Children’s commissioner to review ‘terrible’ sex education

The children’s commissioner said she was “shocked” to hear “horrific” examples of some sex education materials being used in schools.

Dame Rachel de Souza told the Commons Education Committee on Tuesday that she would look into relationship and sex education (RSE) education, and that children wanted “thoughtful” and “age-appropriate” materials in school.

Tory MP Miriam Cates, who sits on the committee, said voters had written to her expressing concerns about “a nine-year-old coming home trembling, white as a sheet, having learned about rape in great detail.”

She compared this to teaching four-year-olds about quadratic equations, and said students should not be exposed to complex and difficult conversations about sex before they are ready.

“Of course, at some point, children have to come to terms with the reality of the world we live in and learn how to protect themselves and give consent,” she said.

But she asked whether age-inappropriate RSE material “damaged” children.

Dame Rachel said age-appropriate materials are “absolutely critical” and she’d especially looked at this when it came to the online world.

She said she would investigate how CSR is taught in schools, adding that Ms Cates set “horrific examples” in a Westminster Hall debate last week.

Dame Rachel said headteachers and trust leaders had spoken out about their concerns about providing quality education on the subject, which resulted in the education being outsourced to outside providers.

“We should look into that,” she said.

Last week Ms Cates gave a speech on RSE condemning ‘extreme’ material delivered to students in schools.

She said the new RSE framework had “opened the floodgates to a slew of third-party providers who provide sex education materials to schools, and now children across the country are being exposed to a plethora of highly inappropriate, wildly inaccurate, sexually explicit and harmful materials.” ‘in the name of sex education’.

For example, she gave dice showing body parts, with which students represented different sexual positions, and young people who were taught about ‘rough sex’, beating and choking.

She said one of her parents had been “distraught” that her six-year-old had learned about masturbation in school.

Materials from the Sex Education Forum divided children into groups of “menstruators and non-menstruators,” she said, which would confuse teenage girls, while sex education provider BISH said “many people” were in the middle of the spectrum when it came to sex education. ask whether they had male or female genitalia.

Ms Cates said some RSE classes “actively contributed to the sexualization and adultification of children”.

“Introducing graphic or extreme sexual material into sex education classes also amplifies the porn culture that harms our children in such a devastating way,” she said.

Ms Cates said encouraging students to talk to adults about intimate details made them more “available” and “susceptible” to sexual predators.

In the debate, she said that outsourcing RSE education to third-party providers created a “Wild West scenario” when it came to teaching the subject.