Now, as well as being a proud dyke, I am also a very proud mum to my 10-month-old baby who brings my partner and I so much joy.

It has been truly life-changing, healing and sometimes still feels radical to be a lesbian parent in a world so set up for heteronormativity.

LGBTQIA+ parents are nothing new of course (my partner also has lesbian mums, so my daughter will be lucky enough to have lesbian mums and lesbian grandmas!). But thankfully, we are living in a time where LGBTQIA+ people are increasingly able to see it’s possible for us to have children and that reality is slowly being reflected in the representation around us.

Yes, a lot of barriers remain – including eye-wateringly expensive NHS services and private clinics, tough adoption processes and many more issues – but it is increasingly common to hear about LGBTQIA+ people becoming parents.

In fact, there are an estimated 217,000 same-sex couple families in the UK as of 2022 (up 1256% from 16,000 in 1996, according to ONS). There are also many trans and non-binary parents, bisexual parents in opposite gender relationships, gay dads and lesbian mums co-parenting and plenty more kinds of LGBTQIA+ families not included in that figure.

So we’re really not alone. As LGBTQIA+ parents, we are just two of 217,000 same-sex families. And there are around 32,000 nurseries and schools in the UK, so you can roughly estimate that each has at least six children with same-sex parents. And that’s assuming there’s only one child in those families, so there’s likely far more. Ultimately, there’s probably at least one child per year group who will be feeling incredibly isolated if their school makes no effort to be LGBTQIA+ inclusive.

We’re not the majority but it’s fair to say we’re a substantial part of school communities. Yet, somehow, LGBTQIA+ families are still facing huge challenges when it comes to sending their children to nursery and school. I wanted to do something about this.

LGBT+ Parents is a new research report I have written at Just Like Us, the LGBTQIA+ young people’s charity. The research shows that many queer families are dealing with very stressful challenges when it comes to their school communities, leaving them isolated, depressed, anxious and their children are even being bullied and excluded by school peers because of their family structure.

As if creating a family wasn’t enough of a challenge when you’re LGBTQIA+, the research shows that throughout nursery, primary and secondary school, there continues to be unique and disproportionate issues that we have to deal with.

Amy Ashenden