Dissertation draft

29 Jan Dissertation draft

Posted at 16:38h in Journalism Project, Level 6 by Russell

My piece looks at how the Sex and Relationships Education guidance of 2000 has failed students in the past and evaluates how successful the new guidance will be should it be passed in parliament. I decided to look at this story specifically from the angle of consent as it is a very relevant topic right now that is constantly developing. I had a degree of difficulty with finding interviews for my piece due to it being an intimate and personal topic. I was very careful with my approach to potential interviewees and assured them of their rights to remain anonymous, which resulted in me getting a handful of detailed and brutally honest respondents. In terms of my audience, I can see this piece being published somewhere like The Guardian. I wanted it to be a good mixture of personal stories and factual information and so would say the intended audience would be liberal 18+ adults.

Sex and Relationships Education: an update?

            New Sex and Relationships Education guidelines have been proposed but will they be enough to teach our children about consent?

Ally*, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of her story, vividly remembers her teaching of Sex and Relationships Education as shameful. “It [having an abortion] was taught through biology and it covered the anatomical aspects and that consequences mean babies. I remember the teacher expressing how terrible and shameful it was to behave so recklessly and to end the life of another being.” This subject was particularly difficult for Ally to sit through at the time because earlier that year she had entered into a non-consensual relationship that had ended with her getting an abortion. “He didn’t respect my boundaries and wishes, he wasn’t always careful despite me once crying about not wanting to get pregnant, and he didn’t always get consent”. Ally said that what she needed was a supportive environment that didn’t shame her or her decisions, but she didn’t find that at school. She can provide a long list of what she wanted, and needed, to be taught. “I wish we had learned about attraction, power imbalances, consent, how to be assertive, what we really want in a partner, what love and respect looks like, and how to love and take care of ourselves.”

The curriculum that Ally was taught under, and is still taught today, is based on the Sex and Relationships Education Guidance issued in July 2000. The aim of these guidelines is to teach pupils about the “nature and importance of marriage for family life and bringing up children” and to “understand human sexuality, learn the reasons for delaying sexual activity, and the benefits to be gained from such delay, and learn about obtaining appropriate advice on sexual health”. These guidelines were issues 19 years ago, and in 2013 an Ofsted report concluded that one-third of schools needed to improve their teaching of Sex and Relationships Education. This has called for a Sex and Relationships Education update.

Between November 2017 and March 2018, The Department for Education held a wide-ranging stakeholder engagement process. This included discussions with national and local groups who represented teachers and education professionals who could divulge information to the government regarding what was currently lacking from the Sex and Relationships Education guidelines. One of those meetings was “The APPG on Sexual and Reproductive Health” chaired by Baroness Barker, at which representatives from several sexual health organisations, such as the PSHE Association, discussed what constituted as good quality Sex and Relationships Education. At the same time as this, a call for evidence was launched to involve the public in updating the guidelines. This alone received 23,000 responses. The information gathered helped towards drawing the new set of guidelines which were issued for consultation on the 19th July 2017 and the results of which will be published early this year.

At 20 years old I’m trying to put a condom on a cucumber in a test to see how well I was taught the practicalities of contraception during my Sex and Relationships lessons. I just can’t seem to figure out how to do it. I’m desperately trying to think back to my Sex Education lessons to try and remember what they taught me about contraception, but all I seem to remember is at the age of 16 turning to my friend as a condom was passed around the class to let her know how horrible and slimy it felt. The more I think about those Sex Education classes the more I realise how very little I know. I can give you a brief description of the menstrual cycle, how a baby is naturally conceived, and a few types of contraception, but ask me to do something as simple as put a condom on and I’m completely lost.

My lack of knowledge about sex seems to be shared with a number of students. In 2018 The Sex Education Forum and the National Education Union surveyed 1,000 English students aged 16-17 and asked them to rate their Sex and Relationships Education. 52% of those students said that they believed more time should be spent on teaching Sex and Relationships Education and 34% said that they wanted the subject to be taught more seriously. I carried out my own investigation with a focus group of 13 students aged 15-18 which found that 69% of students didn’t feel like they had a complete Sex and Relationships Education knowledge, and 100% of which felt like they weren’t given adequate Sex and Relationships Education at school.

