One cheer for the government's new sex education guidance

Relationships and Sex Education should be ditched for good

Photo by Alan Rodriguez on Unsplash

This week, the government published its published updated guidance for schools on the teaching of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE). It is a response to reports raising the alarm about children being taught age-inappropriate, sexualised content and bogus gender ideology.

Much of the guidance is a rowing back on the more extreme practices that had crept into some schools at the behest of activist teachers or LEAs or the franchising out of RSE to external organisations. The guidance makes clear that: 

• Sex education should not be taught to children before Year 5 (age 9) and, from then on, should be taught from a purely scientific standpoint. Relationships education should not include topics which involve explaining different forms of sexual activity. 

• Parents have the right to see the resources that are being used to teach their children about relationships, health and sex in all circumstances .

• Schools should not teach about the broader concept of gender identity. Gender identity is a highly contested and complex subject. 

• Schools should be clear that an individual must be 18 before they can legally reassign their gender. This means that a child’s legal sex will always be the same as their biological sex and, at school, boys cannot be legally classified as girls or vice versa.

• Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise.

This is sensible. It returns some degree of power to parents and prevents schools from encouraging children to question their gender identity.

However, it is worth noting that this advice is only needed because a previous iteration of the RSE curriculum, introduced in 2019 and which came into effect in 2021, paved the way for a more explicit and politicised approach. Backed by Theresa May and implemented under Boris Johnson’s premiership, the 2019 curriculum was influenced by groups like Stonewall as well as international organisations such as the World Health Organisation and UNESCO. Its driving principle was to help children discover and celebrate their gender identity and sexuality. Its aim was to socialize children into not assuming that cis-gendered people, heterosexual relationships or the traditional family were, in any way, considered ‘normal’. In other words, it is on the current government’s watch that RSE expanded its remit to such a concerning extent.

Now,  a number of teachers are arguing that new guidance is unnecessary - they claim there is no problem with current practice. They say that RSE has not been inappropriately sexualising children and parents have always been able to view resources.

It is worth remembering that mother Clare Page was told by a judge that she could not access the teaching materials used in her daughter’s school’s sex-education lessons. Her campaign to discover what children were being taught began in 2021, when her daughter returned home claiming to be ‘sex positive’ and arguing that heteronormativity was ‘a bad thing’. Page discovered that her daughter’s school uses resources provided by the School of Sexuality Education. She then tried to use freedom-of-information laws to demand the material, then used in around 300 schools, be made publicly available. But the School of Sexuality Education refused to publish its lesson plans. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) backed this decision, ruling that the charity’s commercial interest in keeping its resources private outweighed the public interest in publishing them. Page appealed. But a first-tier tribunal upheld the ICO’s judgement. If parents have always been able to see classroom resources, did Clare Page just imagine this legal battle?

It is also worth remembering just how extreme some RSE lessons were. As I wrote for The Spectator in 2023:

Drawing penises and making vulvas out of Play-Doh might not be the reply most parents expect when they pose the question, ‘What did you get up to at school today?’ But with even the youngest children now encountering explicit content and bizarre teaching methods in mandatory sex education classes, it is an answer more might come to hear.

Masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, fisting, rough sex, gender queer, polyamory. When the school curriculum can be confused with the dropdown menu of a pornography website, something has gone wrong. But it is not just highly sexualised content that is concerning parents, they are worried about ideologically-driven and scientifically-inaccurate lessons in gender identity, too.

Children are being taught that people have a gender identity distinct from their sex and that – despite what their biology teachers may have said – sex itself is just a label randomly assigned at birth. This allows pupils to be introduced to dozens of gender identities: from non-binary and agender, to demigirl and boi. Lessons reiterate the importance of respecting someone’s gender identity, including their preferred pronouns.

At the same time, research conducted for Policy Exchange found that only 28 per cent of secondary schools are reliably informing parents as soon as a child discloses feelings of gender distress. They also found that 25 per cent of schools are teaching children that some people ‘may be born in the wrong body’ and almost three quarters of schools teach that people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex. 

Again, unless law courts, the Spectator, Policy Exchange, the Centre for Social Justice, many concerned parents and teachers, The Telegraph and some MPs were all conspiring to invent alarmist stories about sex education we must assume that at least some of this has actually happened. 

For all these reasons, the latest government guidance is to be welcomed. 

However, with relationships education now a compulsory part of the school curriculum for all primary and secondary-age children, we now have a time-tabled lesson in search of content. The government’s RSE guidance moves from telling schools what they should not teach, to advising them on what should be covered. And it is truly depressing. Here are some excerpts:

• Pupils should learn about harmful sexual behaviours, that sexual violence and sexual harassment are never acceptable, and can include a wide range of unwanted behaviours, including sexual innuendos, suggestive comments, questions about a person’s sex life and sexual advances.

