While not supporting the campaign itself both Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy PM Nick Clegg stated the need for updating the guidance for teachers in separate interviews. Mr Cameron said that he was ‘grappling’ with how to talk to his children about this issue and that teaching needed to ‘reflect the problems of the internet.’ Cameron’s advisor on family issues and chief executive of the Mother’s Union, Reg Bailey, said the current guidance was still ‘in the dark ages.’ However, education secretary Michael Gove is not supporting any changes. Mr Gove said: ‘As soon as you create a new set of guidance to respond to new and challenging circumstances there is a risk that you crystallise something that new technology or changing social mores will render time-bound.’
Jason Royce from Romance Academy believes that schools need to focus on relationships as well as sex. ‘In the end, all sex education begins at home and on the street; young people tend to mimic the behaviour they see modelled. Schools can’t take all the blame! sex education is not just about sex. Safer sex begins with safe relationships. Making relationship-positive SRE a compulsory part of the secondary curriculum is a no-brainer, because currently online porn is doing a pretty good job of raising a generation on the worst sex education you could ever imagine. This has got to stop.’
Alongside the the Telegraph’s campaign was the results of a wide-ranging survey by the NSPCC which, among other things, showed that 28 per cent of school pupils believe pornography dictates how young people should behave in relationships. In addition to this, a further 32 per cent said porn ‘sometimes’ dictated how they acted in relationships. The NSPCC’s Claire Lilley said: ‘Girls feel they have to look and perform like “porn stars” to be liked and valued by the boys.’ The survey also showed that young people are three times more likely to go online to find out about sex and relationships than they are to ask their parents or carers.
The Golddigger Trust’s chief executive Beth Stout encourages youth workers to do something about the state of sex education: ‘We’ve seen the huge effect of porn in the attitudes and actions of many of the young people we work with. The NSPCC survey showed that 52 per cent young people said they went somewhere else other than their parents or online to learn about sex and relationships— wouldn’t it be great if the place they did learn about sex was from their Christian youth workers?’
Sex education – Your views
We asked our Twitter followers and Facebook friends what they thought of the current state of sex education in schools. Here are their responses:
@vikki_thomas Considering most teachers get no training in this area before they teach it, I think they do the best they can!
@SimoninSurrey Sex-ed is not delivered in the right way. Too often it is about the mechanics and not enough about relationships.
@NaiStanton It needs to be in the context of relationships education and not separating the physical from the emotional.
@GoodNewsJunkie It’s definitely a good thing, but we weren’t assessed on it, so the teachers didn’t give it the time / energy it really requires.
Decent sex education has been lacking in schools for years. I think children need to learn all about sex rather than just what goes where and look at the ramifications of having it and the over-sexualisation of the media. Rowan Wyatt
