Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
The 90s brought John Major's Back To Basics appeal to traditional moral values, and the moral panic around single mothers also led to a renewed focus on reducing teen pregnancies. This is my era: I recall a video which showed us a real live birth. Several contemporaries also remember this film, and we're all agreed that the image of a baby's bloody head crowning does a wonderful job of putting you off your vagina for a few years. Other experiences range from a teacher unable to actually say the word sex, to one so keen they shared her placenta recipe. In 1999, under a new Labour government, the devolved Scottish government repealed Section 28 (England would follow suit in 2003), and sex education was renamed "Sex and Relationships Education" to emphasize that children needed an understanding of more than the basics.You would have thought that the increased access of children to sexual information on the internet would inevitably have thrown more emphasis on the relationships aspect in the 2000s and beyond; the density of purely sexual information makes the skills for navigating it all the more important. But in 2007, the UK Youth Parliament's Are You Getting It? survey found that, according to young people themselves, the SRE they were receiving was too little, too late, and far too biological.Yet in 2012, a Channel 4 sex education film, Living And Growing, that showed some pretty innocuous cartoon sex, was withdrawn after protests by some parents. Older people still view clear information about sex as inherently corrupting, though Brook's research also shows that young people want sex education, and they know what they want from it: everyday language, better trained teachers, more input from young people and teaching without embarrassment. One young person told them: "I think SRE should be taken more seriously by the government and the Department of Education. I think they need to step up a bit faster… I think SRE would stop people getting into abusive relationships. You should be taught to recognize when something is right."My south-London primary teacher agrees: "It's important to have an open forum to discuss these things. But we have to make sure that the teachers are properly trained and feel totally prepared, and it's got to be a mandatory subject. It's got to be something that we allow proper timetabling for, and that everybody does it in the correct way, and they do it in the same way."If it's taught well, it seems that SRE needn't be mortifying for anyone involved. "You wouldn't believe it, the feedback that I get from the children: the energy and electricity in the room, and the attention, their eyes are on sticks. They cannot believe that I've said the word penis. They really wanna know, and they really listen to everything that you say. It's a real pleasure to teach, and you really feel like, 'I might have taught you something that you'll learn forever.'"Follow Emily on Twitter.In 2007, the UK Youth Parliament's Are You Getting It? survey found that, according to young people themselves, the SRE they were receiving was too little, too late, and far too biological.