Less than half of headteachers in London have read official guidance on stopping female genital mutilation, new figures revealed today.
The guidance, which tells teachers how to identify girls who are at risk or who have suffered mutilation, was emailed to every school in the country. But data from the Department for Education shows that only 56 per cent of heads in the capital even opened the email after it was sent to them by Education Secretary Michael Gove last month.
An even lower proportion — 45 per cent — then “clicked through” to read the guidance, meaning that headteachers in 1,724 London schools have ignored the effort to prevent the abuse.
Today’s figures, which also reveal that in some boroughs fewer than one in five heads has read the guidance, prompted renewed warnings from MPs and campaigners that schools are failing to take sufficient action to protect girls from mutilation. Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, which is conducting an inquiry into FGM, said that the response of London heads was “dreadful” and called on the Education Secretary to ensure that the guidance was read by all staff.
“I am deeply concerned by how few headteachers have even opened the email from Michael Gove,” he said. “A second email must be sent which is marked urgent and shows that it includes information on possible child abuse in their schools. It is imperative that this guidance reaches the frontline.”
Today’s figures, obtained by the Evening Standard via a Freedom of Information request, show that Mr Gove’s guidance on FGM was sent to 2,922 headteachers in London. Of these, 1,534 opened the email, but only 1,198 “clicked through” to read it.
Further statistics for each London borough show that the response rate has been significantly worse in some areas, including several containing large numbers of girls from communities that have traditionally practised FGM. In Hackney, for example, only 25 per cent of the 91 heads read the guidance, while in Lambeth and Southwark the proportion who did so was only 34 per cent.
The worst performing boroughs were Barking and Dagenham, where only 13 per cent of heads read the guidance, and Hillingdon, where the figure was 17 per cent. The only boroughs in which more than half of heads read the guidance were Bexley, which had a 63 per cent take-up rate, Bromley and Sutton.
Nimco Ali, from the Daughters of Eve campaign group and one of the FGM victims who met Mr Gove to lobby for the new guidance, said the figures showed that headteachers were ignoring the problem of mutilation and adding to the risks that girls faced.
“These figures are disappointing and again show the reality that headteachers see the protection of girls as someone else’s issue,” she said. “For protection to become a reality, head teachers need to take the issue seriously.” The DfE said that a website page containing the guidance had been viewed more than 65,000 times and that five tweets that it had published about the document had reached hundreds of thousands of Twitter users.
It added that further measures to highlight the need to protect girls from FGM had also been taken.