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Strategy on teen pregnancy ‘mostly right’

The government has got it ‘mostly right’ with its £60m strategy to cut teenage pregnancies, according to sexual health and family policy campaigners.

The Social Exclusion Unit’s proposals to halve teenage pregnancies by 2010 have been welcomed by the Family Policy Studies Centre as ‘giving all the right signals to professionals and the public’.

FPSC director Ceridwen Roberts said that the plan – which includes better financed sex-education telephone services, pregnancy advisers and ‘peer mentors’ – attempts to tackle teenage pregnancies in a way that ‘isn’t scapegoating the vulnerable teenage mother’.

The proposals put greater emphasis on education, with sex education classes in schools being inspected, and primary schools required for the first time to provide sex education. Young mothers under 16 will be expected to go back to school, and education maintenance allowance pilot schemes will offer an additional £40 a week to 16 and 17 year olds who go back to education.

Contraceptives should also be more widely available to under-16s and family planning clinics will open in the evenings to allow schoolchildren greater access to contraceptives.

Health Education Authority director Kathy Elliott said the report ensures that teenagers who get pregnant will be ‘better supported and not cut off from training, education and job opportunities’. It recognises the importance of social and economic inequalities and their impact on health and opportunity, she added.

Education could be a key factor in tackling the ‘structured disadvantage’ that often contributes to teen pregnancy, Roberts added. ‘Many young women are facing barren futures, in the sense of living in deprived areas where job opportunities for themselves and their partners are nil or low.’

However, the Brook Advisory Centres and the Family Planning Association both called for the guidance to schools on sex education to be sharpened to meet the needs of young people rather than the prejudices of adults.

The Social Exclusion Unit’s report was issued following the publication of figures that show Britain’s spiralling teenage pregnancy rates – with about 90,000 teenage conceptions a year – are by far the highest in Western Europe, and six times higher than in the Netherlands.