Letter

Tried hard, but could do better

Dear healthmatters

The editors for the sex education issue do not appear to possess sufficient intellectual and educational rigour to have engaged in such an important and currently widely discussed topic appropriately. If it was the aim, as you state in your editorial, to identify weaknesses in practices which, by design or inadvertently, avoid being clear about the legitimate purposes and intentions of sex education programmes, then you have added to an already suffocating confusion in the field. This you do by failing to make any explicit reference to the statutory framework for sex education according to the relevant regulations governing any programmes beyond the National Curriculum’s science curriculum from key stage 1 through to key stage 4. Let me be more specific.

To let those most closely involved with and concerned about sex education state their case is laudable. Teachers, parents, pupils, family planning workers and people active in the field will all have a viewpoint which, if presented with journalistic and editorial expertise, will help to demonstrate the complex interrelationships at the heart of the matter. The tensions uncovered by the seven contributions needed a treatment far more serious, informed and illuminating to assist the debate and move it out of its intellectual quagmire. A shared language and shared meanings for central issues such as morality require more than anecdotal evidence. This, however, constitutes the core of the series of articles.

There is the example of the lesbian teacher. She is quoted having stated that children who are lesbian or gay do not want to have heterosexual relationships. The author of the article makes no attempt, unfortunately, to unpick the dilemmas experienced by teachers who wish to inform beyond the purely biological processes, yet feel restricted in their classroom practice not least because they see themselves implicated. And this would certainly be the case here.

Then there are the conflicting views of the parents. Their case-study significance is not contextualised and lacks any analysis. Again, with a firm anchorage in existing legal structures, both contributions could have explored more fully the paradoxical and back-peddling nature of current legislation. You allude to this in the editorial, and this is where it is left, alas.

Regrettably, committed health education teachers would be ill-advised to follow your editorial call for ‘action now’. Instead, I suggest, you might consider offering a more informed debate on the legal, sociological, political and ethical implications of continuing to legitimate the ostrich position of sex education programmes in British schools.