Sites of Good Practice: How do Education, Health and Youth Work Spaces Shape Sex Education?

Abstract

Among professionals delivering Sex & Relationship Education (SRE) in the UK, my earlier research found that teachers and school nurses held contrasting views of SRE: most notably differing over how young people and young people’s sexual activity was seen, but also in their understandings of sex education and of their own role in delivering it (Alldred & David 2007). Practices in health and in education respectively gave rise to differing understandings that reflect distinct professional concerns. This chapter extends this analysis to incorporate a youth work angle. It compares accounts of sex education work from these three groups of professionals and explores the significance of their differing approaches for attributing agency to young people. I conclude that SRE operates differently within these differing professional approaches, and that youth work and health services are more able to grant what Allen (2005) called ‘sexual subjecthood’ to young people, while an educational understanding of ‘child-as-pupil’ profoundly limits how teachers understand sexualities education. This highlights the value of youth work sites and approaches for SRE because of pedagogies that are young person- and relationship-centred and therefore more easily recognise young people as sexual subjects.