Sex and Relationship Education

Stephen Gilbert Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Andrea Leadsom]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady on that point. Of course, there is some excellent material. As I said, schools are teaching SRE with the very best of intentions. The problem is that there is no licensing regime and no sense of appropriateness of the material. A wide-range of material is used, with varying amounts of intervention and careful analysis by schools, parents and governors.

[Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)]

My hon. Friend says, on the one hand, that she wants to see a national licensing system and, on the other hand, that she thinks schools should be able to decide for themselves. Are those two positions compatible?

[Andrea Leadsom]

I think that they are. I am not talking about a national licensing regime; I am simply talking about material that is used in schools being rated as age appropriate by the BBFC. By the same token, I do not know if my hon. Friend has any children, but if he does and he wanted them to watch 18-rated videos when they were only 12, that would be down to him as a parent. However, he would take such action with the clear understanding that the BBFC does not consider that to be appropriate for his children. Likewise, I will not show my seven-year-old videos that are above the relevant classification. I take the advice of the BBFC and only show my children things that are deemed to be age appropriate for them. My point is that there is no such guidance where SRE is concerned. At the moment, it is left to county councils, schools, governors and parents to make that decision. Parents and governors are often very busy and do not look at the material that is being shown to their children, and some of it is extraordinarily inappropriate.

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[Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Mr Amess, following our many deliberations on the Committee that considered the Localism Bill.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) on securing this important debate. Although I am not a parent, I am an uncle to two children and a godfather to two more. I think we all agree that good parenting is about protecting childhood and preparing children for the future. I should like to explain what that future might be as some young people grow up.

Last year, young people—who form just 12% of the population—accounted for half of all sexually transmitted infections in the UK. Twenty-five per cent. of sexually active 15 to 24-year-olds test positive for chlamydia; 75% of 16 to 24-year-olds report not using condoms when they have sex; in 1990 the proportion of women who reported first intercourse before the age of 16 was about 10%, but 10 years later the figure had doubled to 20%. The equivalent figures for men were 20% and 27%. Teenage pregnancy in the UK has been reducing in recent years, but we still have by far the highest levels in Europe.

Far from trying to move away from teaching sex and relationships, the Government should be doing a lot more to embed this, if Members will excuse the pun, in the curriculum. We talk a lot about the three Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic—but there is a fourth R that is equally important if we are to create happy and confident young people: relationships.

We know that good SRE gives children confidence. It teaches them about their body—how it changes as they grow up—and it gives them the self-awareness and confidence to start to combat some of the sexualised imagery and body fascism prevalent in so much of our media today. It helps to safeguard them by equipping them with the skills to negotiate safe sex and decent relationships—to understand, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) said, when their relationship would not be considered normal and, at an extreme, when it might be considered abusive. It also helps them later, through biology lessons and other parts of the secondary school curriculum, to understand how to negotiate the kind of safe sex that will help to stop them from becoming one of the statistics we have all read about. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire that SRE must be appropriate and sensitively delivered and that we must ensure that schools do not use inappropriate material, but I cannot agree with the “Too much, too young” campaign, whose tips on actions for parents at the back of its campaign material include seven ways of monitoring their child’s SRE, but do not include one positive way of talking to children about relationships and the consequences of unprotected sex.

That is quite ironic. Mr Amess, you may remember that The Specials had a number one record in 1980 called “Too Much Too Young”. I will not sing it, but it ends with the following lyrics:

“Ain’t you heard of contraception

D’you really wanna programme of sterilisation

Take control of the population boom

It’s in your living room

Keep a generation gap

Try wearing a cap.”

In the 1980s, when teenage pregnancies were rising significantly, that political song of the time said to a generation that relationship counselling and education needs to be embedded much further into the curriculum.

[Andrea Leadsom]

On a point of information, what do those song lyrics say about relationship education? Absolutely nothing, surely. That is a complete trivialisation and part of the problem, not part of the solution. There is no relationship guidance in those lyrics.

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[Stephen Gilbert]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s point. I am trying to make the point that the consequence of not embedding relationship guidance at primary school level leads to the consequences of teenage pregnancies and the rise in sexually transmitted infections that so damage our society. We have to make this a continuous process, which is why I agree with Opposition Members who asked the Government to put the programme on a statutory basis.

It is a shame that debates such as this perpetuate some myths. The first is that sexual relationship education does not work. It does work, when it is established, properly resourced, appropriate and embedded in the curriculum. The second is that it leads to young people engaging in more sexual activity. All the evidence is to the contrary. Continuous, proper sexual relationship education actually helps people better negotiate the point at which they want to take part in sexual activities.

