The following article by Norman Wells was published by the Daily Telegraph on 21 July 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5879177/Sex-education-must-not-be-statutory.html
The government’s intention to make PSHE (Personal, Social and Health education – including sex and relationships) a statutory part of the national curriculum is a cause for serious concern for several reasons.
First, it would limit the influence of parents. Making PSHE compulsory would inevitably reduce the influence of parents over what is taught. As one sex education and genito-urinary medicine consultant, Colm O’Mahony, puts it: ‘To improve sex and relationship education, legislation is needed to make it a statutory duty for schools to teach it competently. I think schools will probably even like this, because then parents can be told that this has to be done and the risk of parental complaints is greatly reduced.’
Schools are currently required to consult with parents with regard to their sex education policies and to be responsive to their wishes. However, making PSHE part of the national curriculum would make schools less accountable to parents in what is a particularly sensitive and controversial subject area.
The second concern is that it would limit the discretion of individual schools. At the moment, schools are free to develop their own policies on sex education in line with their own ethos. However, to mandate PSHE centrally would remove discretion from schools at the local level, to a greater or lesser extent. One of the Government’s stated aims is to ensure consistency. This raises the very real possibility that some schools would be forced to compromise their beliefs on controversial areas such as contraception, abortion and homosexuality in the name of consistency. Allowing schools flexibility to teach sex education in line with their ethical and moral values is incompatible with the goal of consistency.
Even primary schools would be affected. While they are currently required to have a policy on sex education, they are under no obligation to teach anything beyond the requirements of national curriculum science. However, if PSHE were to be made statutory at all key stages, the governing bodies and head teachers of primary schools would have no option but to provide sex education.
Not only would the move to make sex education compulsory hamper schools’ discretion and autonomy, it would also run contrary to the government’s proclaimed policy on education. At the end of last year, ministers stated: ‘Recent curriculum developments have been aimed at reducing the statutory core and allowing schools even more autonomy to organise their curriculum.’ Adding PSHE to that core would be a step in the opposite direction.
On top of all these concerns, there is a lack of firm evidence for the effectiveness of sex education. Surprisingly little research has been conducted to evaluate the success of sex education programmes. As the government’s own review group noted in its report last October: ‘[T]here is a dearth of good quality international evidence on SRE [sex and relationships education]. 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… Second, there is such significant variation in the delivery of SRE that it makes comparisons between programmes difficult.’
Not only could compulsory PSHE be ineffective, it could actually lead to parents taking less responsibility for their children. Most of the components of PSHE are the primary responsibility of parents; for example, nutrition and physical activity, drugs, alcohol and tobacco education, sex and relationships education, emotional health and well-being, safety, and personal finance. If PSHE were to become a statutory part of the curriculum, there would be a very real danger that parents would no more consider themselves responsible for these aspects of their children’s physical, emotional and social development than they typically regard themselves as responsible for the teaching of English, maths, history and science.
If we are serious about encouraging parents to take more, and not less, responsibility for their children, the state, through its schools and other agencies, needs to take care not to undermine them by assuming a parental role.