We are a group of students at a secondary school in Hertfordshire, we have spent the past three months studying discrimination against the LGBT+ community, and we have come to the conclusion that schools are not doing enough to protect the rights of students in the community.

Our investigation began with speaking to students and teachers at our school. And we found that 80% of students believe that teachers do not notice homophobia while teachers believe that they do, this is a problem as if teachers believe they are doing enough for LGBT+ when the reality is the opposite, then the obvious result is that staff will not be able to adequately prevent homophobic abuse and thus these damaging attitudes will be left to fester in our youth. These views are already having detrimental effects on LGBT+ people across the country, for example: a massive twenty per-cent of LGBT people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their sexual orientation in the last 12 months, as have forty per-cent of trans people. However, a truly immense eighty per-cent of anti-LGBT hate crimes go unreported, with younger members of the community particularly afraid of going to the police. The only way to make our country safe for members of the LGBT+ community, particularly our youth, is to address the institutional homophobia that gives bigots the ability to violate the human rights of LGBT+ people without consequences.

Most schools have extensive racism and racial harassment policies and we'd like schools across the UK write a homophobia and transphobia policy to this standard and train teachers to recognise homophobia and create effective resources to deal with homophobia and make a safer environment for LGBT students.

We also have a twitter page if you wish to follow us: @11Citizenship