What the New Relationships and Sex Education Schools Guidance Really Means with Lisa Hallgarten | Transcript
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Hannah Witton
Welcome to Doing It with me, Hannah Witton, where we talk all things sex, relationships, dating and our bodies. Hello, welcome back to Doing It and happy Sexual Health Week. Sexual Health Week takes place around this time every year in the UK, and this year is run by Brooke, the young people's sexual health charity who I am an ambassador for. Every year there is a different theme such as porn, consent, and last year, we did some podcast episodes around the theme of sex and disability for sexual health week. And this year, the theme is get your RSE in gear. RSC stands for sex and relationships education. This is a specific call to schools as September 2020 is when relationships and sex education becomes compulsory for schools in England to teach. We have been leading up to this moment since the bill passed in 2017 and this episode is going to be all about what this law change is, how it came about, and what does it mean practically for teachers and schools.
To answer all of my questions, my guest this week is Lisa Hallgarten, who is the head of policy and public affairs at Brooke. She has spent her career as an educator, trainer, and advocate for young people's rights to accessible sexual health services and championing inclusive, comprehensive, and sex positive relationships and sex education. Lisa is absolutely wonderful and she knows her stuff. We talk about the 30 year campaign to get RSE on the curriculum, and we dive into the guidance that the government released for schools to use. Lisa did a word search in the document for pleasure, masturbation, and other words, and you'll have to listen to the episode to learn what she found, or didn't find. We talk about the difference between what's required in primary and secondary education and the potential loopholes in the guidance for things like faith schools, parental removal, and the problem with age appropriateness. We go through the good, the bad and the ugly of the RSE guidance coming to a school near you, and Liza also gives some tips and resources for teachers.
This conversation was really interesting and eye opening for me and please tell your friends and family to listen to this podcast episode instead of just reading Daily Mail headlines saying schools to teach five year olds about blowjobs. I hope you enjoyed this episode. As usual, you can find links to everything we mentioned in the show notes on our website DoingItPodcast.co.uk and please let us know what you think over on social media. We're @DoingItPodcast on Instagram and Twitter. And like last week, I'm pre recording this intro before my wedding, but if you want the wedding content, my YouTube channel and Instagram are the place to be for that. I just wanted to let you know that because of the wedding, and our new UK honeymoon travel plans, we're taking a two week break from the podcast but we'll be back in October with more episodes. Thanks for listening and here's Lisa Hallgarten.
Hello, Lisa. So excited to have you and to chat all about the new RSE guidance.
Lisa Hallgarten
Well I'm really excited to be here talking about it with you.
Hannah Witton
It's actually happening after 30 years
Lisa Hallgarten
Well, we hope so yeah.
Hannah Witton
So I guess first of all, it would be great to hear from you, who are Brooke and what is your role at Brooke.
Lisa Hallgarten
So Brooke is a young people's charity focused on young people's sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing and we were set up in 1964.
Hannah Witton
Oh my goodness
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, quite radical at the time, that was the first organisation to offer contraception to young, unmarried women. And so we've always been sort of groundbreaking in terms of acknowledging that sexuality and sex is a normal part of adolescent development and trying to ensure that young people can realise their sort of sexual development in ways that are safe. And that there will always be adults who are prepared to give them confidential advice and support. So that's the sort of, the sort of background to it. But over the last few decades, we've also developed into an organisation that does a huge amount of sex education, or sex and relationships education, or now relationships and sex education in schools, and a range of other sort of settings. So that's Brooke. And I'm the policy and public affairs person at work, which means I'm sort of responsible for thinking about what needs to change, in terms of policy and legislation, to ensure that young people can be safe and healthy and have safe enjoyable relationships.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And there's been a huge policy change in the last few years relating to sex education. So can you give us like a bit of a background on how the new like RSE guidelines came about? What was there before? What is happening?
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, so Brooke, alongside other organisations, have been campaigning for 30 years to get sex education as part of the statutory school curriculum, as it is in many other countries, mainly Northern Europe. And they've been like lots and lots of ups and downs. There was a period for 10 years when the teenage pregnancy strategy was being implemented, where government gave quite a high priority to sex and relationships education and saw it as a really important part of helping prevent unintended pregnancies.
Hannah Witton
And that kind of worked, didn't it.
Lisa Hallgarten
It kind of, it kind of worked, it was a sort of failure on the part of that government that they never managed to get the sex education into the school curriculum. They produce guidance, which in in the year 2000 when they produced it was pretty reasonable, not bad. But actually, 20 years later looked a bit dusty, because it didn't even have any acknowledgement of the internet, or smartphones, or any of the kind of additional opportunities in terms of giving information, or challenges, in terms of what can go wrong, in terms of learning from the internet. So yes, absolutely no acknowledgement of that. And over the years, there's been consistent pressure on on sort of a series of governments to try and do something about that. And finally, the opportunity came in 2017. And it's almost like the sort of pressure on the dam burst, because five different select committees in Parliament recommended that we should have mandatory RSE. And in every case, it was about dealing with a problem.
