My Lords, briefly, I lend my support to all three amendments. In their different ways they are designed to do something about which I feel absolutely passionate, which is to make sure that all children and young people, in whatever sort of school they are, have access to high-quality, age-appropriate and up-to-date sex and relationships education. Of course, I always put it the other way around and say “relationships and sex education”, for a reason I shall come to in a moment; that is absolutely critical. We must focus on the need for all young
people to understand the importance of healthy relationships. It should serve them as part of their fundamental education going through life.
I have read through all the evidence of what people think at the moment. We have heard it and I do not want to repeat it. We know what the National Association of Head Teachers thinks. We saw the reports of the consultation on PSHE education in March this year and the Mumsnet survey. I will just quote from the Brook survey of 2011, where one in four young people said they did not get any sex and relationships education in schools at all and 26% of those that did said that their SRE teacher was not able to teach it well. I fundamentally believe that relationship education should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum and taught by specialist teachers and others who really understand these things. At the very beginning, I should have declared an interest as vice-president of the charity Relate.
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Two more points, quickly: when I reviewed the evidence, some of the international evidence in particular talked about the very important protective function that sex and relationships education can have on young people. Those who have really good experiences of this are more likely to choose to have sex for the first time later, use contraception and have fewer sexual partners. We heard earlier, in the set of amendments about young carers, about links between education and health. There is a strong correlation between young people receiving good-quality relationships and sex education and various public health objectives, which are so critical. They are particularly critical to women. The evidence tells us that they have resulted in earlier reporting of sexual abuse, and in some cases its prevention, reduction in intimate partner violence, reduced numbers of unplanned pregnancies, reduced maternal and infant mortality, and prevention and earlier treatment of sexually transmitted infections, as well as reducing the gap in health inequalities. These are important things. The very foundation stone of all this is good-quality relationships and sex education.
I had the great privilege this morning to be part of a launch event in the House of Commons for the Relationships Alliance. That was about emphasising the huge importance of relationships in all aspects of people’s lives, through all stages of their lives, and its links with public policy. It was absolutely clear there that this has to start young, with high-quality relationship education available to all children. I was delighted to hear this morning that in Northern Ireland it is officially called relationships and sexuality education. That gets it the right way round; it sets the context and then gets to the important aspect of sex education as well. I wholeheartedly support the attempts being made through these amendments to shine a spotlight on this crucial issue.