Misty Media Sex Blog

November 7th 2005, 03:41 Jeff Sela

The QCA has published new guidance for teachers in UK schools on how to teach Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE). Including, of course, sex education.

The actual biological sex education (how babies are made, etc.) is already part of the science curriculum which schools are required to teach all children. But an Ofsted report in January criticized schools for failing to deliver adaquate PSHE. In November last year research (PDF) by the FPA indicated that kids were unhappy about it too:

Evidence consistently shows that high quality SRE can lead to young people starting to have sex later, and helps to reduce teenage pregnancy rates and the rate of sexually transmitted infections. Research also shows that effective SRE should be initiated early, before patterns of sexual behaviour are established. However, SRE provision by schools is variable in content and quality. Young people report that they receive SRE which is too little, too late and too biological, and that they want to learn more about emotions and relationships.

So hopefully this will help move things along, but there's going to be a lot of resistance to any increase in sex education in some areas, and a lot of schools that don't have teachers who can deliver it adequately. This kind of thing needs to be made compulsory so that kids with religious parents, or who go to the wrong school, don't get disadvantaged. There needs to be a decent programme of training teachers to be able to handle what many will find a difficult subject.