There is a lot of this stuff about at the moment and it seems that many people cannot remember what life is like before the hormones start to flow. Explain to a child what sex involves and the general reaction is “yuk, I’m not doing that”.

I was particularly disgusted by Anne Widdicombe earlier this week when her column in the Express told out right lies in that they suggested that the scout association would be providing sex education to 6 year old beavers. Nothing could be further from the truth but she insisted on propogating such scare stories.

The whole issue continued later in the week although I note that the Mail’s headlines on wednesday telling us that schools would be teahcing sex education to 5 year olds has now been changed to 7 year olds. Still not quite what one might call the truth but if even they are having to ease the tone of their rhetoric it simply emphasises how bad it was to start with.

Good post, Unity.

How long before we see faith schools and ‘libertarians’ like Ms Warsi arguing that they should be allowed to ignore darwinian or big-bang theory, as you allude to at the end of the ost? I hope the current, rather vulnerable government doesn’t go weak on this issue.

Unity, there’s plenty of misleading statistics being flung about the place already – let’s not go adding to them here. You claim that

“a report produced by the UK Youth Parliament, which surveyed 20,000 young people, found that more than half of all teenagers don’t understand something as basic as how to use a condom”

but the link says that what the report actually shows is that

“More than half of all 12 to 15-year-olds had not been taught how to use a condom”

(I admit that I haven’t read the full report because the link to it on the Youth Parliament site seemed to be broken at the time of my visit)

First of all, from the point of view of what you should know about sex, 12-15 year olds are a very different research cohort from “teenagers.” Second, there is a world of difference between not knowing how to use a condom and not having been taught to how to use one. There are, after all, instructions in the box, older siblings talk and condoms are not, after all, the world’s most complicated things.

The way that SRE advocates sometimes present their case, you could be forgiven for thinking that teenagers who have not received enormous quantities of education on the subject are simultaneously entirely ignorant about sex and yet, somehow, at it all the time. They aren’t.

I don’t advocate removing SRE from the curriculum entirely but I do think that, beyond ensuring that children have some pretty elementary facts straight, they should be left to figure it out for themselves. All this talk of ensuring that children place sex into a proper emotional context smacks (to me at least) rather too much of Brave New World, of palliative sex emptied of meaning.

Maybe we should teach them some of the microbial gems they could find in their lives whist sleeping around. Some of which stay with you forever. So in this context leaving you to “figure it our for yourself” may well condemn the ignorant child t0 a life with the herpes virus or something far worse.

Please excuse the typing I recently spilled nuts all over the keyboard.

Mund,

I’ve no problem with telling children that herpes is forever nor that warts are ghastly, unplanned pregnancy will change your life forever and crab lice really itch. What I’m saying is that this stuff is pretty quick to teach – show children what tertiary syphilis looks like and I doubt they will forget it in a hurry.

UKYP’s report (which I have now read) features a comment from a girl complaining that. “My sex education was rubbish, we mostly just watched videos and got so bored nobody really listened. There wasn’t any conversation about it, it was all
boring worksheets and everybody just binned them.”

What she seems to be saying is – we didn’t learn anything we did not know already. And yet she wants more of this? Nor does anyone else quoted in the report mention anything that they felt they had not been told.

The impression I get is that everyone feels that they personally knew everything but there should be more of this sort of teaching for the small number of people who have managed to make it through to their mid-teens without learning anything about sex and that it is these people – the ones who know nothing about sex – who end up having sex and getting pregnant or getting AIDS or whatever.

So, will anyone here admit to having discovered anything they genuinely did not know in a sex education class or, alternatively, is there anyone here who believes that they suffered as a result of not being told something that they might reasonably have been entitled to know?

I will start the ball rolling – I did not know until I was told in a sex education class at the age of 15, that such a thing as fisting existed. I remain unconvinced that it was necessary for me to know this at that stage

Is there any evidence base for introducing relationship education for 5-7 year olds?

I have no moral objections to it, and I couldn’t care less about libertarian arguments, but I don’t like the idea of introducing a lot of new measures such as this which I can see turning into a complete waste of time which further undermines parent’s trust in sex education.

