Scotland has officially become the first country in the world to implement a required LGBTQ+ curriculum in schools after a new teacher toolkit launched this week. Educators now have access to a website offering an e-learning course on teaching topics related to the LGBTQ+ community, as well as a host of inclusive lesson plans and educational support materials, according to Scottish news outlet The Scotsman.
While LGBTQ+ subjects will be taught explicitly, the new curriculum also seeks to integrate inclusion into everyday learning. Lessons offered on the website range from exercises on discrimination to a math problem involving a young girl purchasing Father’s Day cards for her two dads.
While the new curricula were created, in part, for students to receive a more well-rounded education, the Scottish government also hopes the lessons will help reduce bullying. LGBTQ+ youth in the U.K. are twice as likely to have been bullied in the past year than their straight, cisgender classmates, according to a June study released by the youth advocacy group Just Like Us.
Scotland’s history-making curriculum is in large part due to the efforts of Time for Inclusive Education (TIE), an LGBTQ+ advocacy group that successfully lobbied the Scottish Parliament to implement nationwide inclusive learning. In 2017, the country’s government created the “LGBTI Inclusive Education Working Group,” which consisted of TIE and several other pro-LGBTQ+ groups, to investigate deepening inclusion in schools. A year later, the government accepted all 33 of its recommendations.
“Everything we’re trying to do here is all very, very Christian,” TIE Co-founder Liam Stevenson told them. in 2019. “It’s about looking after one another, it’s about respecting one another, and it’s about caring for and loving one another and producing healthy young people.”
Scotland’s streamlined national education system is partially responsible for the success of this effort. In the United States education is hyper-local and individual school districts have the power to decide what their students learn, but decisions on Scottish public school curricula are largely made at the federal level. Other countries seem to be following Scotland’s example: In 2018, Wales announced that it would implement an LGBTQ+ sex education curriculum by 2022.
Scotland has also taken other steps to better support LGBTQ+ students in recent months. In August, the Scottish government provided guidance encouraging schools to adopt gender-neutral dress codes and allow trans students to use chosen names, pronouns, and bathrooms. The recommendations were not compulsory.
In the U.S., only seven states have adopted curricular standards that affirm LGBTQ+ people, according to the anti-bullying advocacy group GLSEN. Those states are California, New Jersey, Nevada, Illinois, Oregon, Connecticut, and Colorado. Conversely, at least four states — Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — still have so-called “no promo homo” laws on the books that actively bar educators from depicting LGBTQ+ issues in a positive light.
This June, the Biden administration issued guidance informing states that the federal government considers discrimination against LGBTQ+ students to be a Title IX violation. The directive was inspired by the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which banned anti-LGBTQ+ workplace discrimination nationwide.
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