Hannah Witton
Right
Lisa Hallgarten
It was about sort of hooking up on an area, a new area of risk or
Hannah Witton
So like unintended teenage pregnancy, STI's
Lisa Hallgarten
Well, interestingly enough, in the past, it was very much around sort of obvious clinical health issues. And clearly, there is still a sort of very high rate of STIs amongst young people, and that is seen as a problem. But increasingly, the kind of problems that were being identified weren't really around biological, clinical, physiological issue, they were actually around psychological wellbeing issues around sexual bullying, sexual harassment, sexual abuse
Hannah Witton
Oh, okay
Lisa Hallgarten
Views around use of the internet for things like naked image sharing, the concerns about young people using pornography as a form of sex education. And so there was increasing pressure from all sorts of different areas and angles on the government to do something about it. And they use the opportunity of the children in social work bill to add an amendment, that would make sex education mandatory in all schools. And in some ways, it was a bit opportunistic. It just happened to be the bill that was going through Parliament that could be amended. But in another way, it feels quite significant that it was a sort of Child Protection Bill that it was added to because very much the feeling around sex education is still what it's all about; protection and protection from harm, rather than anything which is about kind of positive change, or cultural change, or some things that we might think are good and wholesome about talking about sex.
Hannah Witton
Is that really telling in the actual guidance, that it feels more protective?
Lisa Hallgarten
I think it is, it's telling in the guidance in as much as there's very little to say about anything positive, or things that people might call sex positive. So as an experiment, I did a search in the in the guidance, just using a PDF search, to look for words like pleasure. And the consistent message that came back when no matches were found so pleasure, no matches were found, fun, no matches were found, masturbation, no matches were found, intercourse, no matches were found.
Hannah Witton
What? You just think at least that one
Lisa Hallgarten
You'd have thunk, wouldn't you. So pornography came up twice; one presented as something that presents a distorted picture of sexual behaviours and can damage and the way young people see themselves. So, again, a very sort of protective framing. And secondly, it came up in a list of legal provisions related to topics. So you know, people need to know the law on that. So I found that really interesting. And then I thought, I wonder if it talks about anything to do with specific body parts and it doesn't, or specific sexual acts of any kind, and it doesn't
Hannah Witton
Well if it doesn't mention intercourse then I'm holding out hope for oral sex.
Lisa Hallgarten
No, but it's so funny, you should say that because I did actually look up or just to see what would happen and it did come up nine times. Twice,
Hannah Witton
Oh, wow.
Lisa Hallgarten
Twice in terms of oral hygiene.
Hannah Witton
Right, brushing your teeth.
Lisa Hallgarten
Exactly. Six times as part of the word moral .
Hannah Witton
Oh.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yes.
Hannah Witton
Wait, how many times is the word moral in?
Lisa Hallgarten
Six times, and then three times as part of the word pastoral. So that made me laugh quite a lot. And, it's not really to say that, I mean, there's no reason particularly that that level of detail would necessarily be in a piece of guidance, except that there is no other government sanctioned place for schools to look. So lots of people have produced really good curricular, lots of organisations, local authorities, you know, Brooke has gotten lots and lots of good stuff. So it's not that there's nothing out there, it just feels significant that the guidance is not, it's not being very specific about what schools really should be addressing.
Hannah Witton
Did you do a search for like consent or LGBT? What does that say about those things?
Lisa Hallgarten
Consent does come up a lot, and that makes complete sense, given the kind of context in which this legislation was passed. So we're obviously very glad about that.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Lisa Hallgarten
I think it's really interesting to consider whether you can talk about consent very constructively without also talking about pleasure. Because you have to ask what it is people are consenting to, and what are the kinds of things you'd be taking into account when you consent to something, or withdraw consent from something. And I would have thought that that sort of pleasure, enjoyment, comfort, all those kinds of things would be part of that. But everything’s quite loose.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, rather than consent from a, avoiding sexual abuse standpoint, rather than like aiming for a really amazing, pleasurable experience.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, exactly. It's very much from a kind of a legal standpoint, a the kind of safeguarding standpoint, and those things are all really important. And, you know, I wouldn't want anyone listening to this thing that, you know, I don't think that safeguarding is important. It's absolutely critical. But interestingly enough, I don't think that you can do safeguarding without taking a more positive and explicit approach to talking about bodies and talking about sex. So I think that the two go hand in hand.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. That kind of relates to a question that actually somebody asked on Instagram, which was, how do you tell the difference between fear mongering and genuine concern? Maybe, maybe this is a young person who is getting information from their teachers, and is like, is this fear mongering? Or is this actually like, good, you know, like, concerned information, I'm not sure.