• It is important to foster respectful relationships between boys and girls, and schools should be alive to issues such as everyday sexism, misogyny, homophobia and sex stereotypes, and should take action to build a culture where any occurrences are identified and tackled. Pupils should understand the importance of challenging harmful beliefs and attitudes and should understand that sexism and misogyny can be linked to violence against women and girls. 

• Some pupils may be exposed to harmful behaviours, including online, which may normalise harmful or violent sexual behaviours. This can include exposure to sexist and misogynistic influencers, which may normalise sexual harassment and abuse. Teachers should be aware of risk factors such as existing vulnerabilities, bullying, peer pressure, or low self-esteem, that may make some boys more vulnerable to harmful online content and encourage pupils to consider how this content may be harmful to both men and women.

We may have ditched gender ideology but, it seems, political activists are still in charge at the Department for Education. Lessons designed to tackle misogyny, homophobia and ‘stereotypes’ (read: transphobia) are indoctrination pretending to be education. The prejudices of London-based, 20-something-year-old professional feminists have been unleashed upon the school curriculum. Of course, teachers should tackle specific instances of bullying or harassment. But that is very different to designing lessons that pre-empt problems and aim to re-engineers children’s attitudes.

Alongside this politicisation comes a dose of cod-psychology. The guidance asserts children should be taught:

• that most friendships have ups and downs, and that these can often be worked through so that the friendship is repaired or even strengthened, how to manage conflict, and that resorting to violence is never right. 

• how to recognise who to trust and who not to trust, how to judge when a friendship is making them feel unhappy or uncomfortable, how to handle these situations

• the benefits of physical exercise, time outdoors, and helping others for wellbeing and happiness. Simple self-care techniques, including the importance of rest, time spent with friends and family and hobbies, interests and community participation. 

• the range and scale of emotions (e.g. happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, nervousness) that they might experience in different situations. Pupils should understand that worrying and feeling down are normal and affect everyone at different times and are not in themselves a sign of a mental health condition

• how to recognise feelings and use varied vocabulary to talk about their own and others’ feelings. 

• how to judge whether what they are feeling and how they are behaving is appropriate and proportionate. 

• that change and loss, including bereavement, can provoke a range of feelings; that grief is a natural response to bereavement, and everyone grieves differently.

• that it is common to experience mental health problems, and early support can help resolve problems.  

Teaching friendship through lesson plans and worksheets is a bit like teaching someone how to cook without food or an oven. Children learn about friendships by making friends (falling out with them, making up, falling out again, and making new friends). For this to happen they simply need to be left to get on with it. If schools have got time to waste on theoretical instruction in friendship, they need to lengthen play time or shorten the school day. 

The same can be said for lessons in grief and mental health. No one learns how to deal with grief by memorising five bullet points for a test next Monday. And few teachers have the professional training in grief counselling or psychotherapy to be offering sessions to 30 pupils en masse. The problem with offering crude mental health interventions to all children is that problems can be created where none previously existed. Having children dwell on their emotional responses to every situation is not normal. It is how they come not just to imbibe an adult vocabulary of ‘stress’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’ but to apply these labels to themselves. The danger is that children move from perfectly fine, to worried-well, to plain worried. 

The government’s new RSE guidance is to be welcomed for ditching gender ideology and overly-sexualised content. But civil servants have filled the gaps in the timetable with something which is - if possible - even worse. Children may be spared lectures on the 73 different gender identities but instead they will be taught they are victims of misogyny who need to practice self-care and check in one their emotions. Lessons in anal sex may, at very least, have allowed some children to bond over embarrassed giggling. Being taught to watch out for sexual harrassment and grief-gone-wrong is just depressing.

Of course, the real problem being exposed here is that hardly anyone in our education system - from the Education Secretary, through to bureaucrats in the Department for Education, university schools of education, head teachers and class teachers - has any idea what education is for. Worthless lessons in managing-your-feelings are on the timetable because schools have abandoned an intellectual mission, connected to the transmission of knowledge. 

If the Conservative Party really wants to make a bold move in defence of education, it should stop tinkering around with Relationships and Sex Education and ditch the wretched subject altogether. I’d suggest replacing it with two things. First, get children reading great works of literature. They will learn far more about the range of human emotions from a Shakespeare play or a George Elliot novel than by completing a million ‘relationships’ worksheets. Second, free up more of the day for children to play - unsupervised, without phones and outdoors. Do these two things and children will be happier, healthier and better educated.