Woman loses fight to see daughter’s sex education content

[lady69]

Well, this seems dystopian…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/woman-loses-fight-to-see-daughters-sex-education-content-3j8cg9kkt

This is also my understanding.

Shocking this has happened to Clare. I admire her greatly for taking this further, and I’m pleased that the Times is publishing this.

Interesting. It’s often called Relationship and Sex Education.

Comment piece in The Times by Jawad Iqbal:

Parents have right to know what’s taught about sex

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/64626dee-0a1f-11ee-997e-7710367054a0?shareToken=41476152fa3b6206bd4bfd9e8ff0dc71

It’s interesting that the company is called School of Sexuality Education because the words “sex” and “sexuality” aren’t interchangeable.

FrancescaContini· Today 07:20
It’s interesting that the company is called School of Sexuality Education because the words “sex” and “sexuality” aren’t interchangeable.

What a good point. You are absolutely right.

In this time of tightened school budgets, sex education would not be my first choice of area to spend money on expensive external provision.

They do it because whilst money is tight, teacher time is even tighter. In the absence of materials from central government, their teachers struggle to do everything, so buying in pre-made materials is appealing.

Also, of course, anyone pushing an agenda just has to make their package quite cheap (a couple of hundred pounds) and the cost saving in teacher time is greater than the cost of materials. It's wide open to abuse by bad actors and is a very clear safeguarding loophole and red flag.

The same safeguarding rules for these companies as for school staff do not apply - I think for something as open to abuse as RSE, people producing this should be subject to Ofsted and all have to have enhanced DBS and use safer recruitment as for school staff, especially if those staff are going into schools. If the school of sexuality education had had to apply safer recruitment the staff would not have been hired and definitely would not have been allowed in classrooms due to the links to fetish / porn.

Say the name to yourself out loud, slowly.

School of Sexuality Education

Why does anyone need to be educated, schooled, on their sexuality?

It's a notion that feels as though it belongs in an underground Victorian novel.

I think it sounds creepy/ inappropriate for school kids. What’s the agenda of the adults wanting to “educate” school children about “sexuality”?

Of course they need to know the facts about reproduction, pregnancy and how to avoid it, and consent, whether in gay or straight relationships.

They don’t need to hear adults telling them that “heteronormativity” is wrong, or about being “sex positive”. Let them work things out at their own pace - IF they want to, of course. They should be free NOT to hear about any of this.

Totally agree.
The line “they should be free to not hear about any of this” so important to remember .

Well, yes. We teach them the importance of consent, after all. In the case of Clare Page’s daughter, did she and her classmates consent to listening to opinions (rather than facts) about sex(uality) that many adults would choose not to listen to, for all sorts of reasons? It doesn’t sound as if that was the case. No wonder Clare Page is livid.

@MargotBamborough sorry for the delay in answering

"Don't the schools already have these resources?"

The resources used in lessons are typically prepared by a teacher at the school and then perhaps shared free of charge with other staff in the department and kept for future years.

As teachers have become more stretched for time a trend to share (and get) lesson resources online has become more normal. Various sites where teachers sell resources they personally have created (generally for fairly small sums) have emerged and expanded.

So slowly but steadily buying resources has become more or a thing. Buying resources for something like sex education classes is more understandable where you think the teachers in the school would have no knowledge or training (beyond being a grown up) and would have a natural horror of getting something wrong and risking their career.

In this instance the business model seems to be the school don't get to 'own' the resources in the normal limited way. The head (maybe) is shown them, could ask to be shown them. The school isn't left with the resources afterwards.

That's my understanding anyway

This is such a good point. Children and older teenagers should be able to refuse consent for things they do not want to hear or disagree with.

I think it may not only be a matter of time. And perhaps not even primarily. I suspect avoiding responsibility is a key factor. The school says: "Oh, they're a reputable company. We have outsourced it to them, it's not us." It adds that vital layer of extra bureaucratic impenetrability. I worked in the NHS for a time and very briefly was involved in a procurement process for a new IT support provider. I pointed out very clearly that it was cheaper to do it in-house with existing staff and even could have more support staff for the same price. But it clicked about half-way through a meeting that they didn't want that because the responsibility would lie with them (the Primary Care Trust). They wanted a bit of paper that said it was someone else's responsibility if there was a cock-up. Didn't matter that it would increase the chance of it.

Honestly, sex education as it was when I was at school didn't seem that hard. Run through the biological facts which I would hope most teachers as adults should just know. Add in a little about consent and respect and safe practices. Then take questions. Perhaps I over-simplify a little for effect but it's not some wildly specialist subject.

I appreciate that teachers do not have time to develop lesson plans and content. However it is wrong that each school is spending time, I assume, reviewing external content.

Are all there providers vetted by the DfE? Are schools just choosing from a recommended list? If this is the case then someone needs to explain how these providers are getting on the lists and why.

I just don't understand why there can't be a couple of people employed by the DfE to develop and maintain these materials and provide them to schools and if required deliver them. Al this money spent on external providers makes a mockery of schools 'lack of money'.

@howdoesatoastermaketoast Thanks for the explanation. There seem to be important differences between the teaching of sex education and the teaching of other subjects in this respect though.

