Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson is crying. The headteacher at Anderton Park primary school in Birmingham has suffered eight weeks of protests outside her school gates over her decision to teach LGBT-inclusive content to her young pupils, the vast majority of whom are Muslim. After repeatedly putting on a brave face when I ask her how she is feeling, she finally admits: “I am in despair”, and then breaks down. She is struggling for control as she continues: “I know one of the phrases that’s associated with domestic abuse is the crushing of the spirit of a woman. And that’s what I feel is happening. We can’t give in.”

Her voice trembles with emotion. She has been having sleepless nights, she says, worrying about the impact of the protests on her staff and pupils, and has received threatening messages telling her to “watch her back”.

“I am quite resilient to these things but other people, who are more concerned for my safety, are worried I may come to harm.”

She had a particularly difficult week last week. Police were called last Sunday after LGBT-inclusivity campaigners and their children were pelted with eggs for tying supportive messages and rainbow ribbons on to her school gates. The following day, Hewitt-Clarkson estimates, about half the children at the school were withdrawn from lessons by parents. She believes many were intimidated by protesters who stood guard on the roads that led to the school, and says they were telling parents: “If you take your kids to school today, you’re not a Muslim and you’ll burn in hell.” On Friday, the school closed at noon so that the children would not have to put up with a highly publicised “national protest” taking place outside their classrooms. “Our children, our choice”, a video shows around 200 protesters shouting. “Let kids be kids! Listen to parents!”

The battle being fought on Hewitt-Clarkson’s school grounds is one that has nationwide implications for all schools. The row centres on whether the local authority-run school is teaching children about LGBT relationships, gender and sexual orientation in an “age-appropriate” manner. Hewitt-Clarkson believes she is – her main message to her younger pupils, for example, is that some children’s parents may be the same sex – but her parent protesters disagree.

“Do you know how hard it is to explain to a four-year-old why she doesn’t have two daddies?” asks one, Mrs Naeem, who declines to give her first name when she speaks to me outside the school on Thursday. Her daughter came home asking this question, she says. “She kept pushing it – ‘I want two daddies’ – questioning me: ‘Why can’t I?’ It was upsetting for me and my child.”

As a religious Muslim, she didn’t feel she could simply explain to her daughter that Daddy would have to marry another man. “You have to respect another’s person’s faith. If I feel my daughter is too young, at four, to learn Qur’an and Islamic studies, I think she’s very young to learn you can have two mummies.”

What is age-appropriate LGBT content in primary schools? And who should decide this? Like section 28, which banned the promotion of homosexuality by teachers, this question has the power to turn schools across the country into places of protest. But this time, it’s very young pupils who are being caught up in the crossfire. Muslim parents and staff at the school on both sides of the debate spoke about the divisive impact the conflict is having on their children: friendships are being destroyed, children taunted, the authority and actions of the teachers – who are no longer automatically trusted as neutral and fair – questioned.

Outside the school gates, a group of eight parent protesters tell me the atmosphere inside the school means their children are anxious about attending: “They’re upset. They don’t want to go,” they all agree. “Not because of the protest. Because the teachers are terrorising them.”

Inside the school, parents who support its teaching stance say their kids feel the same way, but because of the atmosphere outside: “My littlest one is very sensitive. He’s been really disturbed by the shouting, and gets upset,” says Patricia Verkerk, a 48-year-old mum. Another Muslim mother, who wishes to be anonymous, says her two children feel scared: “They used to love going to school but now they are very stressed about it.”

About half the school’s staff are Muslim. Some have been intimidated by the protesters and none wants to give their names. Two teachers tell me that the Muslim children of the protesters have been “targeted” by other Muslim children who are sticking up for the headteacher they love. “We’ve tried to explain to the children it’s not their fault. These are young children. They don’t understand why they’re at the protest,” says one teacher, who is Muslim. “The children are in the middle,” says another. “They are the innocent victims in all this.”

Last month, the government passed legislation to make relationships education compulsory in primary schools from September 2020. But confusion still rages around how much LGBT content there should be in these lessons. On the one hand, the government has stressed that schools must ensure they comply with the relevant provisions of the Equality Act 2010, under which sexual orientation and gender reassignment are protected characteristics.

Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, headteacher at Anderton Park school. Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Observer

Hewitt-Clarkson, who has devoted 0.5% of her annual timetable to teaching the characteristics of the Equality Act for years, explains: “As public sector workers, teachers have a duty to eliminate discrimination, tackle prejudice and foster good relations between people who have a protected characteristic and those who don’t. You don’t just sit back and wait until a racist or homophobic thing happens to deal with it – you go out of your way to promote good relationships.”

She shows me a few of the 25 books she uses to fulfil this statutory duty. In those aimed at very young children, characters may have two parents of the same sex: that is the only LGBT content they contain. “It’s not like I’ve decided to paint all the railings pink and sparkly and everybody’s fed up with that. This is a British law. It’s a good law and it means all of us are considered to be equal in the law.”

The outcry started at Anderton Park after consultations around the government’s new relationships education guidance drew the attention of religious activists to existing school curriculums in Birmingham. An award-winning programme at Parkfield community school, created by local teacher Andrew Moffat to teach children the nine protected characteristics of the Equality Act, was suspended after repeated protests. That acted as a rallying call for the religious families at Anderton Park.

“The protests have been most pronounced in Birmingham because it has a history of religious activism to undermine schools,” says Colin Diamond, professor of educational leadership at the University of Birmingham. The big difference between 2019 and 2014, when the Trojan horse scandal broke, is how these activists are seeking to undermine school leaders of whom they disapprove, he says. No longer able to infiltrate governing bodies, they are now trying to influence policy “from outside the school gates”.

Their approach appears to be working. Further guidance from the Department for Education issued last month states that although “primary schools are enabled and encouraged to cover LGBT content if they consider it age appropriate to do so, there is no specific requirement for this”.

The government has massively muddied the waters with its guidance. It's a mess that I'm being left to deal with Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson

Yet its own newly passed legislation states that teaching in all schools should continue to “reflect the law, including the Equality Act, as it applies to relationships, so that young people clearly understand what the law allows and does not allow”. How can primary teachers leave sexual orientation, as a protected characteristic of the act, out of that lesson? “The government has massively muddied the waters with this further guidance, which is not policy,” says Hewitt-Clarkson. “It’s a mess: one I am being left to deal with on my doorstep with screaming people.”

The government is shifting the responsibility for LGBT content – including the highly sensitive question of whether any LGBT content is “age appropriate” for primary school pupils – from politicians on to the shoulders of individual headteachers, she says. “I’ve had eight weeks of protests as a result. It’s just unforgivable.”

While she is trying to deal with the protests and run a school, policymakers are “sitting in their offices in Whitehall looking at the Thames”: “They’re not working out how we’re going to sort out our deficit budget, our Sats results, all that stuff I’m doing in my job as headteacher. It’s not OK to write policies in Whitehall that affect me in Birmingham so badly.”

The local Labour MP, Roger Godsiff, says that, inevitably, in a community which is overwhelmingly Muslim, there are sensitivities around LGBT content being taught to primary schoolchildren. “There are parents at the school who feel uncomfortable about that. That is just a fact.”

It was wrong of the government to give headteachers the power to decide what LGBT content to teach children at different ages, he says. “I think that the government guidance should have been more prescriptive as to when the different elements of the Equality Act were appropriate, in the government’s opinion, to be taught to children. Governments are elected, people have recourse to hold their politicians to account. Headteachers have had this burden put on them, and in some cases are going to end up in the situation Anderton Park is in.”

He blames the academies system. “If schools were still maintained by local councils, in a situation like this Birmingham council could have put down a programme about how the elected representatives of the council believe the protected characteristics of the Equality Act should be taught. And then headteachers could have said: ‘we’re doing what we’ve been told to do.’”

Instead of being able to rely on explicit guidance from the government, heads can look forward to more conflict, particularly with religious parents, in the immediate future: they will be required to “consult” parents during the development of new relationships education policies over the next 18 months – but not to compromise.

