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.