Q&A was conceived in the summer of 2021, when a newly appointed prefect offered to take responsibility for improving Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) across the school. In particular, they were keen to begin an LGBTQ+ group for pupils and asked for staff support. Several sixth formers met with me to work out the details; what the group would do, how often, when and where it would meet, and how we would advertise it.
For that, of course, we needed a name, but none of the common group names schools use seemed to fit. Then inspiration flashed: sessions would be open to everyone interested in LGBT things, no matter how they identified personally. They might be members of the queer community or allies. Queer community & Allies. Q&A. Simple and memorable – and in the event, memorable enough to be name-checked in the 2021 ISI report, when one inspector attended a meeting, and another inspector invited group members to an interview to describe Q&A in their own words.
The group was originally going to meet monthly, but conversations were sufficiently plentiful and passionate the first week that we agreed to meet the same time the following week to finish our discussion…and here we are, 3 years and 100 weekly sessions later. What do we do? Simply talk, in a safe space. Elsewhere in school, or outside, people might feel a need to filter their conversations, but at Q&A people are free to explore ideas, share experiences, and recommend things to read or watch or listen to, all refracted through an LGBT lens.
I advertise our weekly sessions in the school’s registration ‘daily updates’, usually with a nugget of LGBT news from the previous week (‘In the week that saw Thailand become the 38th country in the world to legalise equal marriage, Q&A meets today from 1.20pm…’), and lots of pupils and colleagues comment to me on what they learned in this week’s notice. It always finishes with the sentence, ‘All with open minds are welcome to attend, and nobody will ask you why you are there,’ and I know that several of my colleagues make a point of reading that line verbatim to their forms each week, even if pupils have heard it dozens of times before. Pupils at Q&A always express their delight at these shows of allyship in their tutor meetings, or when they come across a member of the school body wearing one of our rainbow ribbons on a jacket or a lanyard.
At Exeter School, with the advent of Q&A, high-profile allyship around the campus, calling out and re-educating in instances of homophobia, and a root-and-branch reconsideration of the PSHE and assembly programmes, it is a good place to be out and proud, or just out, or questioning. It is a place where LGBT pupils can feel they belong, just as they are. No community is perfect, but perhaps one day Q&A will no longer need to exist. In Heartstopper, neither Truham nor Higgs has Q&A, but Nick and Charlie and Tara and Darcy coped OK thanks to supportive staff and peers. Even so, I’d still like to mark 1 October as the day our newly-conceived LGBT society was born, with all its ripple effects – one part of our journey towards true EDI, and a roadmap for other schools just setting out.
Written by Michael Latimer, teacher of modern foreign languages.
