Why Scotland must make sex and relationships education mandatory to protect pupils |
This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.
When the NSPCC says that an initiative is vital for protecting children, it probably makes sense to sit up and pay attention, even if the underlying topic makes some people uncomfortable.
And that is definitely going to happen this time, because the initiative in question is a campaign for proper, and mandatory, sex and relationships education in schools.
You might be wondering why this is an issue, because surely by now, in a modern and progressive country, and a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, we’ve managed to sort out the sex-ed problem?
It’s certainly the case that things are better than they were, and that some young people are getting a really good grounding in all of this, but as the NSPCC has found, this is far from a universal experience.
The problem in Scotland is that sex and relationships education (or Relationships,........