156 pages
234 x 156mm
July 2009


Primary teachers and other professionals working with children are increasingly required to address equality in relation to sexual orientation and gender expression as legislation in the UK and elsewhere includes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in the equalities spectrum. The No Outsiders Project has taken ground breaking steps in addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in primary schools.

The No Outsiders Project is a collaboration of primary education practitioners and university researchers, funded by the ESRC. In this book, members of the research team analyse the issues which have permeated the teams challenge to heteronormativity and gender conformity in and through primary education and there is a chapter by Susan Talburt. Together they explore the key themes of the project's work:

• silence and speaking out


• faith and culture


• leadership and role-modelling


• personal and emotional investment


• gay rights/liberal humanist and queer perspectives


• safety and risk taking


• the possibility of a queer pedagogy


• intersections between queer theory and practice.

This is the academic companion to the team's practice-focussed book which draws on the project teachers' classroom work, Undoing Homophobia in Primary Schools and follows their insightful Invisible Boundaries: addressing sexualities in children's worlds. It will be essential reading for all those in primary education who are concerned to challenge this last bastion of inequality, as well as for students and researchers in sociology, cultural studies, queer studies and related fields where the underlying discourses shaping heteronormativity and gender conformity require urgent analysis in the move towards a fairer society.