All of the Schools OUT team that wrote the primary lesson plans are qualified teachers and practitioners. We all hope that you enjoy using these lesson plans and adapting them for use in your own classroom.
The team is: Paul Bell, Steve Boyce, Kate Sicolo and David Watkins.
The secondary team is likewise made up of qualified teachers, trainers and practitioners. The team is: Kate Sicolo, Jeff Evans, Sue Sanders, Elly Barnes, Tony Fenwick, David Watkins, Nigel Tart, Yvonne Taylor and Mark Jennett.
David Watkins built the website in the spring and summer of 2011 and it was substantially updated and reedited by Steve Boyce, Andrew Dobbin and Tony Fenwick in the summer of 2013.
In 2015 ten new lessons with video clips of ‘talking heads’ were introduced with LGBT Youth NorthWest (now known as The Proud Trust) and the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, as part of the ‘This is How we got Here’ project in Manchester. The lessons mainly cover PSHE and Citizenship plus some history and an English lesson on Polari.
Tony Fenwick, CEO of Schools OUT UK reviewed and updated some content of the range of lesson plans during winter 2016-17 to bring them up to speed with current legislation and terminology.
30 new PSHE and Citizenship lessons are to be added between 2017 1nd 2019 as part of an anti Homo/Bi/Transphobic (HBT) bullying campaign funded by the Government Equalities Office. These will be piloted in selected schools and awarded with a gold standard if found to be successful.
This is the start of a new way of looking at education and equality. Give a teacher a lesson plan about prejudice and she can teach it for an hour. Give her the means to tackle homophobia/transphobia (and other forms of prejudice) and she can teach generations of pupils and pass on her skills to younger teachers. It is in trying to create that collective voice of equality education that realises a simple approach to something once considered difficult, the eradication of homophobia and transphobia in schools.
We are acutely aware of the insidious effects of homophobia/transphobia, how it can be described as dying of a thousand paper cuts. The non-mentions; the non-interventions; and the loss of interpretation because they never told us an artist, a scientist or a writer was LGBT leave us isolated and alone. The Classroom offers a new alternative, a subtly of teaching that requires a lightness of touch.
Our method can be used by every subject teacher to enable them to contribute to a whole school approach around diversity. It does not require a detailed understanding of LGBT issues or those of any other protected strand.
The method can be used to tackle all forms of prejudice. Once you have the concept of usualising, you will realise you can do it for disabled people, on all forms of religion, ethnicity and gender and so forth. It is a method that enables you to meet the public duty and educate out all forms of prejudice. Anti-bullying policies, for example, all too often say what to do after the bullying has happened. We are hoping that this methodology will stop the bullying happening in the first place.
Given that our focus is LGBT, what we offer is a host of lessons that make LGBT lives visible without feeling forced out of context; out of proportion and linked to the National Curriculum.
The Classroom is constantly under revision. If you have any comments on the site or its contents please let us know by emailing info@schools-out.org
