- EXCLUSIVE: Controversial charity Educate and Celebrate is shutting down
- The LGBTQ+ charity has weathered years of controversy but is finally closing
A controversial education charity that encouraged three-year-old toddlers to question their gender has mysteriously shut down, MailOnline can reveal.
LGBTQ+ charity Educate and Celebrate was founded by Dr Elly Barnes, a teacher who received an MBE for her contribution to equality and diversity in education but has since seen her charity and herself rocked by scandal.
When it was running, Educate and Celebrate said it hoped to ’embed gender, gender identity and sexual orientation into the fabric’ of organisations including primary schools.
However, after a series of controversies – from encouraging three-year-olds to question their gender to pushing to replace ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’ with gender-neutral terms – the charity has shut down.
Its latest accounts reveal a deficit between expenditure and income of more than £30,000.
The charity formally asked to close itself down on January 3. It will now be removed as a registered charity on the Government website in three months.
When approached by MailOnline, the charity wouldn’t confirm the exact reason it had shut down but suggested its work was not finished.
The chair of trustees Julie Bremner – who was a civil servant for 31 years – said: ‘It was our decision to close the charity.
‘We are all long serving teachers, school leaders and academics who have dedicated our careers to inclusion in education.
‘We will continue our much-needed work through new projects.’
Educate and Celebrate founder Dr Elly Barnes seemed to be enjoying renewed success after winning an ‘information’ award for her Pride-themed learn-the-alphabet book for three-year-olds.
The book’s description said: ‘ABC Pride introduces little readers to the alphabet through the colourful world of Pride.
‘Children can discover letters and words while also learning more about the LGBTQIA+ community and how to be inclusive.’
Yet just months later the charity Dr Barnes founded is shutting down. Both the charity’s and Dr Barnes’s websites are no longer online.
The Family Education Trust’s Lucy Marsh told MailOnline: ‘Dr Elly Barnes has been open about her plan to smash heteronormativity in schools so it’s unfathomable that anyone from this organisation has been allowed in contact with children, since they clearly want to indoctrinate young children with their agenda to promote queer theory and gender ideology.
‘We hope that it is permanently shut down rather than being reinvented under a new name to continue sexualising and indoctrinating children.
‘The Government must crack down on third party RSE organisations having free rein in schools.
‘Organisations which work to indoctrinate children like this should not have charitable status.’
In 2017, the charity put books encouraging children to question their gender on their reading lists for nurseries and primary schools – meaning kids as young as three would be reading them.
Just last year, a teacher was filmed reading children one of the books at a school in St Albans.
That recording came after MailOnline revealed last year the shocking lesson plans that showed kids are being taught about anal sex and orgasms before they have reached puberty and encouraging them to be ‘private’ if they wished to masturbate.
In 2021, the charity became embroiled in a bitter dispute between a fee-paying boarding school and a Christian chaplain who was sacked for refusing to chant ‘smash heteronormativity’.
Reverend Dr Bernard Randall, 51, from Long Eaton, Derbyshire, did not join in the ‘chant’ when urged to do so by the leader of Educate and Celebrate Dr Elly Barnes during a session at the independent Trent College in Long Eaton, Derbyshire.
Rev Randall was dismissed by Trent College after the school flagged him to the government’s Prevent programme for giving a sermon that was ‘harmful to LGBT’ students.
Police investigated the tip-off but advised the school by email that Dr Randall posed ‘no counter terrorism risk, or risk of radicalisation’.
In the sermon he had told the children they were not compelled to ‘accept an ideology they disagree with’, adding that it is, ‘perfectly legitimate to think that marriage should only properly be understood as being a lifelong exclusive union of a man and a woman’.
Two years after he was sacked, the chaplain lost his case for unfair dismissal.
At the time, he told the Mail it was a ‘blow for free speech and Christian freedoms’.
In 2022, Dr Elly Barnes found was slapped down by the Government for telling teachers they ought to be moving towards a ‘gender-free model’ in education.
During a session funded by the National Education Union, Dr Barnes recommended dropping words such as ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘son’ and ‘mother’ and replacing them with gender-neutral phrases.
Her mind-boggling suggestion was criticised by the Department for Education (DfE).
A DfE spokesperson said the suggestions were ‘inappropriate and completely unnecessary’.
They added: ‘It should not be happening in our classrooms.’
Later that year, Educate and Celebrate found itself embroiled in even more controversy when one of its patrons – a trans comic called Jordan Gray – stripped naked during a TV skit to expose their penis.
Gray was concluding an expletive-filled song about being a trans woman during Channel 4’s revival of Friday Night Live when the Educate and Celebrate patron stripped off in front of a whooping audience.
Critics branded the gimmick ‘disgraceful’ and ‘offensive’ as more than 1,400 viewers complained to the broadcast watchdog Ofcom.
Referencing the lewd skit, charity Educate and Celebrate, said they had removed the performer as a patron.
Gray had claimed they go into schools to ‘talk about gender’ on behalf of Educate and Celebrate, adding that ‘toddlers kind of get it straight away’.
However, the charity said in a statement they believe Gray had ‘never gone into schools’ on their behalf and they had never asked them to carry out work for the organisation.
A Charity Commission spokesperson said: ‘On January 3, 2024, the trustees of Educate and Celebrate submitted a dissolution form to the Commission with a declaration that the charity had fulfilled its purpose and had applied all of its remaining funds in furtherance of its objects.
‘As a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) the Commission has instigated the removal process for the charity by placing a notice on our website, in line with the CIO regulations, advising of our intention to dissolve the CIO after the required three month notice period has expired.’
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
