Monday, April 09, 2007

When Lizo introduced the animal rights report last week, he said that being cruel to animals has been illegal for years. It's also true that discrimination against people has been illegal for years, and last Friday the Gender Equality Duty came into effect with the intention to actively promote gender equality in all walks of life. In schools, teachers will need to be more careful not to pigeonhole or stereotype.

Newsround's teachers' section included a lesson plan last year called Career Stereotypes. Currently the teachers' section deals with animal rights based around the news report last week (see previous blog).

So it will be interesting to see how much coverage, if any, Newsround devotes to rights granted by the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations. They come into effect in Britain at the end of April and LGBT Human Rights is one topic about which Newsround has yet to report.

Amongst other things the new laws should mean that bullying against lgbt kids will be dealt with as strictly as racist bullying - that means a real change for many schools which have condoned homophobia in the past.

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