Lisa Hallgarten
I think there is something about context isn't there. If young people consistently hear this is bad, this is awful, this is harmful, it'll get you pregnant, it'll get you an STI, this will get you. And yet what they see represented across very mainstream media, you know, at kind of peak viewing hours and soap operas, and what, whatever it is that adults seem to like having sex, and seem to get some sort of pleasure from it. Then I think it's very easy for kids to turn off and say, why do you just keep telling me everything so dangerous? And why is everyone doing this thing if it's so dangerous? So I think there is something about being really honest, and putting things in context and thinking in terms of harm reduction, not, you know, not abstinence and prevention. I once went to a conference where a head teacher had taken it on himself to devise a whole series of workshops about pornography, because he felt that it was a real problem, the sort of level of pornography viewing by his students. And he, he showed us a whole load of different workshop exercises that he devised, all of which they were all slightly different exercises, but all of which giving off the same message, which is, pornography is bad, pornography displays sex that isn't real, isn't nice and isn't good, and if you watch it, you might get very distorted ideas about what good sex is and what good relationships are. And I said, oh, that's really interesting. So what what what have you taught them about what a good relationship is and what good sex is? And he said, well, I can't do that.
Hannah Witton
Oh, my goodness, yeah.
Lisa Hallgarten
And I thought that really crystallised the problem for me, I don't actually think there's a problem talking about all the negative things that may come from watching some forms of porn, especially the forms of porn that are very readily available and are free and that young people are viewing, and I think some of it is very problematic and it wasn't designed to be a form of sex education. And it certainly isn't a very useful form of sex education in many ways. But you can't just keep saying something's bad without saying what the good stuff is, what would good sex look like? What does a good relationship look like? And I think that that goes some way to answering that question.
Hannah Witton
We miss that bit out so much. Yeah. That balance and the context.
Lisa Hallgarten
And I think that's where young people start to go, you're just fear mongering. Because if all you say is that sex will get you pregnant, and you don't also say, you know, sex can get you pregnant, the reason people sometimes take those risks is because sex can be nice and pleasurable, and it's a natural part of human development to want it and desire it. But this is how you can make it safer. I think young people are much more likely to engage. If you just say this thing's awful, and yet they see it being represented in ways that make it look not awful all over the place, they're just going to turn off.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Because I feel like you're hiding something from us, like, what are you not telling us? So then there's like an issue with trust in the, in the information that they're being given, yeah. So what about LGBTQ+ education within the guidance? Is it there? Is it mandatory? Is it good?
Lisa Hallgarten
Is it good? That's a really good question. It's in the guidance, it comes up in the guidance in terms of, in terms of talking about protected characteristic and the need to be inclusive. It does talk about it in one way that I do like and which was very much part of the sort of lobbying that a whole load of organisations including Brooke did, which was to say, please don't have a lesson on LGBT.
Hannah Witton
And then that's it.
Lisa Hallgarten
It's not like, this is the LGBT lesson. It's about ensuring that LGBT, that all classes are relevant to, and speak to, and represent people of all sexualities and genders. So it has to be integrated.
Hannah Witton
Woven throughout.
Lisa Hallgarten
Throughout, and there is something in the guidance that does say that this, it needs to be part of broader sex education, not sort of carved off as, I can't remember the exact words but you know, not carved off as an individual session.
Hannah Witton
That's good.
Lisa Hallgarten
And I think, you know, so, so that's, that's sort of a little bit of progress, isn't it? Erm, in terms of how far schools are mandated to explicitly address LGBT issues is really pretty disappointing. There is some leeway in the guidance across all areas for schools to teach. There's all sorts of bits of wording that I think, provide loopholes for school. So they say things like, consistently throughout the guidance, it talks about age appropriateness, and I think that can be interpreted very widely. I kept lobbying for them to use the word timely, because age appropriate seems to me like that's something about putting the brakes on information. Whereas the word timely is about making sure something is given in time, and on time to be useful. And young people consistently say, oh, yeah, no, it's great that we had that lesson on contraception in the last two weeks of year 11 but actually, half my friends had already had sex by then. Or, you know, maybe even more terrifying that Sex Education Forum did a study once that showed that 25% of people had experienced their periods before learning about them. You know, which really is sort of terrifying prospect, isn't it? And you wouldn't want any young child to go through that experience, and not understanding what was happening to them and that it was okay, and safe, and healthy.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, and I guess like the age appropriate thing, it allows people to get keep that information.
