Rishi Sunak tends to shy away from social issues so it has been left to a backbencher, Miriam Cates, to introduce a Bill which would oblige schools to disclose to parents the materials which are being used in their children’s sex education classes.

The Bill is necessary because the Conservative government has allowed sex education in many schools to be taken over by campaign groups with a radical agenda who wish to persuade children that it is wrong to think in a ‘heteronormative’ way.

The scandals that have recently surrounded schools reveal the scale and severity of the problem. Children have in some cases been taught that there are dozens, even hundreds, of different genders, and that somehow they must discern and choose their own. Some have been told that when talking or writing about historical figures they should always use ‘they’ because we don’t know a past person’s preferred pronouns. Muslim parents in particular have protested against their children being given ‘age–inappropriate’ information about sexual practices. They insist that parents should have a right to know what their children are being told.

The rise in the number of children claiming to be transgender seems to have caught the government by surprise but, given what pupils are now being taught, it should not have done. One popular schoolbook, for instance, tells of a Cinderella-like figure who undergoes a successful gender realignment overnight with no complications and no regrets.

We have a brave London mother, Clare Page, to thank for finally bringing the scandal to light. Page asked to see what her daughters were learning in sex education but to her astonishment she was rebuffed by the school. She then complained to the academy trust which ran the school, and was briefly shown an extract on a laptop which confirmed that children were being taught a concept known as ‘sex positivity’. The trust refused to let her see any of the lesson plans in detail. Even after Page took the matter to the tribunal, she was still denied proper access to the materials. The tribunal ruled that the commercial interests of the School of Sexuality Education, the company which provided teaching materials on relationships and sex education to her daughters’ school, took precedence over parents’ rights to know what their children are being taught. This is an extraordinary development.

The arrival of online teaching materials has allowed a situation in which what children are taught can be kept a secret, with copy-right laws used to enforce that secrecy. The dangers of this ought to be apparent. Pressure groups on a mission to disrupt societal norms should not be allowed to provide sex education to young children. But the more fraught the whole subject becomes, the more eager schools are to contract out the whole business. Teacher training has anyway become politicised, and young teachers are often themselves indoctrinated with gender ideology. Last year Teach First announced proudly that it had won a gold award in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index.

Parents, rightly, do not appreciate dogma supplanting education. Any decent Conservative government should at the very least support good parents and promote good education. Yet this government has washed its hands of the matter and seems perfectly content to let Stonewall-approved providers organise sex education in schools.

Imagine the outrage if, for instance, school-children were being taught, unchallenged, that Brexit will bring great benefits to Britain. It would be seen as unbalanced propaganda. Yet with sex education the ideologues have been put in charge.

It ought to be obvious that pressure groups will want to target children in order to further their own aims. That is why it is so vital to keep political messaging out of schools and why the pupils who recently recorded their teacher berating them for believing in the reality of just two biological sexes were quite right to release the recordings. The whole process needs to be held up to much-deserved ridicule.

The only way to tackle this nonsense is to call it out for what it is. As far as education is concerned, it means keeping ideology and dogma out of the classroom. The fact that the government seems to be afraid to stand up for science and for a child’s right to a rational education speaks of a kind of cowardice that will be noticed by voters at the next general election. People are rightly concerned about inflation and the cost of living, but they are also very worried about the kind of society we are becoming, and what we are letting our children believe about the world.

None of this means that children should not be taught to treat each other with respect. They should be encouraged to accept and respect everyone, whatever their race, religion or sexuality. Tolerance is at the heart of our civilisation. But we should not be tolerant of dogma which seeks to undermine reality. The government has let down a generation of children in allowing ideologues to infiltrate lessons. Backing Miriam Cates’s Bill to oblige schools to divulge teaching materials to parents would be a good start.