Bernard Randall, a 53-year-old school chaplain, has won a seven-year legal battle to be reinstated as a preacher after being sacked over a 2019 sermon on gender at Trent College in Derbyshire. Randall, a former Cambridge University chaplain, was banned from preaching after telling pupils at the £40,000-a-year school that marriage is between a biological man and woman, and was referred to the government's Prevent counter-terrorism programme without his knowledge. The case matters as it raises questions about the treatment of clergy expressing traditional Christian teaching and the appropriate use of anti-terrorism referrals.

Randall delivered the sermon in the school's Anglican chapel following a visit from an external campaign group called Educate and Celebrate, which during a training day used the phrase "smash heteronormativity" and said it wanted to embed "queer theory" at the school. That charity was shut down by the Charity Commission in 2024, and its founders, Steven Ireland and David Sutton, were later jailed for child sex offences. Following his sermon, Randall was banned from preaching by the Diocese of Derby and blacklisted by senior Church of England clergy; he said seven years had been "taken from me for doing my duty" and that no minister should be punished for upholding Christian teaching.