Lisa Hallgarten
I think that's exactly it. I think it's very much about kind of saying, oh, well, I don't think you're old enough for that. Whereas timely suggests it's really important that people get it on time, and in time, for it to be useful. And I think in terms of LGBT issues that as one of the
Hannah Witton
And that goes for teachers as well. They know their students best, and they know what would be relevant to them.
Lisa Hallgarten
They do. But they also may have their own anxieties, or resistance, to talking about things and may use that kind of, well, it's probably not time yet to talk about that as a kind of excuse to sort of delay or defer talking about really important issues. I think that's very likely to impact on teaching about LGBT issues, that idea that you can choose when something's age appropriate. And there are all sorts of other loopholes and caveats, like teaching within the tenets of the faith of the school, and taking into account the makeup of the school community to make sure that information is relevant to the young people. And there's implications in there that certain kinds of young people don't need information, or won't become sexually active, or it's not appropriate because of their, their faith or their culture. And, of course, Brooke has always stood very firmly for universal information and education, on the basis that it's not for us to judge who will or won't use or need information, and that we don't actually believe that the information in and of itself is harmful in any way. People do people choose to interpret it in the way that they do, and they'll use it in ways that are more or less useful for them. But information in and of itself is neutral, it's not harmful. So the idea that some people need to be protected from information is, as far as we concerned, a bit wrongun.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. What does it does it include anything on ability, like physical disabilities or neurological disabilities?
Lisa Hallgarten
It does, it does talk about making it appropriate for people with different disabilities. And I think, again, that is something which a lot of kind of lobbying went into. Particularly, I mean, I think people with physical disabilities often sort of almost ignored in the whole discussion about affecting relationships, education,
Hannah Witton
Yeah
Lisa Hallgarten
Certainly children and young people with special educational needs are addressed. And one of the reasons for that, again, comes back to the sort of safeguarding side of things, which is that young people with learning disabilities are at much greater risk of grooming and abuse, proportionately, than other groups of people, so there is this sense of protection. But then if you talk to people who work in special educational needs, they'll be quite divided. Some people see their role as being very protective, but in other contexts, and I know that Mencap has done some really brilliant work around educating young people and adults with learning disabilities around sex and relationships, and acknowledging that all people are sexual people and will have sexual feelings and have the right is the same human rights to in relationships that are enjoyable and pleasurable and safe and non coerced and free from violence, all the things that underpin our idea of what a good relationship is, are an entitlement for all people, regardless of their disability. But people tend to think in terms of learning disability as something that you know, in a very sort of protective way, rather than seeing them as whole human beings who have their own sexuality and their own entitlements and relationships. So that, and certainly that, that more kind of progressive idea doesn't come through in the guidance very much remains in a protective framing.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, I watched a video recently of like, a lot of different autistic people talking about sex education and relationships and things. And one of the people in it said this brilliant thing that has like really stuck with me of that autistic people are like the canaries in the coal mine, in terms of the information that people are given about communication, and about relationships, and dynamics and like, you know how to talk about things like sex and how to express what you want and what you don't want. And autistic people are going to be potentially more impacted by the lack of information around that. But they kind of, as the canaries in the coal mine, signify that everybody else is also not being serviced by that lack of information. Everyone else is also disadvantaged by that too.
Lisa Hallgarten
By that fear. That's such an interesting idea because if you flip it on its head, you could say that if you make, if you make information, clear, explicit, evidence based, and understandable for people with the least ability to communicate and the most means to learn how to communicate, which is not necessarily autistic people, but other people with more maybe more profound disabilities. If you make it okay for them, it's going to be great for everyone.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Lisa Hallgarten
So there is something about turning that on its head and going, how can we make sure that every single person who needs information, can have it and that's going to be really accessible and comprehensible? And if it's good for them, it's going to be great for everybody.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This comes up a few times when I talk about it, but why is it called RSE now, and not SRE? Sorry. So it stands for relationships and sex education versus previously known as sex and relationships education. So thoughts on that change?
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of insignificant and significant, at the same time. I mean, it doesn't really make a great deal of difference to the young people receiving the education, they could be getting really terrible RSE, or really brilliant SRE. So it really, what's delivered in the classroom is the important thing. But the reason this change came about was there was a real anxiety that there was too much focus on sex, as a sort of of biological function, and not enough on relationships. And to be fair, some of that, a lot of that was coming from young people themselves, who are saying, actually, we've had the lessons on contraception and the human reproductive system, but no one's told us how to communicate.
