A Stitch in Time saves Nine

Anastasia De Waal, 15 June 2010

It’s hard to argue with the careful and earnest semantics of the coalition document, in which Cameron and Clegg pledge to ‘tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood’ writes Zenobe Reade. Yet the remit of Cameron’s avowed campaign against ‘premature sexualisation’ is unclear –

might the victorious abolition of Primark’s padded bras for children inadvertently result in the airbrushing of basic sex education from primary classrooms?

In a little reported letter on the 2nd June, Michael Gove wrote to Ed Balls to set out the spending decisions he has made as Secretary of State for Education. In the Annex which follows it is detailed that £7 million of savings are to be made by not implementing the Rose review findings and scaling back departmental initiatives on PSHE, Citizenship and RE. Sir Rose’s primary curriculum review had initiated the introduction of statutory PSHE from age five – it had intended to introduce a framework which would ensure children learnt about the onset of puberty and the basics of where babies come from while at primary school.

Labour’s attempt to topple England from its top spot in the tables of teenage pregnancy rates in Western Europe has cost over £300 million since 1999 by most estimates – it may transpire that £7 million makes few inroads into this. But one hopes initiatives such as Clued Up and Meet the Parents in Hackney, where the pregnancy rate among under 18s has fallen from 77.1 per 1,000 to 57.1 per 1,000 over the last decade, won’t be cut. Blair’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy set itself the ambitious target to halve the 1999 teenage pregnancy rate by 2012. It will likely fall far short: this year, the rate was around 40 per 1,000 conceptions among girls under 18 – in 1999, the figure was 46.

Yet Labour’s record looks laudable amid a long term focus on teenage pregnancy rates. These have always fallen under administrations which put the issue on the political agenda and allow access and advice regarding preventative options to proliferate. Birth rates among the under 20s tumbled from heights of around 50 per 1,000 in the late 1960s and early 1970s to 29.4 by 1978, a time when separate and informal provision of contraception was made available for young people, and it became free on the NHS. The most significant rise recently was under Thatcher – when the birth rate among the under 20s rose from 26.9 per 1,000 in 1983 to 33.3 in 1990. This was a time of cuts to family planning budgets, attempts to restrict abortion and generally lower efforts to encourage people to access and use contraception.

The move to make sex and relationship education a statutory subject from age five is one of the least desperate interventions to try and lower teenage pregnancy – an approach which seeks to ensure that all pregnancy is informed. Later interventions will always be necessary, but with adequate education, one can hope they will be less so. It is surprising therefore that the opponents to last month’s Marie Stopes commercial about access to abortion, and the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE)’s new guidelines to allow emergency contraception to be offered in advance (and perhaps in bulk) are often also those who object to more sustained and comprehensive sex and relationship advice within schools.

Advocacy of sex and relationship education in primary schools is about removing the shame and sniggering which surrounds the scattergun style of sex education in British schools; depressingly, we know that 80% of teachers don’t even feel comfortable teaching the subject. Introduction of the subject early aims to ground and naturalise the subject by emphasising the biological principles which underpin it.