Could we just do whatever it is the Dutch are doing? Do they start at age 5?

What @Woobegone said. Is there really any reason it has to start that early? This proposal seems to be designed to anger conservatives.

Hang on a second, folks. Relationship education for 5s-7s concentrates on encouraging kid to explore ideas like friendship, family, tolerance and mutual responsibility – basic socialisation of the kind that schools have had to take on due to the general decline in community life that used to serve that same purpose.

Why is that problematic?

Well, a lot of people would say that school isn’t the place to learn about that sort of thing. I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing that can be taught (formally) at all.

Just to be clear I’m not obsessed with the idea that parents should be the ones responsible for this kind of thing. Many parents I wouldn’t trust to raise a patch of potatoes whereas teachers at least get training. But I’m afraid that schools just can’t do it. It’s not what schools are *for*.

I’m with Woobegone. It ’s yet another step in the State taking over from the family as the place where children are brought up, as opposed to being educated – there is a distinction there.

Improved teaching about STDs etc, yes. Comprehensive instruction in personal relationships, no. School is not the place for that – certainly not primary schools.

Guys, this is getting silly, now.

Schools have always played a role in the socialisation of children because going to school is, and always was for most children, the first time they encountered people outside their immediate family.

This about teaching kids to get along with each other – your basic Sesame Steet kind of stuff – not some sinister attempt to recruit them in the Hitler Youth.

I’m all for “state intervention” where the only outcome is benefits through enlightenment and education about something they should know at an appropriate age (and experts can tell us if 5-7 is the right age, not haughty parents thanks), when the alternative is crossing our fingers while pissing in to the wind knowing that while we, as “responsible people”, will bring up our child well (according to our own subjective views), there is every chance that the society your child grows up in..directly…is negatively affected by the negligence of others.

If you’re going to complain about relationship education at 5-7 then you might as well just campaign for a shit load of other lessons and principles of education to be scraped because, actually, you’d rather than your kid didn’t learn the basics of morals unless via your words and actions (as a parent).

Sorry, it’s all just a little bit too reactionary, anti-government, kneejerk, bollocks as far as I’m concerned.

“Schools have always played a role in the socialisation of children because going to school is, and always was for most children, the first time they encountered people outside their immediate family.”

Yes of course but not until recently has anyone proposed lessons explicitly doing it. That’s what I’m sceptical of. To reiterate, I have no objections to this if it works, I have nothing but contempt for people who see these proposals and react with knee-jerk anti-statism.

but honestly, this is exactly the kind of thing that sounds good on paper and turns out to be a waste of time and money. since when did kids get socialised into society by being explicitly taught what to think and do? You get socialised through watching and learning by example, and through trial and error. At least that’s how it’s worked for the last 100,000 years of human history and indeed since the first animals started living in packs.

Look – Britain has a long and proud history of resisting the lure of far-right politics. This is not because of our excellent anti-fascism lessons at school, it’s just the way the British are. Likewise, we have a sorry history of teenage pregnancy and binge drinking. This is not, I think, something we can fix through the school curriculum. I’m open to being proved wrong but I want some evidence.

The problem here is that what specifically will be taught at primary school level has not been announced, alh the information we have is this statement from the department for children schools and families

“Sex and Relationships: at primary school this means recognising that animals produce offspring, naming parts of the body, preparing for puberty and being able to talk about feelings and friendships.”

“Drugs and alcohol: at primary level pupils might look at how medicines and toxins can effect the body”

“Healthy lifestyles: at all ages learning about a balanced diet and the need for exercise.”

It is difficult to have a proper debate when that is all the information that you actually have. And the issue I have is the knee jerk reaction that much of the press has had to some of those statements. I am interested to know exactly what the government have in mind but I wont be criticising it in the mean time.

This seems to work OK on the continent, doesn’t it?

As someone who is (in principle) anti-abortion, it disgusts me to see others who think the same way *also* objecting to education measures which would reduce unwanted pregnancies.