Hannah Witton
Yeah
Lisa Hallgarten
Like, no one's told us how to how to understand what constitutes a healthy relationship and how to actually achieve that, especially when there's so many different pressures on young people, and so many different ways of having a relationship now, like in person, mediated by whatever digital platforms, you know, there's a whole load of different ways. And young people have consistently said, it's, you know, our sex education has been too biological. So in that sense, I've got no objection whatsoever to us thinking much more carefully about how we support young people to define and achieve healthy relationships. But I think there was something else going on as well, which is like, can we just keep burying the sex bit? Can we just keep, like not talking about sex, because it upsets some of the blueprints pervade. And if we can keep relationships up there, that just sounds much more wholesome,
Hannah Witton
More palatable
Lisa Hallgarten
Palatable and easy to digest. So I think, you know, I think there's good and bad in that change. But ultimately, I don't think it really matters. I think what really, really matters is that young people get really good information and education in the classroom, and whatever it's called, isn't going to make that much difference to that.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, it's just the packaging.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, exactly.
Hannah Witton
So you mentioned like a few loopholes in the guidance. And you briefly mentioned about faith schools. And I was just wondering what that like line about faith schools means and, or how it could be interpreted, and then also parental removal. How was that also expressed within the guidance.
Lisa Hallgarten
So it gets all a bit complicated about parental removal, I'll start with faith schools. The guidance is mandatory for all schools. So the top line is everybody has to deliver everything, right. But the loopholes come in the form of these caveats, saying things like it can be delivered in a way that's appropriate to your school community, or that is within the tenets of your faith. So that might mean that you do have to discuss sexual intercourse, but it is absolutely acceptable to do it in a way that says it's prohibited before marriage. We're speculating, because we don't know how people are going to interpret it, but the fact that there's space for interpretation, I think, is worrying. And it's not just these caveats exists. It's just it's very non prescriptive.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, I went to a Catholic sixth form, and they wouldn't teach us about contraception. And I even asked, and they were like, no, we can't, like we actually can't even talk to you about it.
Lisa Hallgarten
It's interesting. Actually, I also heard lots of Catholic schools that will talk about contraception, they'll talk about it, it's still framed within their kind of set of moral values. So they will talk about it as a sort of, you know, technical, factual thing that exists and that people use to prevent unwanted pregnancies at the same time as saying, but that isn't something that's accepted by the Catholic Church.
Hannah Witton
Right.
Lisa Hallgarten
So you can, you can probably do both, and I know that some Catholic schools do do a reasonable job of talking about contraception. I don't know that that many Catholic schools do a good job of talking about abortion, and I know there's actually some really bad practice out there, not just in Catholic schools, but across the board.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, is it, sidetrack, is abortion in there? Because I remember in secondary school, which I went to a secular secondary school, and abortion was only taught in a religious education class, not in PHSE or Sex Ed. It was in RE.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, I think that's a very common experience for people, because it's part of the RE curriculum, and it comes in two places. It comes under, in some examples, it comes under questions of living and dying. And in some examples, it comes under questions of moral whatevers. So yeah, and it's very normal.
Hannah Witton
I just feel so icky about that.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, it's really interesting, because it's as an abstract moral issue. Of course, it's actually very interesting philosophically, and is an abstract moral issue. But we would always argue that it's actually a real life issue. That, you know, one in three women will experience abortion, and also some people who are trans and non binary, but one in three women, that's a huge, huge proportion of the population. And a lot more of those people who can become pregnant, and do become pregnant, will have had the conversation or the thought process around whether they want to continue that pregnancy. So it's really, really a normal part of people's common everyday experience. And so, much as it is interesting, as a philosophical, religious, whatever debate, it's not appropriate to only talk about it in that context, it is in the guidance, and the guidance frames it very much in terms of of one of the subjects you have to cover in relation to what the law says.
Hannah Witton
Right.
Lisa Hallgarten
And it also mentions it in terms of it has to be acknowledged as one of the pregnancy choices. It doesn't say very much more than that. And in fact, it's one of the things that was actually done better in the 2000 guidance, where it talked very specifically about it not being discussed in a way that is polarising and very much being discussed in a way that would help young people to seek help if they need it, which for me, is a much more much better framing.
Hannah Witton
But that's not in the new one?
Lisa Hallgarten
That's not in the new guidance. No.
Hannah Witton
Oh, what a shame
Lisa Hallgarten
What a shame
Hannah Witton
Yeah, so parental removal.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, parental removals quite a little bit complicated, because we're talking about two different things here. There is, in primary school, it was decided that primary school children would not have mandatory relationships and sex education, they would just have mandatory relationships education. And in primary school, you're not allowed to withdraw your child from relationships education. So that is a completely mandatory subject with no parental withdrawal. And that is causing a bit of a who ha with the anti RSE brigade and they are planning on bringing a judicial review to to overturn that decision.
Hannah Witton
Wow, okay.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah.
