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We respond to the new Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance and what it means for trans+ and non-binary pupils.
This September, Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) comes into force in every school and college in England.
This statutory piece of guidance tells teachers, with no exceptions, that a trans+ child cannot use the toilet that matches who they are, regardless of their age, regardless of how long they’ve socially transitioned, regardless of what the child or their family, or their school thinks is right for them.
“Exclusion and segregation should not be dressed up in the language of safeguarding.”
Policies within education should always be built to protect all children. They should be supportive and inclusive of all identities without exception. But what we’re seeing unfold in places of education across England is exclusion and segregation dressed up in the language of safeguarding.
KCSIE is supposed to do exactly what it says. Protect children from violence, neglect, abuse and bullying. However, this guidance takes a group of children who are already statistically more likely to be bullied, and writes their exclusion into law.
In April 2026, Good Law Project and Queer AF published an investigation finding that “trans people make up 1% of the UK population and 7% of child suicides”. With soaring wait times to access gender-affirming care, restrictions on puberty blockers and a lack of adequate mental health support, this guidance will only worsen an existing mental health crisis for trans+ youth.
“Of the 56 trans people whose deaths were verified in our investigation, many of them were young, with under-18s making up nearly half of them. Trans people make up less than 1% of the population – but from 2019 to 2025, trans under-18s made up 7% of all child suicides,” says Good Law Project.
Trans+ children exist. Trans+ adults exist. Both deserve the same dignity as everyone else. A policy that would be recognised as discriminatory if applied to an adult does not become acceptable when applied to a child. If anything, the opposite is true: children have less power to challenge it, fewer routes to redress, and nowhere else to go each day but the institution that is failing them.
These are lessons that we should have learned after Section 28 robbed an entire generation of queer youth of the ability to be supported as their whole selves whilst at school.
In 1988, Margaret Thatcher’s government passed Section 28, a law that made it illegal for teachers to so much as discuss homosexuality in the classroom. It didn’t ban being gay, but it did ban a gay student’s sexuality being spoken of. Teachers, often uncertain what counted as “promotion,” simply stopped mentioning the subject at all, and LGBT+ student support groups closed or went quiet rather than risk breaking the law.
This resulted in a generation of queer kids growing up in institutional silence, watching adults who knew exactly what they were experiencing, say nothing. If homosexuality couldn’t be discussed, homophobia couldn’t be condemned.
“Where Section 28 achieved exclusion through silence, KCSIE achieves it through separation and paperwork. The word “biological” is now doing the work “promotion” once did.”
KCSIE treats a child’s trans+ identity as a danger to other students, rather than something worth protecting. Toilets and changing rooms locked by sex assigned at birth. Overnight trips segregated in the same way. Sports too.
Where a child can’t use what’s on offer to them, the school is told only to “consider” an alternative, and only if it doesn’t disturb the arrangements for everyone else. It’s absolutely unacceptable that any child’s dignity or wellbeing is sidelined or deprioritised if it’s considered inconvenient.
Hold this guidance up against how we treat adults, and the double standard is stark. A trans+ adult who has lived as their gender for years, in some cases decades, is protected in the workplace under the Equality Act 2010 by the characteristic of gender reassignment.
An employer who forced a trans woman to use a men’s toilet, recorded her sex assigned at birth on a staff register, told colleagues without her consent, or barred her from a work trip’s shared accommodation on that basis, would be exposed to a discrimination claim and, rightly, public condemnation. None of that is controversial. It is simply what basic fairness at work looks like.
“If we would not force it on a trans adult, we should not force it on a trans child.”
Yet KCSIE asks schools to do precisely this to children, and calls it safeguarding. A trans+ pupil who has socially transitioned for years is offered less consideration than adult employment law gives a colleague on their first day in a new job. If we would not force it on a trans adult, a person the same guidance elsewhere assumes is capable of managing their own care and identity, we should not force it on a trans child, who has even less power to refuse and even more at stake in getting it wrong.
The guidance also requires schools to record every pupil’s biological sex and make sure relevant staff know it, in every case, without exception.
What it does not require is that this information remain confidential. A trans+ child can effectively be outed to staff, and potentially to other pupils, without even being asked whether that’s what they wanted. Schools are also told to involve parents in the vast majority of cases, unless a designated safeguarding lead decides doing so would put the child at greater risk.
But outing anyone before they are ready, without their consent, is extremely harmful. It’s also impossible to foresee how parents may react or respond to their child coming out, or predict the impact this will have on the household that you aren’t a member of.
It’s important that we think about what this guidance means in practice and how it impacts real children in educational spaces. Too often, trans+ youth are spoken about as a theoretical idea, but this guidance will lead to real students not drinking water because they can’t face the toilet they’ve been assigned. This will lead to real children holding it in all day, every day, because the alternative is a locked single cubicle everyone in the school knows is “the trans toilet.”
This is not an exaggeration. Parents are already describing it happening right now. Trans+ children are becoming dehydrated and developing urinary tract infections from a policy that was supposedly written in the name of safety.
This guidance is wholly unnecessary; many schools were already managing this well. Parent-led research has found many schools running genuinely inclusive environments where trans+ and non-binary pupils get on with their education alongside everyone else. Schools were using their judgement and working with each child in front of them in that child’s best interest.
This guidance takes that judgement away and replaces it with a rule written for no child in particular, applied to every child regardless. It places all trans+ children under suspicion of being a danger to their fellow students, and leaves them vulnerable to harm in the process.
It should stop everyone in their tracks that parents of trans+ and non-binary youth are already pulling their children out of school. Home is not meant to be the fallback for any student when school becomes unsafe, yet that is what’s happening. For trans+ students, ‘unsafe’ means not being able to use the bathroom without being outed to the whole year group.
It’s also of extreme concern that the Department for Education’s own lawyers are reported to have doubts about whether this guidance is legally sound. Eight organisations, including IGLYO, TGEU and TransActual, have told the government in writing that this guidance risks breaching the Equality Act 2010, the Public Sector Equality Duty and data protection law, particularly where it pushes schools toward disclosing a child’s gender identity to parents, with no regard for whether that’s safe for the child.
IGLYO“Being trans, non-binary or intersex is not, in itself, a safeguarding concern.”
This is a policy that sorts children by sex assigned at birth and enforces that sorting into every corner of their day. This is segregation and forced outing, not safeguarding, and children old enough to notice will notice exactly who it’s aimed at.
Trans+ children deserve the same starting point as everyone else in their care: to be treated as whole people, worthy of dignity and protection, not managed as a problem to be sorted.
We’ve been here before, in other forms, with other institutions insisting exclusion was really about safety, or fairness, or common sense. It wasn’t true then in 1988, and it isn’t true now in 2026.
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