Akala’s right about the devil being in the detail, and it remains to be seen what’s actually in curriculum, but the principle is sound.

So far as the merits of the trial and error approach, not only does that leave children in some families ‘flying blind’ because, unfortunately, some parents don’t provide their children with the kind of start in life they should get but it can also prove counterproductive because of the unreliability of some of the information that provides children and young people with their ‘examples’.

To give an extreme case, evidence is emerging from the US that, in the absence of high quality sex education, the now widespread access to porn via the internet is starting to distort sexual behaviour in young adults in some very specific ways, one of which being the expectation that the ‘pop-shot’ is a standard method of concluding sexual activity.

I’m not kidding here, there’s actually a generation of young men in the US who don’t know that jacking off over their girlfriend’s face is nothing more than an artificial convention in porn which evolved in the 60s and 70s simply as a device to authenticate that what was being seen on screen was real and not faked.

Now, the puritanical god botherers (and some feminists) will argue that that’s a consequence of the pernicious effect of porn and demand greater censorship, but that’s not true – the problem is simply that those young men have adopted one of the artificial mores of the porn industry because they’ve never been taught that real sex isn’t like what they see on the screen.

(Oh, and I should add that abstinence education has a similar distorting effect – girls given abstinence only education are six times more likely to engage in oral or anal intercourse as a means of retaining their ‘virginity’ than girls receiving conventional sex education).

The question has been asked as to what the Dutch do differently to us – well kids over there don’t get any more sex/relationships education than our kids do. The Dutch devote only about the same amount of time to these issues in the school curriculum than we do.

But what the Dutch do is approach these issues from the bottom up – sex is treated as a normal healthy human activity that takes place within normal healthy human relationships, and in some of those relationships a level of commitment will develop that will lead people to want to get married and have children. They’re socialised into the view that its commitment that creates the conditions for marriage and pregnancy.

Over here we’re still hamstrung by religionists who demand a top-down approach in which kids are taught that sex is making babies and that marriage creates commitment (and not the other way round).

The Dutch treat their young people as people who will soon be adults and who can trusted to make their own choices if they given good information, we treat ours as people who are only just growing out of childhood who can’t be trusted unless we inculcate rigid rules of behaviour, and that makes a massive difference to social attitudes.

The Netherlands has lower rates of abortion and teenage pregnancy because their young people are taught to make their own informed moral choices not because adults drum into them a bunch of hard and fast rules about what’s right and wrong.

If anyone wants a more academic overview, try this http://www.sheu.org.uk/publications/eh/eh194jl.pdf

“The reactions of pupils show the extent to which many English pupils, especially boys, have a cruder and a less sophisticated understanding of sex and, above all, intimacy and relationships. As a leading Dutch sex educator observed in interview, it is very difficult to find a safe and appropriate way of inviting openness, and yet openness is essential if information is to be given about sex and if the message is to be clearly understood. It is particularly difficult in the English situation, where there is so much political and public controversy about sex education and where messages about sex are so very mixed.”

George V,

Showing a child the end results of syphilis means nothing. It’s the same sort of logic used by the catholic church in scaring peope into behaving they they want them to. What you need to do is to teach the chidren the nature of the microorganism and the mechanism of transmission. How it progresses and the repercussions it causes for themselves as well as any-one they want to become intimate with.

@Lee Griffin: “and experts can tell us if 5-7 is the right age, not haughty parents thanks”

Why, exactly, should ‘experts’ have more say over the upbringing of an individual child than his/her parents?

That is the crux of this debate. Not percentages and evidence bases.

But evidence, rather than the daft evidence-free prejudice of people who happen to share their DNA with the child, is fairly obviously a more sensible criterion to use when deciding how children should be brought up…

QT,

I probably agree with the underpinning argument you’re making. But a more legitimate ‘crux’ would be to accept that the majority of parents haven’t got a clue.

It’s a fair ideological argument to say that government has no place to teach these things, but to suggest that the average parent has any higher knowledge belies the more reasonable assumption that most don’t really know what they’re doing.