Hannah Witton
Is there anything that we can do like, like listeners of this podcast, who I'm assuming are pro RSE in like primary? Is there anything that we can do to
Lisa Hallgarten
I mean, I don't think I'm very much hoping the judicial review won't get very far. And actually, probably what most people need to find out is that, relate whatever you call it, relationships education in primary school, does really, really important foundational work, but it's not about putting condoms on bananas, or whatever the Daily Mail would have you believe. You know, when you teach about consent in primary school, which, incidentally, you can do before primary school, you can do it in early years. What you're talking about are things like, if you're going to take that person's toy, you have to ask them first. Yeah. If you want to touch somebody hair, why don't you ask them if it's okay, you know, it's very, very neutral and safe. But what you're putting in place are really important building blocks where people understand they have the right to their own body, and that they have the right to say yes to things and no to things. And they learn the vocabulary to say, I don't like it when you do that? So I think one of the things that we can just keep saying in terms of primary is we can keep reiterating that this is not about, and I'm putting these in air quotes that you can't see on a podcast, this is not about sexualizing children. This is about putting in place really, really important building blocks, they need to know in primary school; the names of their body parts accurately, without having mysterious posters that don't have a clitoris on them. They need to know what their body parts are, because that's how you stay healthy, that's how you ask for medical help when you need it as you get older. That's how you report abuse if you're sexually abused, there's a lot of reasons, and that is just information. So when you're singing a song with children that heads shoulders, knees and toes, actually, you could be saying, bottom penis, testicles, whatever
Hannah Witton
Oh, that would be fun
Lisa Hallgarten
They are just parts of the body. They don't have any meaning for a child of 5,6,7,8 and beyond that. They're just parts of the body and they are they have got biological names and we can teach them to use those names. So that's really important. It's really important to teach about consent, as I said before, and then it's really important, before children are likely to experience puberty, that they know what's coming. It's really important that somebody doesn't wake up in the morning bleeding and thinking they're dying, which is an experience that, that girls and women over the ages have reported, and it's completely a preventable trauma. We know that lots of young women, young girls now are starting to have periods as early as you know, nine or 10. So really, they should be learning about periods in year four. Erm, whether you want to call that relationships educational, or sex educational, or science, or whatever it is, the idea that a parent can withdraw their child from any of that, for me is completely ridiculous, but that is what they're asking for. At secondary school is a little bit different, at secondary school, a parent can withdraw their child from relationships and sex education. But, and originally, they wanted the right of withdrawal to last until the age of 16, but actually, there was a bit of a kind of to and fro around this, because I think in some parts of kind of human rights law, it's considered that most people by the age of 15, have evolved the capacity to consent. So they've they've bought in this rather peculiar thing, which says that you can, a parent can withdraw their child up to two terms before their 16th birthday.
Hannah Witton
It's so specific
Lisa Hallgarten
It's completely specific, and it's a little bit mad. And to be honest, it's not very helpful for any child, because the vast majority of RSE that they will have experienced in school will be before that time, because at Year 11 schools are just obsessed with getting people through their GCSEs, and quite often the amount of RSE falls to an even lower proportion of the curriculum than it was before.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, that's wild. Someone on Instagram actually asked how to handle parents objecting to teaching their kids the new RSE? And are there any resources for for teachers in order to kind of like, navigate those dynamics with parents?
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And, and the government have been really clear that one of the really important duties of schools is to consult with parents. Um, and I'm really fully supportive of that. Because what we find is that when you talk to parents about what you're actually teaching, as opposed to what they're worried you might be teaching, they're normally quite reassured. The vast majority of parents consistently in polls show that they want schools to teach their children RSE. Some parents feel it's a really important supplement to what they teach at home, or that they will supplement what schools teach. And there are other parents who don't want to go near it with a bargepole, but recognise that it's really, really important. Yeah, so the number of people that you know, the proportion of parents who really don't want it at all are quite small, but nevertheless, there's a lot of anxiety, because we hear so much complete hooey in the press, and whatever, about what your child's going to learn at school. And when parents find out what their children are likely to learn at school, and at what age, generally, they're really on board with it, because it's not as scary as they were led to believe. And I think when you ask, I remember seeing a really interesting presentation from a local authority organisation that was supporting schools with RSE and they did this experiment where they got, in fact, it was primary school children to put anonymous questions in a kind of ask it basket or one of those kinds of, you know, secret post it notes or whatever, and then they show them to parents. The parents were absolutely amazed, probably shocked and appalled, but amazed at the kind of questions their children were asking, but at the same time, it made them they made it,
Hannah Witton
What were they?
