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Let’s Talk About Sex – It May Be Awkward, And It’s Not Mandatory, But SRE Is Hugely Important

Teachers might not be the ideal providers of SRE, but we can at least provide a safety net

Kevin Harcombe
by Kevin Harcombe
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The chairs of five Commons select committees have written to education secretary Justine Greening urging her to make sex education a statutory subject in England. It isn’t at the moment, which may surprise some people.

They asked her to consider ‘the consequences of failing to act; not only for the quality of education in England, but also for the lifelong consequences which can result from patchy or inadequate access to PSHE and SRE.’

Sex and relationship (SRE) education is one of the most important topics schools cover. I believe we should begin it when the children are much younger.

Ignorance of multiplication tables can affect your chances of getting a maths GCSE; ignorance of sex, however, can adversely affect your chances of getting an STI, or having an unwanted pregnancy.

It also affects the ability to withstand peer pressure to have sex when you don’t really want to.

In SRE, we offer parents lesson previews. Not all attend, preferring to leave it to the school, which is a compliment but also a pity.

As a parent, I always tried to answer questions frankly. The queries dried up once puberty actually kicked in, but I was able to give refresher talks without my kids walking away, simply by doing them in my car at 70mph while they cringed in the passenger seat, contemplating whether a leap to certain death was preferable to listening to dad give his sex talk.

SRE lesson resources have changed greatly over the years. A cartoon with a twee voiceover used to cover the basics. ‘The gentleman and lady kiss and cuddle which causes him to have an erection so he can gently push it in to the lady’s vagina.’

The vocabulary caused great confusion for one boy. ‘What’s this erection he’s pushing in and out?’ he asked with a frown. The teacher explained. ‘Oh! Well, if you’d just said ‘boner’ I’d’ve known what you were on about!’ came his response.

Terminology, therefore, is one of the starting points in any good sex-ed lesson.

We get children to write down, anonymously, what they call their private parts and the teacher reads them out. There are almost as many euphemisms as there are families, it seems.

A more recent BBC SRE film showed mother and father walking round the house naked, to enable exploration of how bodies change as we mature. The male actor was, I was reliably informed, rather ‘well-equipped’ – something which the teacher couldn’t help but remark on in a whisper. ‘Is it the camera angle or is he very…?’ ‘Looks pretty average to me,’ I lied.

The dads shuffled uncomfortably while the mums’ eyebrows raised as one. When the film was shown to the children, one boy piped up in enthusiastic innocence, ‘I’d like a big, hairy penis like that!’ to which one teaching assistant muttered sotto voce, ‘Wouldn’t we all…’.

Families need to be made aware of how information about sex can be distorted by the internet. Freely available via smartphones, pornography is most often unrealistic, frequently misogynistic and bares little or no relevance to loving, sexual relationships.

Ten-year-olds own smartphones, so they need to know that being coerced into sexting is never a great idea. Most of all, and this is where schools have a massive responsibility, boys and girls need to develop sufficient confidence, knowledge and self-esteem to be able to say no to sex, and to understand that ‘no’ really means ‘no’.

Are teachers the best people to give these messages? Parents first is preferable, but SRE is at least a safety net so that children don’t suffer from dangerous ignorance.

Most teachers – even the younger ones who haven’t fled the profession yet – have sufficient life experience and subject knowledge to provide a satisfactory role model, though given the stressful and time-consuming nature of our job, the ‘practical,’ as science teachers call it, is sometimes lacking.

‘Do you ever manage it twice?’ enquired one teacher. ‘Of course,’ returned the second. ‘Which one did you find more enjoyable?’ persisted the first. ‘Oh, definitely the one in the summer holidays,’ came the answer.

Kevin Harcombe (@kevharcombe) is a Teaching Award winner and headteacher at Redlands Primary School, Fareham. Browse resources for Sexual Health Week.

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