Sex, lies and education

It is an odd day when Ed Balls is rebuked for pandering to the religious right. Yet that is exactly what happened this week, after the Secretary for Children, Schools and Families introduced an ‘opt-out’ clause in his new education bill which would allow religious schools to teach what they believe about sexual morality alongside the government curriculum.

The Church of England, the Catholic Church, and the Muslim Council of Great Britain, grateful for any concession, have all welcomed the revised bill — even though it will still force Muslim teachers to instruct their pupils about homosexuality in a ‘non-judgmental’ way, and compel Christian schools to provide information on how children can gain ‘access’ to contraception and abortion. But Balls’s critics said he had ‘watered down’ his bill to appease the devout.

Surely, though, the debate about what state-funded religious schools may or may not teach about sex and condoms is a distraction from a more fundamental question: why does the government continue to promote a programme which has proved a catastrophic failure? Since sex education classes were introduced in 1963 — followed by countless initiatives to distribute condoms in state schools — the number of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies among teenagers has rocketed.