Jess Phillips: ‘Schools get asked to do too much’

Teachers should “whinge more” and schools have not been thanked enough for how much they have been asked to take on, home office minister Jess Phillips has said.

Speaking to girls’ school headteachers on Tuesday, Ms Phillips, who is minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls and MP for Birmingham Yardley, added teachers should “be more Birmingham bin worker”, and then joked: “But don’t go on strike.”

She also warned the effort put into girls’ academia is “wasted” if they fall prey to violence, and schools will be a huge part of tackling this.

“Teachers should be allowed to teach and enrich the lives of young people, and not have to worry so much about their homes, and whether their clothes are clean, whether they’ve got enough to eat,” Ms Phillips said at the Girls’ School Association (GSA) conference in London, as she spoke about headteachers in her constituency going above and beyond for their students.

“I don’t feel like education has been thanked enough, actually, for the level that it has been asked to take on,” she added.

“And largely you didn’t whinge. You need to whinge more! Be more Birmingham bin worker. But don’t go on strike.”

Headteachers’ union the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has previously warned the burden placed on schools and teachers “has never been higher”, with schools running food banks and supporting families with housing while public services “crumbled” around them.

A “huge and worrying” rate of domestic and sexual violence within teenage relationships has grown, the minister also warned.

“I don’t think we saw that coming. I don’t think enough preparation was done in how it feels to be a girl in society today. I think we all thought – and many of you in the room will be of a similar age to me – I think we all thought that progress would just continue to be made.

“And in some regards that is absolutely the case. But the cohort of young people we could not do anywhere enough to prepare ourselves for the risk that was coming.”

The National Crime Agency said earlier this year the risk to children from sexual abuse continues to increase, and reported that in 2024, around half of all police reported child sexual abuse crimes were offending by 10 to 17 years olds. Around four in five sexual crimes against children are committed against girls.

Ms Phillips said schools and teachers had warned they were seeing a rise in worrying attitudes, and schools will be a “huge part” of tackling violence against women and girls over the next 10 years.

“Certainly you cannot have girls who will thrive in their lives – all that effort you might put into their academia – it doesn’t matter how clever, how brilliant they are. If they fall prey to this violence, all of that will have been wasted,” Ms Phillips added.

She went on: “I think that schools get asked to do much, but making sure that we raise brilliant, safe individuals is an absolute core part of wanting them to go off and be brilliant.”

This comes after the Department for Education (DfE) introduced new guidance for relationships, sex, and health education (RSHE) which said students should be taught to recognise misogyny, and also be taught about the role of consent, inequalities of power in relationships, and how sub-cultures like “so-called ‘involuntary celibates'” may influence our understanding of sexual ethics.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) described child sexual abuse as an “epidemic” when it published its final report in 2022. The Government is introducing a new mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse – which was one of the key recommendations from the inquiry – for those working with children, which includes teachers.

One conference delegate said many girls feel they are not effectively protected by the system when they speak up about violence and do not feel confident that justice will be done, and many boys express anxiety about “making mistakes or being unfairly judged”. She asked the minister how the Government will rebuild trust in the system and between young women and young men.

On the second point, Ms Phillips said the #MeToo movement “has changed the world”.

“So many things have changed because of that, but boys were not invited into that conversation,” she said. “And that is not a deficit of the women doing it. It’s a deficit of systems failure, this conversation not being one that was had with boys as well.

“And actually what it sounded like to them is: ‘We think you’re all rapists’.”

She subsequently said: “I don’t think that we invited boys into that conversation at all and then someone else had that conversation with them. They found it somewhere else and those people were not to be trusted and they didn’t have those boys’ best interests at heart.”