Understanding gender and sexuality: The hidden curriculum in English schools

Schools continue to produce regimes of gender and sexuality, including overt and covert curricula based on assumed essentialist differences between girls and boys, reinforced and regulated through uniform, sport and peer pressure. The recent focus on the experiences of trans and non-binary children in schools makes visible the ways in which all children are subject to heteronormatively gendered regulatory and disciplinary techniques in everyday school life. This article discusses the findings from a pilot study drawing on participatory action research techniques with 42 young people in six workshops in north-east England. Recruitment methods were required to be flexible given the context within which the study was conducted, which was with Covid-19 mitigations in place. This meant that we were not able to be fully inclusive of young people from local youth groups as they were either not meeting or only meeting online. We thus had to mainly recruit from university student societies and student residences from which we organised three workshops; sports organisations from which we organised one workshop, and a local youth group with which we ran one workshop. The final workshop was conducted with young people who had attended one of the previous five workshops, to enable feedback on our analysis. All participants were over 16 years of age. The majority of participants were women (25) with 16 men, including one transman, and one non-binary person. Most identified as white (31) with the rest identifying as Black, East Asian and British ‘Other’ (11). The focus of the workshops was to explore with young people their memories about where and how they first encountered being ‘gendered’ and/or having a sexuality. The data has been collected, recorded and transcribed within strict ethical guidelines. The workshop data has been analysed using a grounded theory approach, where we developed the theoretical models from the data. This article focuses on those key moments when their behaviours, presentation and/or ideas were subject to facilitators and/or regulators of their gender and/or sexuality. We draw out the contradictions inherent in, on the one hand, the essentialist rationales for difference and inequalities between genders and sexualities in schools and, on the other hand, the apparent need to enforce these ‘natural’ differences and inequalities. Participatory creative approaches were adopted in each workshop to promote conversations and drawings about who regulated/facilitated their gender and/or sexuality and how they did so. Each workshop cumulatively informed the next, leading to a sixth synthesising workshop that collectively analysed young people's reflections. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of epistemic injustice (M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press, 2007) and ‘space for action’ we conclude that young people want and need brave active spaces to discuss and ‘do’ gender and sexuality, and to resist essentialism and social control. Schools can be both places where control is created and entrenched and where it can also be resisted. Our research suggests that better whole school responses to dismantle regimes of gender and sexuality can be created by and for young people.