My mum was a teacher and for her subject (languages) the school owned a set of text books which were loaned out to each student at the start of the year. The text books were usually a bit dated (I remember using the old Arc en Ciel French books in the late 1990s and early 2000s for example), but since French grammar and vocabulary hadn't changed particularly radically, schools could get away with using the same set of text books for a couple of decades before they really needed replacing. My mum used to teach from those books and then depart from them where necessary by supplementing with her own work sheets that she had developed herself or which had been developed and given to her by colleagues. I assume the text books themselves were designed to prepare students to take the GCSE and A-level exams set by whichever exam board the school used.

I appreciate that the approach to learning materials will have changed significantly since the internet became mainstream, but the point is that even back then, the schools didn't own the intellectual property in those resources but they did have physical and often electronic copies of them.

Yes, infringement of intellectual property rights happened. Teachers owned one copy of a text book which wasn't used by their current school and photocopied pages from it to use in school. It has always been a problem in the music world as well, with people photocopying sheet music instead of buying originals. That is a risk that the authors and publishers of these materials have always had to take. I'm not sure why people who produce sex and relationships education material expect to be able to protect themselves from these risks when no one else can. No school would buy a set of maths text books without reviewing and testing them first, and once they own them, that's it, any student can take them home, show them to anyone, leave them on the bus, and yes, any teacher can photocopy from them.

In the online age it should be much easier to manage these risks. There is a strong argument in favour of not having printed textbooks these days, so that resources can be periodically updated. But you can do this with online subscriptions very easily. I'm a lawyer and there are several subscription only services for legal resources. Sometimes people who work in house or in smaller law firms don't have access to all of them and yes, sometimes they will ask their friends working elsewhere if they have a copy of this template or that practice note and send it by email. Password sharing happens. The owners of these materials know it happens. But they make enough money from essentially all the big law firms and universities subscribing to them that it's not worth enforcing.

When it comes to educational resources, what could be done fairly easily is that the DfE could appoint a number of sex and relationships education providers to a panel, and all of those providers could offer a subscription only service to access resources, and there could be a centralised database keeping track of which schools have subscribed to what. Any school which is not listed as having subscribed to a service from the approved list would need to be able to show what resources it is using and demonstrate that they meet DfE criteria. That way, if you are Provider A and a teacher leaves their job and goes to a school which uses Provider B and brings a few scanned copies of your materials with them, it doesn't really matter because plenty of schools will have paid for your materials anyway, and if the new school really likes these resources it might switch to Provider A when renewal time comes round.

The only people who have any interest in stealing these resources are schools and teachers. By effectively obliging schools to pay for someone's resources, you make stealing them less attractive.

Students and parents are not remotely interested in stealing sex education resources, and so it is a total nonsense to deny access to them for intellectual property reasons.

Your final paragraph is spot on.

So the question remains: why can’t parents see these materials?

Because all hell would break loose if they were allowed to.

Yes, it would.

It really wouldn't be hard for somebody in the chain somewhere to just copy this stuff or parts of it, and leak it.

Even just someone who has seen it giving a detailed description of the contents.

“There seem to be important differences between the teaching of sex education and the teaching of other subjects in this respect though.

My mum was a teacher and for her subject (languages) the school owned a set of text books which were loaned out to each student at the start of the year. The text books were usually a bit dated (I remember using the old Arc en Ciel French books in the late 1990s and early 2000s for example), but since French grammar and vocabulary hadn't changed particularly radically, schools could get away with using the same set of text books for a couple of decades before they really needed replacing.”

The other thing that hasn’t changed particularly radically (or indeed at all) is the mechanics of sexual reproduction. So why don’t schools have existing teaching and learning materials which they can use to teach sex ed?

OK, I get that the wider context of growing up in an online world is a massive difference - and especially the availability of videos of extreme sexual violence against women and girls which children are able to access on their phones - and the culture of sexting, nudes and digital harassment of girls.

But it seems to me that an external provider whose main focus is on protecting children from these online harms would be unlikely to be an external provider which also refuses to let parents have a copy of what it is teaching their children.

The DfE should have provided detailed guidelines - but the tories govern on a "no red tape" "you're the experts" basis. Thus allowing all these dodgy organisations to self identify as the experts and sell all this age inappropriate queer theory ideology to schools.
Sex ed in schools needs to be "conservative" in approach, age appropriate & take account of the differing needs of children. We need a core curriculum and IF outside agencies are to be used, they must be regulated and monitored in terms of knowledges and safeguarding.

We are a primary and we use online resources. I am having a meeting with parents where we are sharing our RSE resources that are printed out and answering questions. We cannot put them online or let them make copies of them for copyright reasons. The same happens for any resources we purchase.

It is important that parents can see the resources if they wish including viewing the video for year 6.

It has actually been a real headache making sure we use the resources we feel are appropriate.

Yes, I guess sexual reproduction is the same as it always was but society's attitudes towards it have changed a lot more in the last few decades than, say, French grammar.

But that's an argument for having online resources that can be easily updated, not for teaching things in secret without any proper oversight or safeguarding.

This is the point of it. Secret sex stuff that your parents wouldn't possibly understand.

Sinister and worrying for anyone who hasn't been swept up in the ideology