‘experts’

I hate this.

Lazy anti-intellectualism. I suppose I should ignore my ‘doctor’ and my ‘electrician’?

Yes but we must show the children actual facts, rather then social philosophy.

Mund – what wouldn’t be a fact?

QT: What Aaron said.

Something which is not backed by evidence. Or where the evidence gathered has not stated it’s methodology.

But maybe fact was the wrong word to use.

@Aaron Heath: “Lazy anti-intellectualism. I suppose I should ignore my ‘doctor’ and my ‘electrician’?”

No. I think there needs to be a distinction between the use of ‘expert’ in the context of something like science/maths/home repairs or whatever, where there’s a “right answer” and objective standards, and that in social policy, where there isn’t.

‘Expert’ in the kind of context of this debate too often means “someone who backs up my argument, perhaps with the help of some numbers”.

Returning to the topic of discussion: @Aaron you may be right in suggesting that “most [parents] don’t really know what they’re doing”. However that is a pretty contentious thing to say and base policy on, don’t you think.

Don’t you think at the very least this move could have been handled with a greater level of sensitivity? This Government seems to think “we are right and you are wrong, so we’ll go ahead with what we think is right and f*ck you”, all the time. This proposal is like sticking two fingers up in the faces of anti-statists.

The most important elements of it could have been introduced gradually, through minor alterations of the existing curriculum, and this would have averted the vast majority of the controversy. But that wouldn’t have pissed off conservatives, so clearly it’s not good enough.

“‘Expert’ in the kind of context of this debate too often means “someone who backs up my argument, perhaps with the help of some numbers”.”

I’m talking about science. If an expert can say that age 5 is the right age to do this then that’s the right age to do it. Now I’d love to believe the curriculum will be objectively and expertly produced given the sensitivity of such a situation but I may have doubts that you share about that…but I was purely talking about whether or not these kids should be taught that subject, at that age, in school…if the experts say yes, then it should be done.

I don’t agree. IMO, in politics, even if a scientist says that something is the right thing to do doesn’t necessarily mean it should be made policy.

Deomcracy isn’t scientific.

I don’t agree. IMO, in politics, even if a scientist says that something is the right thing to do doesn’t necessarily mean it should be made policy.

Democracy isn’t scientific.

It’s not politics to know when a child is best served to be educated about relationships, obviously leading on to sex education later on…it is a potential fact. I can’t say I know that it is something that has been studied adequately, but if the positive benefit is at its best by educating at such an age then that’s the cold hard truth of the matter.

Policy generally isn’t scientific but it should be. For example there is very strong evidence that standard abstinence-based education programs don’t work:

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/335/7613/248

I would say that if a politician proposed introducing such a program, they would be wrong. Just flat out wrong, like if the agriculture minister planned to bring rains by dancing around in circles, or if the defence minister proposed replacing the air force with guys on flying pigs.

“Policy generally isn’t scientific but it should be.”

Totally agree, I’ve argued on here before that policy shouldn’t even make it to a vote before it’s been attached to a report given by objective and independent people. Hell, I’d even give them, assuming the right checks and balances, a veto on policy.

Woobegone and Lee Griffin, I agree with your respective opinions.

woobegone, Lee, is it fair to summarise the thrust of your arguments as “many parents have no idea how to raise children and the job of child rearing is therefore best left to experts”?

If so, would parents or experts bear the principal responsibility for the formation of children’s moral character?

Is it your view that experts agree about child rearing (or, indeed moral character)?

“woobegone, Lee, is it fair to summarise the thrust of your arguments as “many parents have no idea how to raise children and the job of child rearing is therefore best left to experts”?”

It’s not really that simple, moral education is something that should be provided by parents. This is why I disagree with schools teaching one religion if that school is the only realistic choice for a child to go to. I do agree with broad religious theory and philosophy being taught on the flip side and believe that parents don’t necessarily have the knowledge or inclination to provide that, in my opinion vital, set of lessons to ensure understanding and acceptance of those different from them.

