Parents lose right of withdrawal of their children from Sex and Relationship Education once they reach 15.

[Thandeka]

Please discuss your reactions to this news as I would be very interested to read them.

Personally I think this is a great thing but then I am biased as I work in young people's sexual health.

P.S "Parental opt out" is a much better word sorry as "withdrawal isn't necessarily a good word to use in relation to sex ed- hehe!

'I hope that DH and I will always be open with them about sex and relationships, and that they will learn from us rather than teachers.'

Why not both and then open discussion? I only caught the end of a BBC breakfast discussion but a (very sensible IMO)muslim girl was saying that while she got her values from home she was interested in hearing other views and have discussions on the subject.
If a 15yr old is old enough to have a baby, and just months off legally having sex, I would have thought that it could be assumed that they have their own powers of reasoning. Many people seem to assume that DCs, even practically adult ones,are blank canvasses and will blindly follow whatever is said to them. It seems to me to be rather like the early church not wanting the ordinary man to be literate so that the priest could give only their interpretation.

A parent is responsible for sex education but I can't see the harm in it also coming from elsewhere and then having open discussion. So many parents seem to think that their DC must think what the parent wants them to think. It seems really odd to me when so many people on these threads are at odds with their own parents!

If you set a good example your DC will most likely have the same values and open discussion can only be healthy IMO.

If you withdraw your DC from sex education you must be living in cloud cuckoo land if you think that the content doesn't get passed on from those who were there! I would much rather it was first hand, through a teacher who is trying to make a good job of it, rather than be drip fed bits through the interpretation of a friend!

Pisces puts it so much better than me. If you withdraw your 15yo from sex education, they will miss out on the balanced approach of the teacher (which ime is not about teaching young people to have sex), but will still be stuck with the gossip of their teen friends, which I suspect is far less what you want them to hear.

you can still have self-respect and high self esteem and have sex at a young age though, right? This isn't about stoping teens from having sex but more about educating them to have it safely.

should be younger IMO
if you get to 15 with knowledge only from playground rumours you have been failed

completely agree piscesmoon.

if a parent wants to talk to the children themselves thats fine, but this should be done as well as sex ed not instead of.

leaving it up to parents alone to teach this means that the opinions their dc's are getting could be bias and the parents could be passing on their own prejudices.

15y old far too late IMO and IME.

You would have been preaching to the choir at that age in our school

I agree with the muslim girl that I mentioned,I like to hear all opinions. It is one of the reasons that I like mumsnet. I tend to have friends who think in a very similar way and so it is refreshing to have completely opposite opinions. I think a lot of them are batty! They are probably not going to influence me, or change me, but it is always interesting. Why should 15 yr olds be any different? If you have done a good job in bringing up your DC you should have confidence in their maturity. I would be very worried about mine if I was frightened that the school might tell them something that 'mummy doesn't want them to think'!
I hope that I have brought them up to be free thinkers and not to follow the herd.(If I haven't 15 is too old to bolt the stable door!)

It's definately a good thing but I I think it should be younger, eg start of secondary school. Each generation seems to start having sex younger and younger, and 15 could well be too late for many teenagers.

I think it's a very good thing and would support the government in lowering the age further.

It cannot possibly be right that you can have sex at 16 yet not be allowed to learn about methods of contraception.

I also agree with Riven that if you want the state to educate your child you can't pick and choose from the curriculum like this. Home educate if you feel so strongly. Faith schools are also allowed to teach contraception in the context of their faith, so there is still a LOT of leeway IMO.

I think that 15 is not early enough by a long shot.

Are they hoping to reduce the age gradully? Are they worried that if they start at a lower age people will throw hissy fits? Are they easing people in?

I think that anyone wanting to opt out at this age is crazy and this needs doing long before 15.

Also, I think that any faith or way of life that relies on ignorance to propagate its message, is failing.

It should be the strength of your message that wins out, not the fact of its being the ONLY message available to your children.

Just to clarify Sex Education starts at primary school and continues all the way through in an age appropriate fashion. From Sept 2010 Parents can opt out of any sex ed (except the science national curriculum) up to age 15. they are not saying they will only teach Sex ed at 15 as that is far too late but for those who have maybe been withdrawn previously they will then have an opportunity to do some sex ed in their final year at school.

Abstinence-based programmes DO NOT WORK. Because abstinence-based sex education is put together by dysfunctional creeps who have an extremely unhealthy and usually mysogynistic attitude towards sex. Sensible, practical sex education, which emphasies that you should only have sex when you want to and feel ready, that here are ways to prevent unplanned pregnancy and disease, and most importantly that sex is enjoyable and if one of the people having sex is not enjoying it then it needs to stop, tends to make young people think things through and delay sex till they feel ready. Whereas peddling romantic ignorance and bullshit means that when they get a bit of a hormone surge they consider themselves 'in love', don;t carry condoms because that would indicate that they;ve had impure thoughts, then when they have sex without protection they can tell themselves that they got carried away by True Love...
Ignorance is nothing to be proud of, for all the fuckwits call it 'innocence'.

