Sex education now means whatever schools want it to mean

I’ve never shied away from discussing sex with my children and they’ve always been precocious enough to ask probing questions, usually in public. So when the letter came home from school announcing sex education classes for my then ten-year-old, I was relaxed. And when I later asked him, ‘Did you learn anything you didn’t already know?’, I expected a bored ‘no’. In fact, he said, ‘Yes. Oral sex and masturbation.’ Clearly sex education has moved on since I was at school.

Schools have traditionally covered reproduction in science lessons and, since the 1960s, sex education as a discrete subject has dealt with contraception, sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy. David Perks, head of East London Science School, began teaching in the mid-1980s. ‘Attitudes towards sex education have changed completely since that time,’ he tells me. ‘Back then, you’d be breaking the law if you taught children about homosexuality. Now you have to cover all kinds of relationships.’

More changes are in the pipeline following calls from politicians and campaigners for sex education to be made compulsory and to encompass a wider range of issues. The chief executive of Barnardo’s, Javed Khan, argues this is needed to ‘prevent children being groomed and sexually exploited’. Labour MP Stella Creasy claims better sex education is vital because, ‘addressing the way in which children relate to each other is not just a safe-sex issue, but a safeguarding issue’.

Last year, the then education secretary Justine Greening announced that relationships and sex education would become a statutory requirement for schools. She launched a public consultation on a new curriculum to ‘help equip every young person for life in modern Britain’, to be in place from September 2019. A revamped and mandatory sex education is expected to cover intimate relationships, including friendship and same-sex relationships, sexual consent, domestic violence and online safety.