Let's talk about sex
IF WE needed a reminder that even in the 21st century many of us are uncomfortable talking about sex, one was offered up last week by Nick Clegg. Even the straight-laced leader of a middle-of-the-road political party was caught in a stammer when asked how many sexual partners he'd had. The answer, when out it stumbled, was "no more than 30". Cue much sniggering, and no little embarrassment for Clegg, who was accused of either being trapped into making a gaffe or cack-handedly trying to give himself a Jack the Lad image.
If a 42-year-old married family man who also leads a major political party squirms when discussing sex, is it any wonder that our children don't seem to be able to get the message?
As this newspaper reveals today, an official report prepared for the Scottish Government presents a pretty bleak picture of the way that many kids get their first formal sex education in lessons in schools – as opposed to the misinformation of the playground. Having looked at the way the subject is covered in hundreds of Scottish schools, Dr Edwin van Teijlingen, a public health expert at Aberdeen University, condemned the service overall as inadequate.
Van Teijlingen pointed to a lack of staff training and serious gaps in teachers' knowledge as the reasons why the sex education curriculum is failing to teach pupils how and when to have safe and healthy sexual relationships. This is not a minor problem. It is deadly serious in a country where about 700 girls aged 13 to 15 and another 8,000 older teenagers get pregnant each year. As well as one of the worst teen pregnancy rates in the western world, Scotland has an abysmal record on sexual health: in 2007 diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections rose, with 17,926 cases of chlamydia and 1,290 cases of herpes.
And these are just the most obvious consequences of an ill-considered approach to sex, which, in part at least, must be attributable to a poor starting knowledge of the subject. There are others, and they are not all about lives scarred by disease or by unwanted pregnancies or abortions. Young people who are not properly educated about the subject may be less likely to go on to have a fulfilling sex life. This, in turn, may make their relationships less happy and more fragile.
So it is important that we take sex education seriously and give it its due place on the school curriculum. At the moment, too many schools go their own way – as they are entitled to under the current system by which the government merely gives them "guidance" on how to teach the subject. This means that schools that have targets to meet on the three Rs quite understandably concentrate their resources on those areas, rather than in areas of social and moral education, which are not tested in league tables.
It also means that there is less incentive for head teachers to recruit and properly train counsellors to teach the subject. That leaves ill-prepared and often embarrassed teachers to face the questions of inquisitive children (many of whom will already have learned enough from friends and the media to make sure they maximise that embarrassment).
Scottish schools rightly take great pride in the flexibility of the curriculum they follow – indeed, teachers have resisted efforts to make it more "national" and less adaptable to local needs. But sex education is not an area in which teachers should ever need to adapt lessons: surely the birds and the bees are the same the world over.
There must therefore be a more coherent teaching package, which is designed to give all children the information they need about sex. This goes for Catholic schools too, which have for too long decided that they know best on this issue. Only parents should have the right to opt children out, whether for religious, social or moral grounds.
Hopefully, most will see the benefits of a truly national programme, which is tailored to provide the right amount of information at each stage of life. The current Government guidelines do attempt to do this, although revisions may be necessary to take into account the fact that, whether we like it or not, our children learn about sex from other sources much earlier than earlier generations did.
In a country in which a 12-year-old girl became pregnant two years ago, we should err on the side of giving too much information, rather than too little.