In February 2019, the government announced health education was under review for the first time in twenty years and would be updated in time for the September 2020 academic year. These new guidelines instructed that there would be relationships education from primary school, sex education at secondary school and health education for all ages. Former education secretary Damien Hinds described these reforms as provoked by the influence of social media on young people’s safety online – an issue which an outdated sex and health education curriculum is not equipped to deal with. Despite being overdue, these reforms to sex education guidelines should be welcomed and positively reinforced, but it must not be overlooked that these reforms do not go far enough and the curriculum is neglectful on several issues concerning young people’s sexual health.
Perhaps the most concerning detail about the new guidelines is the absence of the discussion of homosexual relationships. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, 4.1% of 16-24 year olds identified as LGB in 2017 – up from 3.3% in 2015. This translates to one in 25 young people not being taught how to practice safe sex based on their sexual orientation, or roughly one child per classroom. Not only is this indirectly homophobic, but it is also ignorant of a large demographic and proves to be neglectful of the duty of care that school should provide to all students – regardless of their sexuality.
Nevertheless, to dismantle this heteronormative narrative will require reform that exceeds the realms of government policy and a societal shift. In Birmingham, a secular secondary school in 2019 was met with backlash from Muslim parents for their discussion of homosexual relationships in the classroom as part of the school’s health education curriculum. This promptly led to a debate about the rights of religious parents to abstain from their children being taught in a way that conflicts with their religious values, or if by choosing to enrol their children at a secular school, the children should not be able to abstain from a secular education.
In a similar vein, the updated lessons for health and sex education in September 2020 were planned to include awareness of female genital mutilation (FGM). This policy deeply unsettled Christian, Jewish and Muslim conservative groups to the extent that a petition was posted on the parliament e-petitions website requesting the government to ‘Give parents the right to opt their child out of Relationship and Sex Education,’ with the petition accumulating over 100,000 signatures.
This tension must be seen in the context that these are minority groups: in 2018 according to the Office for National Statistics, Muslims accounted for 5.9% of the English population, and according to the 2011 national census, Jews accounted for 0.5% of the population and according to data from Brierley Consultancy, UK church membership has consistently fallen across the Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Orthodox denominations since 2008 (with the Catholic church having the highest membership in 2013 at 1.4 million). While it is undeniable that minority groups are typically those most disadvantaged by government policy and it is equally true that government should be held accountable and scrutinised for implementing damaging policies, I believe there is a need for an updated sex and health curriculum that is inclusive for all to promote the well-being and health of young people.
The consequences of sex education being taught to accommodate religious interests can perhaps be demonstrated by rising rates of STI’s in young people. According to a BBC article, there were reports of nearly half a million STI diagnoses in young people, with cases of gonorrhoea up 249% and cases of syphilis up 165% in the last ten years. Furthermore, nearly half of all new STI diagnoses are of people under 25, and there is a new STI diagnosis in England every 70 seconds. This trend implies that young people are not knowledgeable in sexually transmitted infections or are being misinformed about how to practice safe sex. In summary, this is a failing on the part of the education system. The extent of this failing is intensified when we consider the statistics for non-heterosexual sex – gay men are the group most affected by STIs, in 2018 accounting for 75% of diagnoses of syphilis and nearly 80% of diagnoses of gonorrhoea. This data points towards a failing of sex and health education in primary and secondary schools and reveals the neglect of the curriculum towards students that do not identify as heterosexual.
By no means is this an exhaustive list of the ways sex education needs to be improved, however it is a concise example of the larger problem. Despite the government’s revising of sex and health education in schools, the curriculum still falls short of being informative to the demographic it is trying to teach. To counteract this, further reforms are needed to ensure sex education is representative of all sexual orientations and the curriculum needs to work harder to teach young people how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections. Further discussion needs to be had regarding the precedence of minority views on secular curriculums.