The grand total of my sex education when I was at school in the Noughties went like this: in Year 6, the girls and boys were split up, and the girls were made to watch a graphic birth video; in Year 8, we carried “flour babies” around school for a week; in Year 9, we received a self-defence lesson in which the male instructor told us not to wear our hair in a ponytail because an attacker could grab it; and in Year 10, the school nurse demonstrated how to use a condom while we all giggled hysterically.
It was entirely focused on the mechanics of sex and the risks it posed to our life outcomes and health. There was no discussion of consent, no suggestion that sex could or should be pleasurable. And there was no mention of the internet and the ways it was already shaping our early, faltering romances. My peers and I learned far more about sex outside the classroom – from playground gossip, chat rooms, TV and porn – than we ever did within it.
And yet this is the sort of sex education the last government wanted to return to. In May last year, the then education secretary, Gillian Keegan, published draft revised guidance for Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE), which proposed age limits on what children could be taught. Children, it said, would not be informed about puberty before Year 4 (when they are aged eight to nine), sex before Year 5 (nine to ten), sexual harassment or pornography before Year 7 (11-12) or STIs before Year 9 (aged 13-14).
There are basic biological problems with this chronology: girls could start their periods before learning what it is (one in four girls already reports that this is the case); pupils could be offered the HPV vaccine before learning what an STI is. But setting all this aside, it is deluded to believe that children are not exposed to everything Keegan wished to protect them from, and much more, beyond the school gates. So, the new RSHE guidance, released by Bridget Phillipson’s Department for Education on 15 July, is a welcome relief.
While it incorporates some sensible Tory proposals, such as teaching children about the prevalence of deepfakes, age restrictions have been removed. There is greater emphasis on tackling misogyny and incel culture, which Phillipson described, in the aftermath of the Netflix drama Adolescence, as “a defining issue of our time”. To the previously planned content on stalking, revenge porn and upskirting, Labour added financial sexual exploitation, strangulation, and “personal safety in public spaces, recognising that sexual harassment and abuse are never the fault of the victim”. Schools will have the flexibility to teach in late primary about sexual imagery online “where this is an issue in their school”.
Keegan’s ban on sex education for children aged nine and under received much media attention at the time, thanks largely to the efforts of Miriam Cates, then the Tory MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, who coordinated a letter to Rishi Sunak raising concerns about the appropriateness of RSHE content. Cates, who lost her seat last July, has since said the subject should be “scrapped” altogether. Children, she told the Commons, employing some bad-faith hyperbole, were being taught “graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely and 72 genders”. (This last was a reference to news reports about a school on the Isle of Man, which is not part of England and therefore falls outside the Department for Education’s remit.)
It may indeed seem inappropriate to teach children about strangulation during sex. We instinctively feel that they should not have to know about such things – not yet, not ever. And yet it is necessary that they do. No one wants to have to prepare a small child for the possibility that another child or an adult might try to touch their genitals, but they should know that such an act would be wrong and that they should report it. If a child brings to their teacher a question about, say, a pornographic video that has been shared with them, that teacher should be allowed to sensitively discuss with them what they have seen. Children must be prepared for the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.
This is the world as it is: one in ten children has seen pornography by the age of nine, according to the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza. The same research found that nearly half of 18- to 21-year-olds have experienced a violent sex act. More than a third of girls at mixed-sex schools have experienced sexual harassment at school, and, according to the teacher survey app Teacher Tapp, one in eight secondary-school teachers say a student in their school sexually assaulted another pupil in the last autumn term. Pornographic deepfakes are a growing problem; in June 2024 a girls’ school alerted authorities that deepfake images and videos depicting its pupils were circulating a nearby boys’ school. Despite the UK’s overall falling birthrate, pregnancy rates among the under-20s are rising; so too is the prevalence of STIs.
“All children,” as Baroness Strange put it in a debate in the Lords on sex education in 2000, “have a right to their childhood and their innocence.” Yet it is not schools that threaten their innocence, but technology, which moves at such a pace legislation cannot keep up. Children should be given every opportunity to bring to a trusted adult – whether a teacher or a parent – what they hear and see in the dark corners of the playground or the internet. The alternative is not that they are protected from inappropriate content, but that they are left to process and navigate it alone.
[See also: Kemi Badenoch isn’t working]
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This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn’t Working