Examination of Witnesses (Questions 780-799)
THURSDAY 9 JANUARY 2003
DR TREVOR
STAMMERS, MR
ROBERT WHELAN
AND MS
GILL FRANCES
780. I was going to say that. Then they do not
behave in the way they tell you in the survey, so how do you explain
that?
(Mr Whelan) I think often they have not—
781. Go on.
(Mr Whelan) As I said earlier, I do not think there
is a magic programme for sex education that we can devise that
is going to solve the huge cultural problems we are facing, which
are the sexualisation of the culture and the increasing pressure
on young people to be sexually active at early ages. There are
some things you can do to oppose it but on the whole it is beyond
the reach of sex education. If I can go back to your original
question, do we take young people's views into account, any programme
that did not take young people's views into account and which
did not take into account the culture in which they are living
would obviously fail, but that does not mean to say that we accept
young people's current views on things as the last word and we
do not try to educate them.
782. Would it be unfair of me to say that you
almost certainly take into account the views of the young people
whose views agree with your view? Would that be unfair?
(Mr Whelan) We take into account the fact that most
people want to get married and have children, that is the norm
in society, but for a lot of people there is a gap between what
they want for their lives and what they are getting.
783. Do you have a group of young people that
you consult regularly or not?
(Mr Whelan) No. This survey that Dr Stammers was talking
about was a random survey of about 22 schools.
784. So how many young people are involved,
relatively young? I am not suggesting that you are old people
but relatively young people who contribute to your programmes.
(Mr Whelan) That one was 2,250 13-15 year olds. If
I can just give you another example. At the moment we are testing
a manual called The Art of Loving Well which is devised
to try and help at-risk young people to resist the pressures to
get into sex early. That has been tested in six schools and it
is spread around the country. It is the usual way in which any
educational programme is tested, you find some religious schools,
some secular schools, some in urban areas and some in rural areas
and you try and correlate.
785. I am not a particular enthusiast of surveys
because if you ask surveys you will find out that 30 to 40% of
doctors do not want to be doctors if you ask them if they are
happy and the same applies with teachers, if you ask teachers
if they are happy in their work it is not surprising that a third
of them say they are not. What I am asking is do you have any
youngsters in the planning of—
(Dr Stammers) Can I respond with my other hat on because
as well as being a trustee of the Family Education Trust, in which
capacity I am here this morning, I also work with an organisation
that has a wide sex education programme in Northern Ireland called
Loveforlife with a website, Loveforlife.org.uk.
That has a website which answers young people's questions. It
is not possible to do that without being very, very keenly aware
of the way in which young people are thinking both in terms of
the language that they use and of the fraught world that they
are coming from. I think that keeps me at a cutting edge in this
area where perhaps in my medical practice the number of teenagers
I would see would be relatively small in proportion to older patients.
It does keep me abreast of what is going on. As Robert says, I
think many of these young people, as I guess all of us are, are
looking for meaning and love and one of the difficulties with
the area of sex is that it often promises these things but does
not necessarily deliver them and that is why there is often this
mismatch between the aspiration of young people to find something
beautiful and the sad discovery that something dreadful comes
along.
786. This does not only apply in the realm of
sex.
(Dr Stammers) No, absolutely not, but it certainly
does apply to that.
Chairman
787. Can I just come back to Mr Whelan. We may
find differences with the Holland experience but one of the things
that struck me from Ms Frances' comments was that you could have
a longer term impact on our society by taking action now that
would mean that the parents of the next generation deal with things
very differently from the way currently parents do. One of the
interesting things we find, and you have said parents do not talk
about sex, is that we are society where everybody appears to be
doing it, and doing it a great deal from the evidence that we
have had before the Committee, yet we are not prepared to talk
about it. Would you accept the possibility that if we did get
our act together in relation to educating the current generation
of children and young people that they, as the next generation
of parents, may well be able to talk to their children in a way
that perhaps is not happening at the moment?
(Mr Whelan) It is possible. First of all, there is
no short-term solution to what we are talking about, all the solutions
are long-term, that is what is so frustrating about it because
we are not going to be around when the results come in. I think
parents influence their children more by the way they live than
by conversations they have with them about sex. It is the home
environment which is the main determinant of whether children
become sexually active at a very young age or not.