When the #MeToo campaign went viral in 2017 sexual harassment and the taboo surrounding discussing sex began to lift. The movement was intended to demonstrate the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault across the world and this led to multiple allegations against dominant people in society- Harvey Weinstein was one of the most notorious cases to be uncovered. Additionally, the number of police recorded rape victims in 2017 increased by 14% from 2016, which points towards sexual harassment and sexual crimes becoming increasingly prevalent and heard of in our society. Which is part of the reason why 19-year old activist Milly Evans set up her website and campaign ISupportSexEducation. At the age of 16, Milly started campaigning for Sex and Relationships Education to be included in her school: “I started in my school where we had very little sex ed at all and I was asking for us to have more talks”. Her enthusiasm for better Sex and Relationships Education comes from personal experience. Milly frequented an all-girls school and from the ages of 10 to 17, she would be harassed going to and from school by the boys at the neighbouring all boys school. “They would shout comments, get on one knee and block your way, it never happened to me but a lot of people I would walk with would get groped and grabbed at.” Despite complaining about this harassment to both her own school and the surrounding schools, nothing was done. So, she asked herself: “how do you nip this in the bud before it actually happens? And it’s sex ed. It’s about respect, it’s about consent, and it’s about treating other people the way you want to be treated.”

Milly began to seriously realise how damaging a lack of Sex and Relationships Education was when she got into a relationship that was “very unpleasant.” She explains “he wasn’t respecting my boundaries, and he was saying stuff that was making me feel very uncomfortable”. It was after this relationship that Milly decided that nobody should have to put up with the same level of disrespect that she had encountered. She began politically campaigning and pushing for new Sex and Relationships Education guidelines under the human rights acts.

Looking at the old guidelines, there is no mention of consent. Instead they mention teaching “about relationships, love and care” and teaching “the taking on of responsibility and the consequences of one’s actions in relation to sexual activity and parenthood”. When I asked my focus group what they would have liked to have learnt in their Sex and Relationships lessons one theme that was consistently raised were issues regarding consent. One member of the group, 18-year-old Beth Price, explained: “It would be good if, as a whole, we were taught about safe sex and safe relationships that aren’t just heterosexual couples”, and another member continued this point saying: “everything is extremely one dimensional. There needs to be more focus on what sexual harassment and abuse is, what is consent, and how [consent] can be retracted”.

The preliminary guidelines suggest that issues relating to consent should begin at a primary school age. They state that by the end of primary school, children should know: “the importance of respecting others even when they are very different from them” and that “they can be expected to be treated with respect by others”. This basic knowledge of respect in all aspects of life should become more explicit to sexual relationships by the end of secondary school when pupils should know: “what constitutes sexual harassment and violence and why it is always unacceptable”.

I asked my focus group to define Sex and Relationships Education. Some of them failed to come up with a definition. For those who did provide definitions, they were very limited and simple. Explanations included: “education that is given to young people on things such as safe sex, information on STI’s, and some discussion about the reproductive system”, and “basic information about safe sex and contraception”. When asked how many hours they were taught Sex and Relationships Education, 46% of the students said less than an hour, and the same percentage responded with never. And when asked what was covered in their lessons only 23% mentioned issues surrounding consent.

When I asked a teacher at an East Midlands school how effective she felt her Sex and Relationships Education teaching was she responded, “basic and clinical”. She felt that the children she taught didn’t grasp how what they were learning related to them and that a more holistic approach was needed. She proceeded to tell me a story about how a pornographic photograph was airdropped around the school she worked at, and from that there was only one assembly given about staying safe online.

I spoke to a senior assistant principal and head of welfare at a secondary school, who said about the training of teachers who teach Sex and Relationships Education: “I wouldn’t call it training. These are all professional people who are qualified to teach. We’ve asked if anyone has any problems teaching the specific topics and if they do, we swap them”. This particular school’s Sex and Relationships Education lessons are taught twice weekly for 30 minutes. The lessons are delivered through a series of PowerPoints that use information from the PSHE Association, debate topics, and written reflective questions. Each year group covers age-specific topics that get more detailed as they progress through their academic years. Their teaching of consent begins in year 7 with talks about peer pressure, and as students move through the years, they learn about saying no (year 9) and rape and rape within marriage (years 10 and 11).