We have the notion, mentioned by my hon. Friend, that parents are excluded from the process, that somehow they do not have the opportunity to monitor and consider what their children are exposed to. Most surveys suggest that eight out of 10 parents think that their children should be receiving sexual relationship education. I think 0.04% choose to opt out at the moment.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I have to make the point again. I do not want to show one-upmanship—having three kids to my hon. Friend’s none—but the fact is that most parents now work. Therefore, when the school invites them in on a Monday morning to come to see what the children are to be taught—when they have an important meeting with their boss—the tendency is to think that school knows best and to let it go ahead. I agree with my hon. Friend in principle that parents have the chance, but in reality life gets in the way. That is why it is important to ask parents to engage and not just, by default, go along with whatever is being taught.

[Stephen Gilbert]

Again, I think my hon. Friend is trying to find disagreement where there may be none. As I said earlier, I think the materials should be appropriate and they need to be monitored. I like her suggestion of a classification system. However, I do not like her suggestion that parents could opt out of something that is so important and such a fundamental part of being a fully functioning human being in the 21st century.

[Alison Seabeck]

We are exploring a very important point. As the mother of two daughters—one of whom went on to teach in primary school and was responsible for sex education—I think it is important that we can trust our teachers to understand what is going on in the classroom and what the children can cope with. As a busy parent, I did not get to the Monday morning meetings either; I trusted my daughters’ teachers. Now we have access to the worldwide web, and there are very good sites to which parents could be pointed by the school, saying, “This is what we intend to teach your children. If you cannot come along, look at the internet.” A vast number of parents—certainly the working ones—would have access to a computer and be able to do that.

[Stephen Gilbert]

The hon. Lady makes an eloquent point. The explosion and proliferation of modern technology make such supervisory duties much easier for all of us. In future, perhaps she will be able to do so in the Chamber from her iPad.

[David Simpson]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the research papers with which we have been presented include an article from The Times Educational Supplement of 13 May 2011, which makes it clear that almost six in 10 parents do not think that sex education should be taught to children at school?

[Stephen Gilbert]

There are occasions when hon. Members have to say, “On that point I have to disagree.” Why would one not teach geology? Should parents be given an opt-out from geology or from history? If we are to create happy, confident, rounded citizens, we need to be embedding sexual relationship education from the earliest possible age. Of course, we need to do so in an appropriate way; it must be suitably delivered, well resourced and properly monitored. However, we must move away from the “No sex, please, we’re British” attitude, which has so damaged individuals and segments of our society. We need to demystify sex and relationship education. We need to see it as a spectrum and I think we need to move it on to a statutory basis. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s views on that. Rather than the three Rs, we should think of a fourth R: relationship and sex education.

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[Pamela Nash]

I thank the hon. Lady for that explanation. I am talking about relationships. I suggest that no images of sex between a man and a woman, between two men or between two women should be shown to very young children, of four or five. However, I do think that it is appropriate to teach young children about relationships, including same-sex relationships.

[Mr George Howarth in the Chair]

[Stephen Gilbert]

Without wishing to continue the love-in, I agree absolutely with everything that the hon. Lady is saying. As I said earlier, I have a four-year-old nephew who, from what he has said to me, is aware or beginning to become aware of sex as well as relationships. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to deal with the world in which we live, not the world in which we would like to live?

[Pamela Nash]

I entirely agree. I have had similar experiences with the young children in my family. I have stories about comments on sex and relationships that they have made, even at the ages of three and four, that it would not be appropriate to tell here. They are inquisitive and they have that knowledge. They watch television and hear people speaking. They see people around them who are in relationships that might be different from what they see at home, and they should be taught that that is okay and why it exists.

I have been looking this morning at the UN convention on the rights of the child. Article 29 refers to the following:

“The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin”.

That is one of the rights of the child, and I believe that good relationship education is part of it and will prepare young people for a normal life.

Children must also be prepared to deal with their own sexuality. The high levels of self-harm among homosexual teenagers have been well documented. Again, high-quality and age-appropriate sex and relationship education will help to tackle that heartbreaking problem.

Let us be clear: sex education is not about the sexualisation of children, nor is it intended to promote promiscuity or a certain kind of lifestyle above another. Taught well, sex education is about teaching children the facts of life and how to handle their personal relationships.

The challenge we face is that SRE is patchy and inadequate. An Ofsted report in 2010 said that the quality of PSHE is poor in a quarter of schools and that teachers lack the knowledge and skills to teach pupils the subject effectively. My experience of sex education, which was not so long ago, involved an expert visiting my school and telling the 14-year-old girls in my class that they should not let boys touch them from the neck down. That was the message in its entirety, and I do not believe it was entirely adequate.

There is strong support from parents for teaching SRE in schools. A poll run by the Department for Children, Schools and Families in 2009—I am sorry these are the most recent figures I could get—showed that eight in 10 parents thought their children should receive SRE lessons, while only 0.04% had withdrawn their children from SRE. To conclude, we need high-quality, age-appropriate and mandatory SRE in all primary and secondary schools throughout the United Kingdom.