There are plenty of ways to teach social cohesion, and further on the sexual education also, without getting in to morals…I think people are getting too caught up that education about these things can’t be extricated from moral education which isn’t…to my mind..the truth. Happy to be proved wrong.

I think it should also be said, however, that a parent doesn’t have the right to indoctrinate their child in to specific morals. A child should always have the opportunity to question their own morals, their own beliefs. A child is not a doll that a parent can dress up with philosophies and beliefs that they wish it to have with no respect for the liberty of the child being heeded. The parent should, of course, be the driver of a direction…but we have to accept this direction could be detrimental to the child, or to society, or both…and there has to be other avenues for a child to begin their own awakening before it is too late.

No, I think that’s a silly idea – I don’t think that there are any experts on child rearing. and if you look at my first few posts you’ll see why. Fundamentally I think that all kids have a natural growing up process and that left to their own devices their moral character and everything will form quite nicely. This is assuming that they’re surrounded by good examples: obviously their parents are important here but they’re not the only ones, siblings, friends, teachers, peers are also crucial. (The idea that children are raised by the mother and father alone is a modern, Western innovation.)

Many parents don’t have any idea how to raise children, that’s certainly true, and it would be great if there were experts who could raise them in school in such cases – but there aren’t.

I’m sceptical of the power of the curriculum in general, I don’t think a 1 hour a week lesson is going to have much success in getting teenagers to have less sex, although neither is it going to make them have more sex or lead to the breakdown of society. teaching people how to use contraceptives (many people literally can’t manage it…) seems sensible, but beyond that I don’t think there’s much we can do.

basically I think politicians should leave this obsession with sex to the bedroom and worry about global warming instead.

“basically I think politicians should leave this obsession with sex to the bedroom and worry about global warming instead.”

They’ve already done that, to the detriment of the Physics curriculum.

I am relieved. there was a moment back there when I thought that what was being advocated was getting rid of al these pesky politicians and simply doing whatever the experts said.

clearly some parents don’t give their kids the best start in life and some others will pass on to their children ideas that we mght wish they hadn’t but if the state considers itself the final arbiter of morality then we are surely all in trouble.

Rather than telling children that what their teacher tells them is “truer” than what their parents tell them, we should surely be ensuring that they have the critical skills to evaluate the information they receive from all sources.

for what it is worth, and to get us back to SRE, I still await a single answer to the questions, name one thing that you learned in sex education that you had not known before or one thing that you feel your sex education teacher could reasonably have been expected to tell you but didn’t.

I didn’t know anything about sex before sexual education beyond the rumours of the playground (my parents never really did the “birds and the bees” thing) and reasonably, in hindsight, I would have expected more (i.e. more than none) discussion about gay sex which (as far as I’m aware) is woefully under educated due to an ultimately outdated homophobia on the part of parents.

There may be a discussion to be had about the format (mine was never worksheets, it was round table discussions, videos and those cliched condom on banana exercises) and how best to educate kids through sexual education, but can we be sure even the majority of children are informed enough about all necessary areas of sexual education to a standard above watching some porn they downloaded and discussing through chinese whispers with their friends? Do the kids that say they knew everything beforehand really understand the (if you’ll pardon the pun) ins and outs of it all?

Assuming they are of course stating the truth then it’s a pretty strong case for moving sex education to earlier years, to a time before what they “know” is found out from a myriad of sources of indeterminable accuracy, is it not?

How very strange, I did a blog on the same subject today. I don’t know that I agree with 100% of what you say, but it is extremely important to be honest with kids & also to ensure they have the information available to make informed decisions.

I suspect there is more to teenage pregnancy rates than simple school based sex education. The fact that “The Sun” is our most popular paper and in some ways “The daily Mail” is our most influential middle class paper is probably as much of a problem.

I find it quite bizarre that people accept the argument that telling kids about homosexuality will suddenly convert millions of kids into homosexuals. Given that schools didn’t even mention it for hundreds of years, yet it still existed gives lie to this myth. Telling children with homosexual tendencies that they are weirdo’s, evil or perverted is not constructive. This seems to be what many of the more outlandish conservative commentators would prefer.