When I asked about the level of interactivity in the lessons the response I received was: “it all depends on the member of staff and the chemistry that they have with their form group. Obviously, some students engage better than others and sometimes students don’t want to talk.” Engaging students and getting them interacting within lessons is an important part of what Sexplain does. It tries to incorporate this ethos when they visit schools to teach LGBTQ+ inclusive and intersectional Sex and Relationships Education.

Sexplain is a Sex and Relationships Education organisation who provide in-school workshops on porn, consent, healthy relationships, and rape culture. They believe that “every young person in the UK should have access to a complete, inclusive and comprehensive sex education.” Just one of the ways that they get children to engage with their learning is by making them mould playdoh genitals. This practice helps children to learn the correct names for genitalia and opens up conversations surrounding topics such as body image and consent. Co-founder of Sexplain Amelia Jenkinson explained: “We often find that students don’t know the word vulva, so we need to go back to that proper terminology. We have a junior doctor who facilitates our work and her inspiration came from working on the labour ward and she found that when she was asking women if they wanted a catheter put in they would ask how the baby would come out.”

Amy believed that she engaged well with her Sex and Relationships Education and that her learning was effective, however, she mentioned completely missing “classic red flags and signs of abuse”.  She described how she knew what to look out for but didn’t know how to deal with it or who to talk to. “It didn’t really feel like abuse at the time” she said, “but I wasn’t comfortable with it so I didn’t know who I could have reached out to without feeling like I was wasting time.” Feelings of guilt and time wasting are common within people who have experienced sexual harassment and/or abuse, and part of combatting that is to equip children with the correct knowledge about what constitutes sexual harassment and abuse and where they can go to find help and support. Sexplain incorporates this into their teaching. Amelia says: “we give children the critical tools that help them develop and defend a more equal society”

When it came to drawing up the new guidelines, as mentioned earlier, specialist groups were invited to speak to the government about what needed to be included within the new curriculum. One thing that was mentioned in the APPG meeting was giving children practical learning and resources that they could use in the “real world”. Lucy Emmerson, national co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum provided “12 qualities of good SRE” to the attendees at this particular meeting, two of which highlighted the need for practical learning. The fourth quality she mentions is: “delivering lessons where pupils feel safe and encouraged to participate”, this is closely followed by her ninth point: “pupils are provided with information to get help and treatment from sources such as the school nurse”. However, Amelia believes that this crucial form of teaching Sex and Relationships Education was largely overlooked: “there’s not enough about consent at primary and secondary level. It is important to introduce this from the very start and recap what it means actually in practice later on in school. We are very firm that we should teach consent on a practical level and not just talk about it as a theory and the guidelines fail to highlight this”.

Despite the new Sex and Relationships Education guidelines not being completely perfect, they have the potential to make a difference in the way that Sex and Relationships lessons are taught. Amelia from Sexplain comments: “People are talking about it more, so I think some schools are thinking their guidance is looking a bit dated and they know they need to do more, so that’s definitely having a positive impact.” However she does recognise the downfalls of the guidance: “I think the issue with the guidance is that it’s probably going to be interpreted according to how a school wants to interpret it or use it so it could be that they make a very dramatic overhaul and they start implementing lots of good lessons or it could be that they don’t change very much, and I think the guidance will allow for that.”

Currently, the Department for Education are analysing the feedback they received from their draft guideline’s consultation. The feedback is set to be released early this year. Until then, it is up to educators to continue improving their Sex and Relationships lessons, and up to companies like Sexplain to help fight the taboo and apprehension there seems to be surrounding teaching our young people about sex and relationships. Campaigners like Milly will continue to fight for educational improvements that will equip our young people with the knowledge and practical skills they need to be safe when they are ready to venture into the world of relationships and sex. And maybe one day, I’ll finally learn how to put a condom on a cucumber.

 

Sources 

Russell
islacatherinerussell98@gmail.com