I don't think there's anything inappropriate being taught. I teach exactly the same thing at home: respect everybody Patricia Verkerk, Muslim parent

“This word ‘consult’ is very inflammatory,” says Hewitt-Clarkson. Even though the government has stressed that parents will not have a veto, her parents think “consult” means they get to tell headteachers what to do. “So there’s another battle you have to fight. They say: ‘you must listen to families because we are nearly all Muslim and you must do what we say.’ If you take that to its logical conclusion, there are areas not far from my school with a lot of far-right parents. What if they say: get rid of all books with brown people in them because white people are superior?”

The protesters, meanwhile, think Hewitt-Clarkson is infringing their rights as parents and confusing innocent children. Naeem, for example, says she would not be protesting if teachers at Anderton Park waited until pupils were 10 or 11 before they talked about LGBT families, so that younger pupils could turn to their parents for information instead.

She and other parent protesters are aware of local Christian faith schools that are not teaching LGBT content to young children, and they know headteachers have a choice.

Verkerk, a Muslim who has four sons at Anderton Park, takes a different view. “I don’t think there’s anything inappropriate being taught in school whatsoever. I teach exactly the same thing at home, which is to respect everybody, regardless of what they believe or how they live or whatever family set-up they have. You don’t have to agree, just respect each other.” Islam, she says, is all about acceptance and loving each other. “This protest does not represent my religion at all.”

Jess Phillips MP, who lives locally, talking to a protester outside Anderton Park. She has called for an exclusion zone around the school. Photograph: BBC News

The Labour MP Jess Phillips, who lives a few streets away from the school, visited Anderton Park last Monday and clashed with protesters. “What they seem to want to do is unravel equalities legislation in their image. They have got to understand that equalities legislation protects them, and you can’t pick and choose.”

She thinks the Muslim parents who are protesting are playing right into the hands of rightwing Islamophobic campaigners. “It’s totally and utterly unacceptable whoever is protesting. But it is particularly dangerous for the Muslim community to be represented like this. It is saying all the things that people who hate the Muslim community think and use against them. If Christians were out there doing it, they wouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. They are handing the far right everything they ever wanted.”

The education secretary, Damian Hinds, said it was unacceptable that children at Anderton Park were missing out on education because of the threat of protests. “There is no place for protests outside school gates. They can frighten children, intimidate staff and parents and, in the worst cases, be hijacked by individuals with a vested interest and no links to the schools. It is time for these protests to stop.

He said: “Working on the ground alongside West Midlands police, Birmingham city council, the school and members of the local community, officials from my department are monitoring this situation closely while taking steps to encourage further talks and dialogue between the school and a number of parents.

“I support and trust headteachers to make decisions in the interests of their pupils and it’s unacceptable that this school finds itself in a position where it feels it has no choice but to close early for the last day of term.”

Hewitt-Clarkson will spend the half-term this week seeking an injunction that will create an exclusion zone around the school, enabling police to arrest groups of protesters who cause a nuisance. “People have been too scared to stand up to this protest, including the Department for Education,” says Phillips. “Sarah needs support. She needs people like me backing her corner because she won’t be able to do it on her own.”

She is deeply concerned that the protests will spread to other schools and bring in other faiths. “If we allow the protests at Anderton Park Road to change the way we teach in British schools and create a two-tier teaching system, where kids in white neighbourhoods can have all the equalities and kids in Asian neighbourhoods have to have things kept in the dark, they win.

“You can expect these protests all over the country. If we give in, this is the beginning of something, not the end. If we give in ...” She pauses, as if horrified by even the thought of it: “We cannot give in.”

Changing laws

1988: Local Government Act

Section 28 stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. It was repealed in Scotland in 2000 and in the rest of the UK in 2003.

2010: The Equality Act

Offers legal protection for people against discrimination, harassment and victimisation in the workplace and wider society, based on nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. Schools, which are bound by this act, are required to have “due regard” to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination and harassment, advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who don’t, and foster good relations between these groups.

2017: Children and Social Work Act

Requires relationships and sex education to be taught in all English schools from September 2020. In primaries, children will learn about subjects including families, friendships, relationships and being safe online, including characteristics of healthy family life. Recent government guidance states that all schools should take the religious background of their pupils into account when planning teaching. It notes that faith schools may use their faith to inform what is taught: “For example, the school may wish to reflect on faith teachings about certain topics as well as how their faith institutions may support people in matters of relationships and sex.”