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 PrintableVersion Too much, too soonDoes sex education work?Extravagant claims are made for sex and relationship education. According to the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF): ‘We know that many young people feel they are not getting sex and relationship education which provides them with the knowledge and skills they need to make safe and well-informed choices, and delay sex until they are ready. Evidence shows that quality SRE has a direct impact on reducing teenage pregnancy rates and is an essential strand of the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy.’1 In making his announcement that SRE is to become compulsory in schools from the age of five, Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, asserted that it would help to reduce rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection.2 The past three decades have witnessed a substantial increase in the provision of SRE and it has never been easier for teenagers to obtain contraception without their parents knowing, yet the UK still has the highest rate of teenage conceptions in Western Europe, and sexually transmitted infection rates have continued to rise. An examination of an ‘enhanced sex education programme’ found that, while the programme increased young people’s knowledge, it had no discernable effect on sexual activity.3 There is no evidence that starting sex education in primary school would produce results that secondary school sex education has failed to deliver. Written answers to parliamentary questions indicate that the DCSF has not commissioned or evaluated research on the impact of SRE on the attitudes and lifestyle choices of young people;4 neither has it made any assessment of the effectiveness of SRE.5 It therefore remains unclear precisely what the Department would regard as ‘good SRE’ and what it would consider constitutes ‘best practice’. As the government’s own review group noted in its report: ‘[T]here is a dearth of good quality international evidence on SRE. A literature review of the international evidence that does exist confirms that it is difficult to be precise about the impact of SRE, for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is not always clarity about what the objectives of SRE are. For example, do we judge the success of SRE in terms of reduced unplanned pregnancies and STIs, or through improvements in the quality of sexual and other relationships that young people experience? Second, there is such significant variation in the delivery of SRE that it makes comparisons between programmes difficult.’6 An editorial in the British Medical Journal noted: ‘Most studies on sex education programmes in schools examine intermediate outcomes only, such as pupil satisfaction or reported condom use. This often facilitates premature false claims of success, whereas more robust outcome measures, such as rates of terminations, unplanned conceptions and STIs, show no benefit.’7 The goal of sex education?One of the governing principles for Sir Alasdair Macdonald’s independent review of PSHE was that: ‘Effective provision should lead to improved outcomes for children in terms of knowledge, skills, understanding and behaviour’. But, what is ‘effective provision’ and how will it impact the behaviour of young people? Does it mean contraceptive use? Or is it measured in terms of sexual abstinence? If, as a result of statutory sex education, there were a marked increase in the sexual activity of young people, but they all used a condom every time, would that be viewed as a success or a failure? Sir Alasdair Macdonald’s report makes frequent references to ‘good practice’, ‘effective practice’, a ‘consistently high quality experience of PSHE’, the ‘underlying aims of PSHE’, and PSHE that ‘meets pupils’ needs’, but no attempt is made to define such terms.8 Yet definition in this area is vitally important. When the claim is made that abstinence education ‘doesn’t work’ or that contraceptive-based sex education ‘does work’, it may just be that the person making the assertion has a different idea of what ‘working’ means and does not regard saving sex for a lifelong marriage to a person of the opposite sex as a desirable objective. A paper published by the BMA Foundation for AIDS considered: ‘Except in very large studies, it may be unrealistic to expect research to be able to show that school sex education has any directly measurable behavioural or health outcomes, in view of all the other factors which influence sexual health and lifestyles.’ It also stated that there was ‘not a consensus as to whether increasing ages at first intercourse or decreasing numbers of partners are always desirable outcomes’.9 Dr. Faith Spicer, the founder and director of the London Youth Advisory Centre (now the Brandon Centre), was among those who did not regard increasing levels of sexual activity among young people as an undesirable outcome. Addressing a conference on ‘The Consequences of Teenage Sexual Activity’ organised by Brook, she stated: ‘The main task of sex education in the past was to inform the uninformed. Now, I think the main task is to help young people find out what they feel, how they feel and take responsibility for themselves. But it is also doing another very good task. It is breaking away from the idea that sex is dirty, taboo-ridden, bad, into seeing it as something good, valuable and life-enhancing, and that’s why I think that sex education can, of course, increase sexual activity, but it isn’t necessarily harmful if it does that.’10 What to aim for?19-year-old Simon Demetriou provides us with a striking example of the ‘new morality’ when he writes: ‘[A]s long as you are having sex responsibly, there is no reason that you should be concerned with… peripheral things [like marriage and moral repercussions]… If taught well, ‘moral behaviour’ should be no more or less than respect and openness for and with your partner.’11 He pays tribute to his secondary school for sex education lessons that were ‘relevant, rational and, best of all, not sanctimonious’. In reality, however, it is simply not possible to divorce sexual responsibility from marriage and morality. Mr. Demetriou suggests that ‘respect and openness for and with your partner’ is the only moral framework required; no more, no less. But what kind of respect is involved in engaging in a sexual relationship for ‘as long as we feel this way about each other’, while running the risk of passing on an STI with possible lifelong consequences? It is common among sex educators to define the goal of SRE as providing young people with information so that they are empowered to make ‘informed choices’. But that is an inadequate and unworthy goal because it allows for young people under the age of consent to make the ‘informed choice’ of engaging in unlawful intercourse just as much as it allows them to make an ‘informed choice’ to wait. The advocates of ‘informed choice’ are setting their sights far too low. It is not ‘informed choices’ we should be aiming for, but wise, moral and lawful choices. What about the Netherlands?Advocates for the expansion of sex education frequently hold up the Netherlands as a model. They attribute the comparatively low Dutch teenage pregnancy rates to earlier and more explicit sex education. However, there is no mandatory curriculum or uniform approach to SRE in the Netherlands and, in practice, delivery varies considerably from school to school, just as it does in the UK. There is no evidence to suggest that low teenage conception rates in the Netherlands are attributable to SRE in Dutch schools.12 A more convincing explanation for the lower rates of teenage pregnancy is to be found in the far more traditional patterns of family life found in the Netherlands. Compared with the UK, the Netherlands has a far lower proportion of lone-parent families, out-of-wedlock births, divorces, and mothers in full-time employment. It also provides teenage mothers with lower welfare benefits, and a stigma continues to be attached to teenage pregnancy.13 This is an edited extract from Too Much, Too Soon by Norman Wells, Director of Family Education Trust, and is used with permission of the publisher. Copies of Too Much, Too Soon are available for £3.50 (inc. p&p) from Family Education Trust, Jubilee House, 19-21 High Street, Whitton, Twickenham, Middlesex, TW2 7LB (020 8894 2525, http://www.famyouth.org.uk). (Discounts available for multiple copies.) References1 Department for Children, Schools and Families, ‘Review of Sex and Relationship Education Delivery’, Press Notice 2008/0029, February 25 2008. © Evangelicals Now - September 2009 |
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