Andy Burnham
788. Something resonated that you said that
I thought was very interesting. In your survey I do not doubt
for a second that young people do have very traditional views
of how they want their lives to turn out, I think the majority
will have those views, but I think what is also true is they have
a view that this part of their life is for this risk taking behaviour
and they do not necessarily make the connection between what they
do in their teen life and how it might have a bearing on their
life in the future, they see the two things as different, this
time is for doing this and that time is for marriage and all of
that. Do you think the most effective message is to try to get
a sense over to young people that what they are doing today might
affect tomorrow?
(Mr Whelan) That is the thrust of our material. We
do a video called The 3Rs of Family Life that makes exactly
that point, that the decisions they are taking now will affect
the way their lives develop in the future.
(Ms Frances) It is not about telling them. The whole
thing about young people being consulted is not about doing a
survey, it is about whoever is going to deliver the sex education,
whether it be parents or carers or social workers or teachers,
actually engaging with young people and saying "What do you
want?" It is about consulting with them and getting young
people to participate. In the whole process of helping to set
up what is going to happen for them, they will probably learn
more from that process and they will learn more about communicating
and talking about it than they ever will as the passive receivers
of a video or of a programme from a teacher or somebody who has
not been properly educated to engage with young people. It is
the relationship that you have with the young people that is important.
Every piece of work that we do should be engaging them in the
task and saying "What do you think of what we have done?"
or "What do you think of what we say?" and "Can
you help us to do it better?" I think that is a really important
facet.
Julia Drown
789. The Chairman mentioned earlier about how
Manchester Young People's Council were reporting very much how
they felt bombarded with sexual images and Dr Stammers talked
about the sexualisation of so much and gave the suggestion that
needs to be countered from home. I wonder if Gill Frances has
any other suggestions and particularly one obvious one is do you
think there should be more censorship of these? If there are any
other comments about how that can be countered or how those negative
influences could be offset, I would like to hear them.
(Ms Frances) I think what delighted me about the Teenage
Pregnancy Strategy was it said this is a difficult problem that
needs lots of solutions. That was really, really helpful. Many
families need a nice little leaflet, a bit of help and they will
kick in and they will do a nice job and it will be fine but there
are a whole bunch of young people that do not come from those
sort of situations and that is when they need a key person. I
got math GCSE because I fell in love with the teacher, there was
no reason for me to pass maths but I got it, she came into my
life at the right time, she inspired me, I thought she was wonderful.
That is what is important. We do not have those key people who
are qualified and skilled-up and feel confident, so our most vulnerable
young people in care, on the edge of society, at risk of exclusion.
You are in a class of thirty and we need to have extra people
round, mentors, personal advisers, a whole bunch people who feel
confident talking about sexual matters, so they can pick up those
young people and support them through. The ordinary, average stuff
is fine for the ordinary, average young person and the rest need
something else as well, not instead of, and then they need to
fall back into what everyone else is getting. I do not know whether
that answers your question. That seems to me to be crucial. We
are talking about a percentage of young people here who are not
getting pregnant because they do not have any information, they
are getting pregnant because it seems to be one positive option
in a life where there are not many positive options.
(Dr Stammers) It is interesting question as to where
the censorship ends and the protection of young people begins.
I am not particularly pro widespread censorship, I think it is
much better if things can come from the heart or within than imposed
from outside. It does seem to me as a society quite paradoxical
that we do get into a great drama about paedophilia and child
pornography, and quite rightly prosecute those involved in that,
but if one were to look at some of the sex education material
that is round out there sometimes distinguishing it from some
of the stuff that is being prosecuted in some circumstances it
may be quite difficult, and that is an issue that needs to be
talked about.
Sandra Gidley
790. Moving on to the nature of education, really,
because as Robert Whelan pointed out it is very easy to pass an
exam in sex education but in practice it is different. In the
Swedish schools the emphasis was on providing relationship skills
and empowering young people rather than a mechanical, this is
what happens, this is what you should not do message. Do you think
there are benefits to this approach, even if it is not an abstinence-based
approach?
(Mr Whelan) Yes, definitely. There is other research
that suggests that some programmes that have the possible effect
of delaying first intercourse and reduce the number of partners
are programmes that did not address sexuality directly but they
did deal with these personality and relationship issues you are
bringing up. Young people are not getting pregnant because they
think that babies are delivered by Mr Stork under the gooseberry
bush. People have a pretty good idea now of the processes you
have to go through to produce a baby.
