A judge has ordered that Scottish schools must provide single-sex lavatories for pupils after parents won a legal fight against a council which insisted on installing only gender-neutral facilities.
In a case hailed as the “first of many” in which the rights of women and girls will be upheld following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, Scottish Borders council conceded it had been wrong to flout the law by installing no sex-segregated bathrooms at the new Earlston Primary School.
Lady Ross KC said she would issue a declarator, a court order, making legal obligations on Scottish state schools clear after Sean Stratford and Leigh Hurley brought a judicial review over their concerns around transgender policies at Earlston, where their son Ethan, eight, was a pupil.
Stratford and Hurley had complained about the lack of separate-sex facilities at the replacement school, which recently opened and cost taxpayers £16.6 million, as well as trans inclusion policies around sports days, and potential punishment that their son would face if he “misgendered” other pupils.
Their concerns were dismissed by Kevin Wilson, the head teacher, and later Scottish Borders council, which claimed it did not have to consult with parents about the lavatory policy.
The parents went to court with the support of For Women Scotland, the campaign group which last week won the landmark Supreme Court ruling declaring that for the purposes of UK equalities law, biological men could not become legally female.
On Wednesday morning at the Court of Session, Scotland’s top civil court in Edinburgh, Ruth Crawford KC, representing the council, accepted the terms of the declarator making clear that the bathroom policy had been unlawful.
Hellbound and Down 