A new sex ed curriculum means nothing if the ignorance outside the school gates isn’t confronted first

There is an urgent need to continue the critical conversations about consent, sexual violence and healthy relationships into workplaces, friendship groups and communities

September is a time of fresh beginnings. Going back to school after the endless summer holidays is about catching up with old friends, making new ones, showing off a new haircut and gossiping about who’s hooked up with who. And this year, thousands of children finishing their breaks are going to march through the school gates into a brand new sex and relationship education (RSE).

Come September 2020, RSE will be compulsory in all primary and secondary schools, but the government is actively encouraging teachers to get the new curriculum up and running this academic year. This marks the first major reform to sex ed in eighteen years. Until now, young people have been taught the same topics as those who are now in their late thirties.

Now, young people will learn about all kinds of relationships, consent, contraceptives, porn, LGBT+ rights and the internet. Controversially, all schools – including faith schools – will have to comply and parents will only be able to pull their children out until they are 16.

The RSE changes have been met with huge resistance. Parkfield, a small primary school in a predominantly Muslim part of Birmingham, drew national attention with a stream of angry parents outside the school gates, furious about the LGBT+ inclusive “No Outsiders” programme. Parkfield inspired other conservative religious groups to kick off around the country. This week, parents in East London spread leaflets outside schools to say that the new RSE was promoting masturbation and “transgenderism and homosexual lifestyles”.

RSE has always been a battleground. When missionary preachers spread throughout the world with the expansion of the European empires, one of their first teachings was on sexuality and the spiritual importance of marriage. After all, in the words of Aimé Césaire the Martinique poet and politician, colonialism was as much about wealth accumulation as it was a “campaign to civilise barbarism”, built upon the idea of the “overall superiority of Western civilisation over exotic civilisations”. “Barbarity” and “savagery” was inextricably liked to sexuality and Christian missionaries worked closely with colonial powers to spread the word of God.

Tens of thousands of churches were built around the world where millions of people were given free food, clean water and access to safe medical care. Nonetheless, at the heart of this mission was a fundamental belief in the superiority of western thought over other traditions, and that the use of violence and force to maintain that domination was permissible. Within the Church’s teachings were strict ideas about sex and marriage, and in an unprecedented move, the Church introduced the first global sex education in human history.

It should then come as no surprise that RSE is often so divisive. The way that we teach – or indeed don’t teach – sex and relationships rests on some fundamental questions about human nature and society: what does it mean to be young? Is it to be innocent? Corrupt? And what is sexuality? Is it about morals? Or religion? Or consent? What about gender? Marriage? Monogamy? Porn?

RSE curriculums reflect fraught politics. As recently as 1987, Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative Party conference that “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” In the context of a media storm about AIDS, or the “gay-bug” as it was also called, Section 28 was introduced which made it illegal for local councils, and therefore sex education in schools, to “promote homosexuality”. Astonishingly, the act was only repealed in 2003.

Classrooms are political spaces, as recent debates about the lack of education on the British Empire remind us. Schools are where young people form an understanding of the world. In classrooms, we move from childhood into adolescence into adulthood.

Curriculums are important, but we have to get real about teachers’ ability to do a proper job with the new RSE curriculum. Schools are bent double under the weight of devastating funding cuts and grading pressures. In spite of the education secretary Gavin Williamson saying that the government will provide support for schools, half of current teachers do not feel confident enough to teach the new RSE guidelines. For the new curriculum to have the desired impact, teachers must be given the resources to do their jobs properly.

But the reality is that we don’t just learn about sex and relationships in school. By putting all the expectation on schools to “sort the sex problem”, we’re denying the huge role that the rest of society plays in forming and shaping our attitudes and relationships.

We grow up surrounded by media, family, friends, religious communities, and relationships that may contradict even the most well-intended school sex ed classes. Non-consent is often depicted as fine and normal in culture, there are gaping gender inequalities throughout society, attacks on LGBT+ communities are becoming increasingly common and #MeToo highlighted what many of us already knew – how devastatingly commonplace sexual violence is.

Sex education wasn’t always limited to classrooms. Before printing presses and before public schooling was introduced, knowledge was transferred between generations by word of mouth: through fables, myth and stories. Today, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are plenty of community-led programmes and educational resources that teach healthy, positive relationships and campaigning groups struggling for justice and rights.

Whilst the curriculum changes are a good place to start, there is an urgent need to continue those critical conversations about consent, sexual violence and healthy relationships into workplaces, friendship groups and communities. Sex education cannot begin and end at the school gates.

Natalie Fiennes is the author of “Behind Closed Doors: Sex Education Transformed“ out 23 September