A teacher may lose his licence to teach for, among other things, ‘misgendering’ a pupil.

The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) has charged Joshua Sutcliffe, 32, of professional misconduct.

In 2017, he was suspended and placed in isolation for telling students “well done girls” while one of them wanted to be identified as a boy.

When the pupil became irate Sutcliffe sought to diffuse the situation and made an apology.

While the maths teacher does not believe it possible to change one’s biological sex, he said he tried to balance his beliefs with the need to treat the pupil sensitively.

He claimed he did this by avoiding the use of gender-specific pronouns and by referring to the pupil by name.

“While the suggestion that gender is fluid conflicts sharply with my Christian beliefs… I have never looked to impose my convictions on others”, he said.

Maya Forstater, who last year won a legal claim that she was unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs, gave evidence in support of Sutcliffe.

She argued schools should avoid implementing trans-affirming policies for students who identify as the opposite sex.

She also argued compelling students and teachers to use preferred pronouns for transgender pupils was asking them to “take part in a belief system” they might not agree with.

Last week, 22,000 Christians of all denominationals gathered together in India’s capital to demand better treatment.

India’s church is exhausted by the surge of anticonversion laws and accusations of illegal proselytisation. They’re tired of mobs driving out Christians from their villages and the possibility that many face property destruction and personal violence. Perhaps most significantly, they’re angry at a government that passively enables these actions at best and actively foments them at worst.

A lesson plan that would teach junior certificate pupils that ‘gender identity’ is “experienced along a spectrum” has been dropped after consultation with the public. Gender theory teaches that your ‘gender’ has no necessary connection to your biological sex.

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) agreed to change a “learning outcome” in a draft for a new curriculum for social, personal and health education (SPHE), according to papers seen by The Sunday Times.

The original proposal aimed to help students “appreciate that sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are core parts of human identity and that each is experienced along a spectrum”.

The final specification for the curriculum, which is yet to be published, references a wider range of characteristics as determinants of a pupil’s identity. It will no longer teach that gender identity and expression are on a spectrum.

A continuing decline in marriage has been recorded in the UK’s 2021 census figures, prompting a clash about whether to bolster the institution of marriage or enhance the status of cohabitation.

The biggest fall came among people aged 25 to 35, with 1.2 million more people unmarried in that age bracket than there were in 2011.

The slump has sparked fresh calls to protect rights for those not in legally registered partnerships, a move which would further blur the distinction between married couples and cohabitees.

The Marriage Foundation said the social pressure to marry in the UK had “pretty much disappeared”, despite “the psychology of marriage remaining deeply compelling”.

Harry Benson, the charity’s research director, argued that the process of making an active decision to be together tended to increase commitment and remove ambiguity, which was “one of the biggest relationship killers”. Getting married in front of your peers also creates “accountability”, he said.

But he said marriage was falling because it had come to be seen as optional.

He said government messaging often projected cohabitation and marriage as equal, while an “irresponsible marriage industry that claims the average cost of a wedding is £30,000” was deterring people. He also highlighted how the welfare system limited payments to married people.

“The decline of marriage is much less obvious among high income groups,” Benson said. “The miracle is that anyone in lower income groups marries at all with this huge couples penalty.”

The divestment of Catholic schools to other patron bodies must stop until the Government gives a guarantee that the State will not attempt to undermine the Catholic identity of remaining schools, leading education experts have warned. Then the handovers should be ramped up significantly, they say.

Professors Patrick Connolly, Eugene Duffy and Eamonn Conway say the “clock is ticking” for Catholic education because while the process of handing over some schools to State control drags on, calls for the “removal of all religious ethos from schools” are likely to grow.

However, to preserve a core of Church-run schools, they say that up to two-thirds of Catholic primary schools would need to be divested.

The Church has to negotiate a settlement to safeguard the future of Catholic education or else see its patronage “eroded” by legislation and curriculum changes, they warn.

To not do so would be “the worst of both worlds for the Church’s mission: in charge of Catholic schools but not in control, yet without a meaningful voice in their own schools,” warn the three influential academics.

