Relationship Education in Schools

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Tuesday 1st April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy, and I thank the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) for securing this crucial debate.

I am sure we can all agree that every aspect of a child’s education is important and plays a crucial role in shaping them into well-rounded members of society, but there is a strong argument that no lesson is more valuable in shaping our young people than relationship and sex education. From teaching the basics of puberty, reproduction and how to engage in an adult relationship, to understanding issues around consent, abuse and sexual and gender identity, good-quality relationship and sex education gives children a crucial basis for relationships. It will influence their interactions with others for the rest of their lives.

The reality is that in the UK, we are failing to provide our children with the quality relationship and sex education that they need. That is leading to a number of issues and gaps in their understanding of healthy relationships. Our children’s RSE classes are grossly inadequate and severely outdated, and in some cases, are not taught at all. Despite RSE being compulsory for all primary school pupils, 50% of students reported receiving no RSE classes during the covid lockdown. We are talking, of course, about age-appropriate sex education, because the catch-all term and sensationalist headlines have led some parents to believe that their children are being taught things at certain ages when they are obviously not. That has only helped to fuel certain issues, which has been awful for promoting the healthy and proper teaching of relationship and sex education.

The latest Sex Education Forum report found that only 50% of the 16 to 17-year-olds surveyed rated their RSE classes as “good” or “very good”. That is an improvement on the previous year’s findings, but it still demonstrates that the relationship and sex education of our young people is simply not good enough.

Hopefully, everybody has by now heard about the truly gripping Netflix drama, “Adolescence”. For any Members who have not yet seen it, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. It is a crucial watch for anyone who works with, or indeed, legislates for children, as we do. As we have heard, it touches on a number of issues relating to incel culture, the manosphere and the increasingly concerning attitude towards women and girls that is infecting our young boys.

We often talk about incel culture and toxic attitudes towards women, and indeed men, but we fail to properly come up with solutions on how to tackle them. We land on things such as limiting social media access for young people, placing more onus on social media sites to monitor online chatter and take down harmful posts and videos, or reducing the airtime given to toxic individuals who perpetuate this kind of nonsense. Those are all really useful options that we have to consider and take action on, but they are far from the solution. We really ought to look at the role that education can play in combating misinformed views.

The core of relationship and sex education, beyond the basics of biology, is to teach children about healthy relationships. It is about teaching young girls and boys how to properly respect and interact with someone they are in a relationship with, whether that is romantic, sexual, platonic or familial. Their understanding of these relationships can be informed by good-quality education, and it goes without saying that the opposite is also true. Poor-quality RSE can drastically impact a child’s understanding of relationships and cause untold damage.

We need comprehensive relationship and sex education that is age-appropriate and delivered by well-trained teachers, who could be crucial in combating toxic incel ideology, or who, at the very least, would provide students with correct information that counters the stuff they read on the internet or watch on YouTube. Effective classes can provide a safe, non-judgmental space for children to ask questions. If they do not have that, we risk either leaving their questions unanswered or leaving them to the mercy of some Andrew Tate-esque figures who will fill their heads with poison. Both options are cause for concern, but the latter is nearly unthinkable.

Like all forms of discrimination, misogyny is ignorance. Education is the best tool against ignorance, but it has to be properly funded and teachers have to be properly trained to deliver it. I sincerely hope to hear from the Minister about the concrete steps that the Government will take to invest in RSE. Making it compulsory is important, but proper funding and training mean, ultimately, that it will be done well. It being done badly is almost as bad as not teaching it at all.