Welsh parents - or rather, parents of children at Welsh schools - will no longer be able to remove their children from sex or religious education lessons. Which initially sounds like a good thing. Surely all children should be given a chance to learn about the birds and the bees, and avoid the embarrassment of having to sit in the corridor with a book while everyone else watches a video about gonorrhoea. I vividly remember teasing a boy named Gerard (not a head start) because his mum hadn’t given permission to go to the lesson about ‘willies’. But now that I’m an adult, I wonder if I might make the same choice that Gerard’s parents did when it comes to sex education.
The assumption is that if you don’t allow your children to go to sex education at school it’s because you’re controlling, or old fashioned, or religious. Because you don’t want your children to learn about sex. But perhaps that’s unfair. In some cases, it must be the opposite.
I started my career in journalism as a sex writer, and as such have spent a lot of my life interviewing experts, reading academic papers, attending workshops and thinking about the spectrum of human sexuality. I have in the past called myself a sexpert (though there is absolutely no bar for that qualification, so anyone could claim the title.) I care about sex a great deal. So the idea of someone else teaching my future progeny about sex is somewhat terrifying.
We can all remember at least one terrible teacher in the history of our education. Whether it’s a Maths teacher who made fractions seem beyond complicated, or an English teacher who destroyed your ability to enjoy poetry, bad teachers exist. Perhaps because they are overworked, overtired or undervalued. But bad nonetheless. It’s a risk you accept when you send your children out into the world. But while I can make my peace with the idea of my little darlings being put off oxbow lakes by a miserable Geography tutor, I cannot accept that someone might mess up their sex education. It’s just too important.
Sex education is, at the moment, not provided by a centralised service. Children in schools will learn the social side of sex education from whoever provides their PHSE lessons, and the biological side from a science teacher. Many of the people who teach sex education will not have had any specialist training in how to impart stigma free, thoughtful information in order to equip young people with a healthy attitude to sex.
My academic education was outstanding, but the quality of sex education was appalling, and predominantly influenced by fire and brimstone - perhaps to be expected at a Catholic boarding school. I was subjected to reems of made up facts such as ‘condoms are only 40% effective’ and ‘the majority of people don’t have sex before marriage’. I was taught that masturbation is a sin, that sex before marriage was always a mistake. I was 18 when I learned how HIV is transmitted or that there were numerous STIs of which I had never previously heard.
Because sex is such a stigmatised conversational topic, steeped in euphemistic language, it’s easy for myths to endure. I’ve met intelligent adults who believe that there is a limit to how many times you can take the morning after pill, or that having an abortion can impact your fertility.
While it is tempting to avoid what can be an uncomfortable conversation, do you really want to trust a complete stranger to do the heavy lifting on your children’s’ sex education? Because until all PSHE teachers are obliged to stick to a prewritten script, created by sexual health professionals, or sex education is taught by visiting experts, I’m just not sure how we can trust something quite so important to them.
It looks likely that England and Scotland will follow Wales and make sex education obligatory for all state educated children. So while you may no longer have the option to take your child out of the lesson, you can make sure that before they attend a PSHE lesson, you’ve already started a conversation about sex, and made them aware that it’s not dirty or shameful, and that they can ask you any questions they might have.