Lisa Hallgarten
You know, just the kind of things people would ask like, certainly, you know, in year six, somebody might ask, you know, is it true that, I don't know, that the size of your penis, will, it tells you if you're fertile? Do you have more babies if you've got a big penis? You know, that sort of thing a primary school child might ask. So it's really, really important for parents to, to not be in a state of denial about their children's curiosity, and what their children are already learning from their peers from, I mean, we know in all the studies that have been done around pornography, that the younger children are, who have seen pornography, the more likely it is that they've stumbled across it rather than sought it out. You know, they've just googled a word out of curiosity, because they've heard it and they've ended up looking at some sort of pornographic images they weren't expecting. And I think parents need to know that, they need to know that their children are googling things because they're curious. The curiosity bit of it is completely natural and okay and don't be scared of it. And isn't it much better if we can answer those questions accurately, and in a way that makes sense to children of that age? Than for them to say, well, nobody's answering these questions, and you just gonna put it online? And who knows what I might see.
Hannah Witton
So what are schools actually going to be required to do? Because it's coming into effect now, like, as this podcast episode is coming out. So what like, what do you think the reality is going to be in schools? Obviously, with COVID, things are going to be potentially different and impacted, but like, how does it look in the school's schedule and people's timetables? Like what is going on there?
Lisa Hallgarten
Well, you've asked the ultimate question, it's a bit of a mystery. We don't really know. I suppose the interesting thing about COVID is two things. One is it's the government has allowed schools to sort of defer and said they must be delivering RSE by I think, June 2021, rather than now. So they've basically said, if you're up and running with it, please do start delivering it. But we understand that school schedules have been completely thrown up in the air, so if you need to defer it a little bit, you can, which is, which is a shame. And the flip side of that is that lots of educational specialists and psychologists have been saying, forget the curriculum when children get back to school in September, they need a curriculum which is about their health and wellbeing. And that gives them space to explore the impact that COVID and lockdown has had on their relationships and on their on on how well they feel, and on their mental health. So that's quite interesting is that there is a sort of move to like, maybe we should not worry quite as much about cloud formation and worry a little bit more about, you know, people's sense of themselves and how happy they are. Whether that whether
Hannah Witton
Yeah, that's really interesting
Lisa Hallgarten
I think how schools respond to those kind of the conflicting needs to sort of get back on track, catch up on learning, as opposed to more, amore pastoral approach is going to be down to individual schools, I think.
Hannah Witton
And the guidance doesn't really have any requirements for amount of hours spent on RSE, does it.
Lisa Hallgarten
It's really non prescriptive. So it's very non prescriptive about what you teach when, and how much you teach it. And there is a great danger that schools will not make any more space for it in the curriculum than they did before. Schools, I have to say, are under extreme pressure
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Lisa Hallgarten
Curriculum wise, there's so much they're expected to pack into their curriculum. And at the same time, they're also expected to be picking up all sorts of pieces from society, that other agencies aren't dealing with. So they have become the kind of police, the social workers, the mental health specialist, everything, as well as actually just trying to plough through a quite dense and mandatory curriculum.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Lisa Hallgarten
So whether schools actually make any more space for this or not, is going to be very much on a sort of school by school basis. There's nothing in the guidance that says, you must carve out this amount of time, it doesn't say you have to do this once a week. At the moment, there are lots of schools who are using the kind of, what do they call it, like tutor group time, which is like 20 minutes in the morning when they take the register?
Hannah Witton
Like your form group
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, exactly. That's when they're trying to crowbar their whole PSHE/RSE
Hannah Witton
When everyone is waking up
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, when everyone's waking up. Exactly. So and there are other schools who've been doing a brilliant job of this all along, just because they really see the value of it. And I suspect that that very patchy, inconsistent delivery is going to carry on for some time, until schools are given more leeway about their curriculum. They have more resources for training teachers, I mean, the more teachers who are enthusiastic about this and confident about it, the more they will put pressure on their school management to make time for in the curriculum. At the moment we don't have, we don't have a cohort of, of you know, banner waving teachers who are desperate to teach RSE. There are some who love it, really enjoy it, totally see the value of it, and undertake as much training as they possibly can. But there's nothing in initial teacher training. It's not a specialist subject and most people also thrust a photocopied worksheet 10 minutes before lesson by some poor newly qualified teacher who's been given the job of coordinating sex education. And so go, you know, you've got to go and teach this class on contraceptive methods now. So as long as teachers are enthused about it, confident about it, and desperate to teach it, and as long as the government keeps piling more more responsibilities on schools, it's hard to see how they are going to make the time and space that's really needed for it.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. So it's all well and good now that, you know, we can say that RSE is compulsory in schools, but if the structures and the resources don't uphold that, then it's going to be really tricky.
