When it comes to sex education in schools in England, teachers and experts agree on one thing: using age alone to determine what topics to cover and what to avoid risks leaving some children more vulnerable.
Headlines announcing the new guidance, to be published under consultation this week, focused on its bar on teaching sex education in primary schools to children earlier than year 5, when they are aged 9.
The revised guidance is also expected to set topics to be discussed in secondary schools, with “explicit” teaching of subjects such as contraception and abortion restricted to year 9.
Jo Morgan, a former teacher who now runs workshops in schools, said the proposed relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) guidance needs to guard against “arbitrary age cutoffs” that fail to support young people when they might need it.
She said: “You want to ensure the curriculum is very age and stage appropriate but you don’t want to be delivering things too late and leaving students at risk.
“Every school will be different, and within a school each class will be different. I was a teacher for many years, teaching sex education, and you can walk into a year 7 class or a year 9 class and have a very different experience with a different class.
“What I’d want to see is a statutory sex education that prioritises the subject and gives teachers the time and resources to tailor a curriculum to their students’ needs. Being generic, one-size-fits all, won’t work.”
Dr Katie Malbon, a consultant paediatrician and chief medical adviser for the teen wellbeing app luna, said: “Paediatricians in the NHS are seeing girls starting their periods earlier, as young as eight years old, so restricting education around sex and contraception until after this point only explains half of the biological story, which is only going to lead to more unanswered questions.
“On top of this, surveys show that 96% of 8- to 11-year-olds have a smartphone, which means they can find ways to access this information in unsafe ways via internet searches and often via secret TikTok accounts – leading to misinformation and potentially distressing content being accessed.”
School leaders also fear restricting topics to fixed age groups would create more difficulties than the government thinks it will solve.
“We have serious concerns about how potential ‘limits’ would work in practice,” said Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers.
“Schools already work hard to ensure that the curriculum and teaching is age-appropriate based on the current government guidance and have the vital flexibility to respond to their own community and the needs of pupils in their schools.
“We cannot ignore the fact that some children and young people are already accessing information from different sources outside of school. It is hard to see how rigid limits on what can be discussed and when would be in the best interests of young people.”
The PSHE Association, the national body for personal, social, health and economic teaching, said the existing curriculum “has had a positive impact” since it was introduced in 2020, and hopes that the revised guidance will not reverse the progress that has been made.
Morgan, chief executive of the consultancy Engendering Change, said one worry is that the revision is more politically motivated than about protecting children. “My concern is that this gives the impression that relationships and sex education is somehow sexualising children and harming them, when in fact what it is doing is protecting them and is absolutely necessary. It’s more important now than ever before.”
