Conclusions: Getting real about sex - embedding an embodied sex education in schools

Abstract

GET REAL ABOUT SEX: The Politics and Practice of Sex Education explores how cultural ideas about gender, sexuality and parenthood play out in the sex and relationship education classroom. It presents new material from a detailed study and analyses the struggle to raise the status of sex and relationship education against academic and market-driven priorities. It locates the dynamics of the classroom within those of the school and asks: What do the different parties in teaching and learning - both staff and pupils - say about how sex education is and should be taught in the classroom? How do ideas about masculinity, femininity and parenthood operate in the classroom and in policy? What different agendas and professional perspectives are revealed in the views of teachers, PSHE coordinators, school nurses and head-teachers?

The complex picture that emerges of forces at work within a single school is, in turn, situated within an analysis of the broader cultural forces at work in contemporary Britain. It considers how young people negotiate intensified pressure on them regarding academic attainment in an increasingly sexualised culture, and it develops a critique of the Achievement Agenda in education policy, contributing another arm to the critique of market rationalities in education.

This book analyses the challenges facing the provision of quality sex and relationship education at the classroom level and at the political level, and makes sometimes provocative suggestions for changes at both these levels.