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, I think there's absolutely, there's a few things we need, they need time in the curriculum, they need resources to train teachers. Even though there's a reasonable amount of free training around, if you want really good in person training, which is the best where people can sort of discuss and pull apart their values and fears and if you want that kind of thing to happen, teachers me not only the funding to go on the training, but teaching cover, which is very expensive. So there's a massive resource issue, there's an issue about the fact that it's not considered to be a specialist subject. So it's never gonna have the status of Math, English, History, whatever. And there's a, finally, there's an issue about how it's going to be inspected, like, is Ofsted going to really talk to young people in schools about how they've experienced this, this apparently new topic, this new mandatory topic? How are schools going to have kind of incentives that they need to do a really good job? So lots of questions
Hannah Witton
Do you think it should be treated like a specialist subject?
Lisa Hallgarten
Well, I personally, because I work in this field, know lots of people who would love to train to be teachers, to be specialists relationships and, well it's was now RSHE, which is a kind of combination of PSHE and sexual relationship education.
Hannah Witton
Oh, so that includes health?
Lisa Hallgarten
Yeah, it includes broad stuff about health, which is why there was stuff about oral hygiene in the guidance.
Hannah Witton
Okay.
Lisa Hallgarten
You know, I think actually, if it was a specialist subject, there would be a lot of enthusiastic people. I mean, Brooke gets emails every week from people saying, how do I become a sex educator? How, you know, tell me, tell me what I can do. Actually, the moment that isn't a pathway, you, you kind of carved your own pathway.
Hannah Witton
And even I'm still like, figuring out how to, you know, do any formal training or like get, you know, a certification or like stamp of approval. Like, yeah, it's so tricky. There isn't one way to do it at all.
Lisa Hallgarten
And I think until it's considered to be a legitimate, academic, specialist subject, you know, then there's not going to be that sort of clear career pathway. But I definitely think there would be takers for it, if it was
Hannah Witton
Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned at the beginning, that one of the reasons why this guidance has come into effect now is because of the really dramatic changes in the last 20 years in terms of the internet, and our digital lives. So what does the guidance actually say about the internet?
Lisa Hallgarten
So interestingly enough, one of the places it comes is there's a on, on one page, there's a section called the law. And it says, you know, it's really important that people understand the relevant legal provisions around these topics. And some of the most complex topics are included in their; stuff around consent, violence against women and girls, online behaviours, including sexting, in quotation marks, youth produced sexual imagery, news, etc. That's actually the only place that sexting comes up, except in in terms of one of the references at the end of the guidance. Um, so it's mentioned in terms of, in terms of legal provisions, like what what's the law say.
Hannah Witton
Yeah
Lisa Hallgarten
The word online comes up again, and again and again. And, and it does, I think it does recognise and again, it is down to the work of people sort of lobbying around this, it does recognise that there isn't this thing called life and then online, and that for most people, there's this kind of seamless, there's an invisible wall between the two. They're just one that if they just are life, and it does recognise that in the guidance, so it does reference particular challenges that are raised by the sort of online world, but also does recognise that they, you know, that, that young people don't see a sort of difference between those two places.
Hannah Witton
Well, fingers crossed.
Lisa Hallgarten
I mean, I just like to, I suppose, yeah, there are there are really brilliant resources out there, and there's really brilliant training, and I think that and then there's a whole world that you sit in, which is the world of kind of outside school, public education, if you like, public engagement around sex and relationships education, I think, between between all of them, we're all on the right track, and I just don't think we should expect any miracles from this new mandatory relationships and sex education.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, it's like, great that it's been acknowledged that it should be mandatory. But it almost feels like that's about it, like a, like an acknowledgement that this is necessary. But with with nothing much else.
Lisa Hallgarten
That's about it. But we're getting there.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And hopefully, you know, it gives schools and teachers almost like permission to try and focus on some of these areas. Are there any resources, you mentioned this, like resources and training out there for teachers. Are there any that you would recommend where people can go and check out?
Lisa Hallgarten
There are loads of really good resources out there, obviously, I'm bound to promote Brooks, but we do have these amazing free e learning tools called Brooke Learn, around a range of topics. And they've been accessed very highly by teachers during lockdown because the great thing is you do on your own in your own time. But really
Hannah Witton
Yeah, and those are all free and online art though, the Brooke Learn
Lisa Hallgarten
Those are all free, online. The Sex Education Forum has got a whole load of partner members and if you look at who they are, they are all, a lot of them are producing really excellent resources. So there's lots of good stuff out there for teachers.
Hannah Witton
Fab. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your knowledge with us. Really appreciate it.
Lisa Hallgarten
I've really enjoyed it. Thank you and keep on doing what you're doing, you're a really important part of the whole sex education picture.
Hannah Witton
Oh, thank you. Thanks for listening, guys. Thank you so much for listening to Doing It. If you enjoyed it, I would really appreciate it if you left a rating and a review. You can find show notes at DoingItPodcast.co.uk and do go follow us on social media and I'll catch you in the next episode. Bye.
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