Sex education insanity

The Family Bulletin arrived this morning. Published by Family and Youth Concern, this is one newsletter that I always find worth reading. The latest issue is not yet at the FYC website but I expect it will be posted there soon.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the Government's Sex education review steering group which is hopelessly biased in its make up. an article in the Family Bulletin picks up on something I had missed. Launching the SRE review, the Department for Children, Schools and Families confidently asserted that:
The delivery of good SRE is crucial in keeping young people safe and healthy as well as helping to bring down teenage pregnancy rates.
However, as the Bulletin points out, the Department has admitted that it has neither commissioned nor evaluated research on the impact of SRE on the attitudes and lifestyle choices of young people. Neither has it made any assessment of the effectiveness of sex education. The repeated claim to have a commitment to review best practice in effective SRE seems to be based on little more than asking young people what they want. There is no attempt to find out what is actually "best practice" or what is actually "effective".

Elsewhere in the Bulletin, a contribution by Dr Genuis to a debate in the British Medical Journal is reported. (See: Are condoms the answer to rising rates of non-HIV sexually transmitted infection? No) I was amused by this passage:
In my home province of Alberta, rates of chlamydia and gonorrhoea have tripled since 1998 despite ubiquitous "safer sex" education. The ongoing assertion that condoms are "the" answer to this escalating pandemic reminds me of Einstein’s words, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
The Family and Youth Concern AGM and Conference with be at the RAF club in Piccadilly on 14 June. Speakers (afternoon) are Irina Tyk, headmistress of Holland House School which set up the Butterfly Project to teach children to read and raise educational standards; and Ray Lewis, a former prison governor who founded the Eastside Young Leaders Academy in Newham. Also at the meeting will be Owen and Eunice Johns who were turned down as foster carers because they were unable to condone homosexual practice.

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