Parents will still have the right to withdraw their children from sex education, Minister for Education Norma Foley has said. The Constitution recognises parents as the primary educators of their children. A new Relationships and Sexuality Education programme has been drafted for Junior Certificate children.

Ms Foley said: “I want to be clear around this: we operate in our schools a spirit of partnership with our parents, the wider section of stakeholders and partners within education. We retain within our schools parental consent at all times for parents to feel that they have freedom to withdraw their students from anything that is happening within a school environment.

“That is important. I know the value of that parental consent in schools, and I know the value of it in all other aspects of life.”

The Labour party has introduced a Bill to ban all single sex schools within 15 years regardless of parental wishes.

Labour spokesman Aodhán Ó Ríordáin claimed: “The fact that so many of our schools are still separated by gender sends the wrong message to children at a young age about gender equality”. About 30pc of Irish pupils are in single-sex schools.

“Ireland stands almost alone with our gender segregation system and we are out of kilter with the rest of the European world. While the conversation is rightly happening about the nature of gender equality in our society, education must be a feature of this”, he said.

“This Bill is about addressing the legacy of single gender schools and move to fully gender integrated schools within 10 years at primary level and 15 years at secondary level.

The Bill would see all State funding removed from any schools that don’t comply with mixed admissions.

A leading voice in sex education has said porn can be ‘positive’.

Dr. Kate Dawson, a lecturer the University of Greenwich, made the claim on RTE’s Upfront programme on Monday night as part of a discussion about school-based Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE). A new RSE programme for junior certificate students is almost complete and ‘porn literacy’ will likely be part of it. A big question is whether students will be taught that porn can be ‘positive’ as well as negative.

Asked whether porn use can ever be positive, Dr Dawson claimed that in the course of her own research, many people reported that “it helped them to feel that their body was normal and that their sexual interests were normal. They felt less alone and isolated”.
On the other hand, she said in the research literature, it is very hard to look into the topic of pornography because you can’t examine it in its natural state.

“You can‘t observe people watching pornography, and see the outcomes over time but we know that for the most part, only a small percentage of people report having very bad experiences with pornography. For the vast majority of people it seems to do no harm”.

This was despite several young women in the audience saying it was influencing men to copy what they see in porn, including slapping and choking women when having sex.

Dr Dawson claimed that academic research has not established a cause and effect relationship between porn and violence. She was contradicted by Peadar Tobin, TD, who said lots of research exists that shows it has this effect.

South Korea’s fertility rate, already the world’s lowest, has dropped yet again in the latest setback to the country’s efforts to boost its declining population. Deaths exceeded births by over 120,000 people in a population of 52 million.

The country reported that the fertility rate, or the average number of children expected per woman, fell to 0.78 in 2022 – down from 0.81 the previous year.

Countries need a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population, in the absence of immigration.

South Korea recorded more deaths than births for the first time in 2020, a trend that has continued since.

In 2022, the country recorded about 249,000 births and 372,800 deaths.

Similar demographic declines are being seen in several other Asian countries including Japan and China, raising concerns there will be too few people of working age to support the ballooning elderly population. European countries also have below replacement level fertility rates.

Scotland’s finance secretary has risked her political career by freely admitting to her belief that sex is for marriage and marriage is for one man and one woman.

Kate Forbes, 32, a frontrunner to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s first minister was elected to the Scottish parliament in 2016. She told The Scotsman that she would have voted against the bill to allow same-sex marriage, which was passed in 2014.

“I think for me, Angela Merkel [the former German chancellor] is the example I would follow, I would have voted, as a matter of conscience, along the lines of mainstream teaching in most major religions that marriage is between a man and a woman,” she said.

Forbes said that she is being attacked for her religion by an “illiberal” wing of the SNP because critics cannot fault her record in government.

She also said that she would have quit the cabinet over the gender recognition reforms that would allow people to change their legal sex through self-identification.

Asked by Sky News if it is wrong for people to have children outside of marriage, she said it is “something that I would seek to avoid, for me personally”.

 “My faith would say that sex is for marriage and that’s the approach I would practice.”