Sex education policies in schools: the first hurdle

Abstract

This paper focuses on the production of school sex education policies. At the start of the decade, two moral panics – about high teenage pregnancy rates and AIDS/HIV – coloured UK Government policy formation. The legislative response put control of sex education into the hands of governing bodies of individual schools. As a result, policies vary widely in quality, presenting local education authorities with a monitoring problem even before policy is put into practice. In 1995, Avon Local Education Authority published a document to help schools develop their sex education policies. In 1997, a project to look at the sex education policies of schools in Bristol began, developing a set of criteria to measure their quality. It found that the quality varied from good to superficial, and that the policies held by most secondary schools in Bristol had serious deficiencies. The main problems with the policies included both specific and general issues. Many either failed to address the topics of sexuality and abortion at all, or addressed them only superficially, despite explicit advice from the local education authority that these topics should be covered by schools’ policies. Many did not make it clear that parents have the right to withdraw their child from sex education, nor did they say what would happen to pupils who are withdrawn. Few schools made their commitment to staff training explicit. Most policies failed to deal adequately with the issue of confidentiality. These findings do not mean that sex education lessons in secondary schools are inevitably poor. Nevertheless this study shows that a considered approach to formulation of sex education policies should be one of the first steps included in a national strategy on sex education.