I think that sex and relationship education should be compulsory - in my experience the children whose parents withdraw them from these lessons are the children who need good, solid, fact based education the most.

In my school, the only teen who ever got pregnant was the dd of the Baptist pastor, probably the only child in the school who was firmly brought up with the Abstinence message. The rest of us had clearly paid attention in Sex Education.

And no, sex education in those days was not You Must Have Early Sex. And sex education these days is not You Must Have Early Sex.

In my school, we also had classes on child development- which did not seem terribly relevant then, but which have stood me in good stead when rearing my own children 20 years later.

Thandeka, I mean I think it should be mandatory from much younger.

I think its definitely a good idea. We have one of the worse teen pregnancy rates in the world so clearly something needs to be done. I'm not naive enough to believe its all down to the lack of sex ed and benefits etc play a part as well but some may be donw to this.

Its very sad that so many children are having sex so young instead of waiting to be in stable relationships - at least over the legal age.

' in my experience the children whose parents withdraw them from these lessons are the children who need good, solid, fact based education the most.'

I would agree-they are often the parents who have to have control of their DCs, what they often don't realise is that the DC has often paid lip service for years, as the easy way, and they have an entirely secret life about which the parent knows nothing.
They will get it all from friends and there is nothing the parent can do to stop it.(Other than HE and make sure that the DC never comes into contact with anyone not of the parent's choosing, and even then they can't be sure.)
If you discuss it at home and lead by example, then I would have thought that even if something was said at school that you disagree with it would at least be up for an airing, with chance to put another view.
If you withdraw them, because they are your DCs and only you are allowed to influence their thinking, then they will get it all second hand, through their friends and they won't tell the parent anything.
By the age of 15yrs you should be treating your DCs views with respect, even if they differ from yours.
Communication is the most important thing-if
you try and cut off outside communication you will most likely tend to cut off all communication.

Yes, being informed should happen at a young age...my friend had an unexpected pregnancy with a very new boyfriend and she said "you know, it CAN happen the first time you do it with someone!" as if this was news to me.
She really believed it never happened the first time you slept with a man and did not use contraception the first time.

She was 33 at the time, had had many boyfriends and also a short marriage.

I can only assume the reason she had not been pregnant before this was pure luck.

I don't see how the school teaching about the mechanics and multiple relationship options that people get up to, stops me from teaching my kids my moral stance on sex.

They are not mutually exclusive and should complement each other.

By posieparker Thu 05-Nov-09 18:08:22
""Muslim council thinks it's terrible, ffs, whereas Catholic and CofE are fine with this.""

Maybe that is not because Muslim are against sex education as a biology topic IYSWIM but are opposed to it as it is not taking in consideration something that Muslims see as part of such education which is : no sex before marriage (please note I did not say "no sex education" before mariage) as a way of making sure that you have children you can raise without too much assistance (I am not talking money but maturity).

The problem is not about sex education being somethiong "taboo". It is really with the fact that Muslims consider it is the jobs of the parents to educate their children according to not only the physical things that sex entails but the more spiritual or moral side that they doubt the school will spend too much time on. BTW this is my interpretation of it , not an official explanation from the British Muslim Council or equivalent organisation.

By whooshspicemonster Thu 05-Nov-09 18:58:40
"If parents were capable of teaching their children about sex education properly, I doubt we'd have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe."

I know these two posts are not conected but I just thought it would be interesting to know how many of these teenage pregnancies involved Muslim girls. My guess is there aren't that common (talking about here in the uk, not world wide of course)

By woowa Thu 05-Nov-09 18:37:13
"I think that parents have the responsibility for the education of their children, not the state. That means parents should choose what their children are taught, not the state." I totally agree with that statment.

The girls I taught were mainly muslim. In my 12 years there I encountered an awful lot of very abrupt marriages and a fair few concealed pregnancies and knoew of several abortions. Muslim girls and boys get up to the same things as other teenagers. They just have more incentive to toe the parental line.

gorionine Fri 06-Nov-09 12:04:18

"By woowa Thu 05-Nov-09 18:37:13
"I think that parents have the responsibility for the education of their children, not the state. That means parents should choose what their children are taught, not the state." I totally agree with that statment."

gorionine, every parent can make that choice by home educating.

But if you choose to put your child in a school with 29 other children in the same class, and maybe 100 children in the same year group- how can you possibly expect the teacher to teach every one of those children exactly what each one of their parents wants them to learn ("Jason's Mum wants him to learn about dinosaurs, but not evolution, Kylie's Mum doesn't want dinosaurs at all, Alysha's parents are strict darwinists" and so on and so forth. "Kyle's Dad is against pre-marital sex and doesn't want Kyle to know some people do it, Sarah's Mum thinks sex is a gift from God but contraception is the work of the devil, Edward's Mum is happy with heterosexual sex education but doesn't want homosexuality mentioned, Katie's Mum wants the other children to be taught to be tolerant towards lesbians couples". ) The teacher would either have to teach 30 separate lessons, or be constantly shunting children in and out of the classroom.