must be reasoned, recorded, and capable of withstanding scrutiny.¹³ This is the language not of suggestion, but of accountability.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. In Woodland v Essex County Council, the UK Supreme Court reaffirmed the principle that schools owe pupils a non-delegable duty of care.¹⁴ A governing body cannot simply shield itself behind local authority guidance, third-party providers, or external “toolkits” where foreseeable safeguarding failures arise. Likewise, governors are protected from personal liability only insofar as they act honestly, reasonably, and in good faith in the discharge of their duties.¹⁵ Where known risks are ignored, where safeguarding concerns are neither recorded nor reviewed, and where obvious legal tensions are simply avoided rather than addressed, questions of negligence and governance failure inevitably arise.
For too long, governing bodies have operated within a culture of plausible deniability—relying on consultants, deferring to fashionable orthodoxies, and assuming that good intentions would suffice. That era is ending. Where risks are foreseeable, and where the law is clear, failure to act is no longer an oversight. It becomes a question of whether those responsible have exercised the care, skill, and diligence required of them.
What emerges, therefore, is not merely a legal issue, but a moral one. The crisis in safeguarding is not primarily a crisis of knowledge. The knowledge has been available. It is a crisis of courage—the reluctance to act upon what is known, to withstand pressure, and to place the welfare of children above the demands of the contemporary zeitgeist. When institutions cease to recognise what a man or a woman is, they should not be surprised when they struggle to safeguard either.
The EHRC draft Code marks a transition: from ambiguity to clarity, from discretion to justification, from evasion to accountability. For governors, the question is no longer what their policies permit, but whether those policies are lawful, safe, and defensible. Where clarity has been given, responsibility follows. And where responsibility is neglected, judgment—whether legal, institutional, or moral—cannot be indefinitely deferred.
- PSHE Brighton – About Us.
- Ibid.
- Equality and Human Rights Commission, Equality Act 2010 Draft Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions and Associations (London: EHRC, 2026), Chapter 13, “Interpretation,” section “Sex.”
- Ibid., Chapter 13, section “Gender Recognition.”
- Ibid., Chapter 12, “Separate and Single-Sex Services,” section “General principles.”
- Ibid., section “Legitimate aims.”
- Ibid., section “Women-only services.”
- Ibid., section “Men-only services.”
- Equality Act 2010, c. 15, §7.
- Equality and Human Rights Commission, Draft Code of Practice, Chapter 12, section “Exclusion from single-sex services.”
- Education Act 2002, c. 32, §175.
- Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe in Education (London: DfE, 2024), Part Two, “The management of safeguarding.”
- Equality and Human Rights Commission, Draft Code of Practice, Chapter 12, section “Justification and proportionality.”
- Woodland v Essex County Council [2013] UKSC 66.
- School Standards and Framework Act 1998, c. 31, §50(7).
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