Andy Burnham
791. I have a question for Gill Francis about
the place of sex education within the wider curriculum and the
status it has. I went to a Catholic comprehensive school and our
sex education was the biology lesson. I think things have moved
on a fair bit from then, the latest guidance from the DfES is
very much that sex and relationships education should be firmly
rooted within the personal social health education syllabus, the
module that schools are given. Presumably you strongly agree with
that. You have hinted a couple of times it is about life skills,
maturity and you need social skills.
(Ms Frances) I think it is crucial. We now have an
extremely good PSHE framework which is linked to the statutory
citizenship for children over 11 but under 11 it is not. What
is crucial is that while PSHE is not statutory, you will have
some schools that will take it on and deliver it and see it as
one of their core functions and other schools which will not touch
it at all. That is really, really, really important. That is when
sex education sudden flares up as being out of context, it does
not have a little home to tuck into. It is when we get into ridiculous
conversations about whether we talk to four year old children
about sex. . . Obviously what four year old children need when
they first go to school is a broad-based personal social development
or PSHE in which they can build the foundation of who they are,
how to communicate and when the time comes sex, drugs, healthy
eating and healthy exercise can be popped into it as appropriate.
It has a context.
792. In Holland—and we were very impressed—they
are developing a curriculum that goes from primary school, that
tries to plot at every stage of a child's life what pressures
they may be feeling and then they try to talk round that. It is
quite interesting. Sex education will then come up as part of
that discussion. I think Sweden had something similar.
(Ms Frances) We have it too. It is a really brilliant
piece of work. We also have the National Healthy Schools Standards,
which is the vehicle to deliver it, but neither of them are statutory.
793. What percentage of schools are doing it
properly?
(Ms Frances) That is the other difference in Holland,
if they want to survey their schools it is very small, if we want
to survey ours we have 26,000 schools and none of us can afford
to do that piece of research. What is important for us this year
is that the DfES and the DH are undertaking an evaluation of how
healthy schools affects learning, children's development and inclusion.
We will have the very first findings of that in August, it is
going to be too late for you but it is looking fairly promising
and they will be publishing it in December. This is a really,
really important piece of evidence that we will have some time
this year where we will be able to link personal, social development,
learning attainment, health and inclusion.
794. It has to be the right way to go.
(Ms Frances) It has to be.
795. Are you looking for the committee to make
a recommendation that it should be given statutory status.
(Ms Frances) Until it is statutory our teachers will
not be trained to deliver it.
796. Back to the argument that comes from the
teaching profession, you are being told literacy, numeracy, there
is no space, what would you say back to that charge?
(Ms Frances) If you make it statutory then it means
that there is no reason when you are doing your literacy and numeracy
you cannot use a reading book or a story book or a discussion
topic which is round emotional feelings and what it feels like
to be sad or about bereavement or about having a new baby in your
family or about puberty. The very good schools are already doing
that, they see it as an opportunity, they see it as a perfect
opportunity for children to be numerate and literate and socially
literate.
797. You are saying statutory but flexibility,
not prescriptive.
(Ms Frances) The framework is there. We are very proud
of it. The teaching professions are happy with it. What we do
not have is schools doing this because schools are saying, "we
do not have the time, we have other things to do. It is not statutory
and we only deal with statutory". Most importantly teachers
only get trained to deliver the statutory framework, they do not
get trained to deliver non-statutory. You will have loads and
loads of teachers delivering things like talking about bereavement,
sex and drugs who have not had the training, which is unfair on
the children and deeply unfair on the teachers.
798. So you think the teacher training side
of things has got to be much better?
(Ms Frances) It is a knock-on. They only train teachers
to deliver the statutory curriculum.
799. Once you have got the statutory requirement
then it will—
(Ms Frances) That is the thing to put into place.
Chairman: Can I say it is nearly five minutes
off one o'clock and I am conscious that we might tie up by one.
Can I ask my colleagues to ask brief questions and can we have
brief-ish answers to try and get through on time.
Dr Naysmith: This area has been partly covered
already. There are individuals in society who are more vulnerable
perhaps and find it harder to access education in this kind of
area. I am thinking of young men in general, and we have covered
that already, but maybe particularly young homosexual men, young
people who are leaving care, that sort of thing, people who are
vulnerable to poor sexual health, teenage pregnancy and the daughters
of teenage mothers. All of these are examples of people who would
not be covered by the normal programme you are advocating in schools
and so on. In relation to the needs of these hard to reach and
sometimes particularly vulnerable youngsters, how would you suggest
they should be given help and assistance?
C
hairman
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