Yes
Martin Johnson
Deputy General Secretary, Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Parents are often too embarrassed to educate their children on sex and contraception, and so society demands that schools do it.

Yet it is not only schools that have a responsibility to educate children about sex. Parents have a role to play in educating children, but it is difficult to convey messages in a way children will listen to.

Sex education is to be taught in primary school and is compulsory in secondary schools. The curriculum features contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, but it is very important that teaching sex education is not solely concerned with biology.

Teachers have to emphasise the moral, personal spiritual and legal aspects. It needs to be taught by specialists - the science lesson is not the place for it.

Much of the teaching of sex education is of a high quality and engages pupils. Yet it is very difficult to teach sex and relationships.

Any teaching group will include children who vary hugely in their maturity and sexual awareness. Before they reach secondary school they will have had very different levels of sexual experience.

There are admittedly some problems around the way that sex education is undertaken in schools. Sex education is a difficult area to deal with and many teachers don't enjoy having responsibility for it, particularly when it's not their specialist area.

But can anybody seriously believe that the regrettably high percentage of youngsters in their early teens who are sexually active is really down to what they are taught in schools? The top message in sex education is: don't do it before you are mature enough and in the right kind of relationship.

Anyone who has raised teenagers will understand that youth culture is complex. Kids often have underage sex for status reasons. Often they desperately want to be adult and think that being sexually active is one sign of that.

These attitudes don't come from school, but societal and peer pressures.Consumerist pressures are sexualising young people at an earlier age.

The way that young girls dress for school and the games children play in the playground indicate how sexualised young children have become, affected by the pressures of advertising and media in their lives.

People vastly overestimate the potential for schools to change certain attitudes and types of behaviour which are overwhelmingly derived from outside school.

Teachers can stop children having sex between 9am and 3pm, but they can't control what goes on beyond that.

There is hardly a teenager in the country who doesn't know what contraception is - why they don't use it is a different question.

We have taught them what to do - but they don't do it, and so teenage pregnancy figures are higher than anyone would like. That is not a question that teachers can answer; that is a bigger social issue.

Regrettably, pupils do not always follow the advice that is dished out in classrooms because what goes on outside school is a stronger influence on their behaviour.

No
Leo Bryant
Advocacy Manager, Marie Stopes International

To date, sex education in the UK has been a piecemeal operation. Schools are encouraged to provide sex education but are not given specific directions about what age to start at and what information to include.

There are schools that have done an excellent job, but there are a large number of schools that have left it very late, until age 14 or 15.

Unfortunately this tends to lead to widespread hilarity among pupils and embarrassment for teachers who teach English or maths but suddenly have to talk about condoms.

And at the far end of the spectrum there are a lot of faith-based schools that have chosen not to teach sex education. It's a lottery as to whether a child gets a good sex education at their school.

Things have improved, but my own experience of sex education is still indicative of a lot of schools.

One day our PE teacher got us all together and said: “Boys, you need to be safe, so when you go out make sure that you've got a condom with you.” And that was about it. It was better than nothing, but it should have gone much further.

Marie Stopes International welcomes the Government's announcement that sex education will be introduced in primary schools.

This doesn't mean that five-year-olds will be taught about the mechanics of sex, but rather that they will learn about the differences between boys and girls, and when they're older more information will follow.

In this open environment it becomes much easier to talk about things such as contraception and sexual relationships when the appropriate time comes.

In countries that take this comprehensive and level-headed approach - Holland is the shining example - there are much lower rates of teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections and a higher average age of first intercourse.

We need to adopt a comprehensive approach to sex education in secondary schools, and sex and relationship education should be made a standard part of a curriculum. A strong ethos of respect should be included - respect for other people, particularly boys respecting girls and respect for different sexualities.

Access to youth-friendly family planning services is also necessary. Many young people report feeling inhibited about going to see their GP because they think information will be passed on to their parents.

We need to improve access to modern family planning methods - including injections and implants - by reinvesting in dedicated family planning clinics, which have now virtually disappeared in the UK.

Education is crucial, but it is not the complete picture. We need to get away from a situation in which parents abdicate all responsibility to schools.

When young people are polled about where they want to get information from, the most popular choice is their parents. Parents who leave sex education to schools are leaving a lot to chance.

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