I’d suggest that the context of sex education is what we need to have a continuing debate, rather than the mechanics. I’d suggest that all schools should have counselling services, trained to deal with all manner of issues. Identification of areas where bullying may occur and prevention of this is also a primary concern. I would see some of the irrational right wing comment in this context.

I would like to see sex taught in the context of relationships, especially for 10-16 year olds. If they want to be promiscuous they soon will figure that out for themselves, but sex in a stable relationship is generally safer and more responsible for teenagers, whilst not necessarily being less enjoyable. Some level of education about the effects of drink & drugs on relationships & sexual behaviour should also be included, as many of the problems people have are related to these issues.

Lee,

I’m not sure that I understand your final contention. It only follows that sex education should be started earlier if a) playground gossip is inaccurate and b) sex education is started so late that there is a real risk of children starting to have sex (or come under pressure to have sex) before the false impressions formed in the playground are corrected.

My contention is that such gossip is more accurate than we give it credit for – I don’t recall hearing anything that was really wrong and, reading between the lines of the kids quoted in the UKYP report, it sounds as if they felt they were going over things they knew in their existing classes. That being the case, I don’t see the case for either allowing the subject to take up more precious school time or central government setting a one-size-fits all solution for a difficult and sensitive subject.

I suppose my wider point is this. I don’t think the SRE regime has that much to do with the levels of STDs and unwanted pregnancies. My guess is that most sexually active teenagers know how to put on a condom – some simply choose not to – or they are drunk or whatever.

It has earlier been noted that the Netherlands have far lower levels of both STDs and unwanted pregnancies and spend about the same amount of time on their SRE classes that we do. It seems to me much more likely that lower levels of risky behaviour among Dutch teens probably has more to do with the wider ethos of the country. You will recall the recent survey that found British and American children to be less happy than their counterparts in any other developed nation.

My guess is that poor behaviour (drinking, screwing, fighting, truancy etc) among young people in this country is more likely to be a symptom of wider problems than the wrong sort of sex education. Shouldn’t we be addressing that rather than asking unspecified to tell us at what age it is appropriate to explain fellatio to children? (Especially since the answer will be, “it depends”)

“My contention is that such gossip is more accurate than we give it credit for – I don’t recall hearing anything that was really wrong and, reading between the lines of the kids quoted in the UKYP report, it sounds as if they felt they were going over things they knew in their existing classes. That being the case, I don’t see the case for either allowing the subject to take up more precious school time or central government setting a one-size-fits all solution for a difficult and sensitive subject.”

So you approve of education via hearsay with no boundaries to ensure this is correct? With no across the board standards? So when all of the rumours are true except one, in one school, where they put across old chestnuts like “you can get pregnant if you use the same bathwater” and such like, you’re happy with this?

“My guess is that most sexually active teenagers know how to put on a condom – some simply choose not to – or they are drunk or whatever.”

And why do they choose not to? Do playground rumours extend as far as the real dangers of STDs? From my experience condoms are more linked to pregnancy than STDs when it comes to young attitudes, and with knowledge of the pill and the pervasiveness of it in society that is (purely my opinion) where the lack of safe sex comes from. Education can help change that, leaving it to kids to gossip through to the truth only might.

“My guess is that poor behaviour (drinking, screwing, fighting, truancy etc) among young people in this country is more likely to be a symptom of wider problems than the wrong sort of sex education.”

But providing simple sex education, which doesn’t take up a huge amount of time, or even a reasonable amount of time, isn’t mutually exclusive of working out how to tackle the wider problems either is it? There’s no need to say we should abandon fussing about SRE just because there are bigger fish to fry, we’d never get anything done.

And for what it’s worth my two cents are that a) teenagers aren’t given enough respect to be talked to like an adult about sex, and thus they choose to learn by experience and b) arbitrary ages of consent that hinder like-age relationships only push a rebellious natured section of society to…you know…rebel. But as you may be able to tell, I feel that SRE is something that can help smooth out one of those issues.