Friday July 9, 2010
U.K. Labour Bid for Mandatory Sex Ed for Academies Tanks
By Kathleen Gilbert
LONDON, U.K., July 9, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Members of the U.K.’s Labour Party have failed in an effort to force British academies to teach explicit sex education to children and teenagers as part of a broader curriculum, the U.K. Press Association reported Wednesday.
Academies are a special type of school that, while receiving state funding, maintain a level of independence from government control. According to The Guardian’s Rebecca Smithers, academies have been compared to U.S. charter schools.
The amendment to introduce compulsory sex ed within the “personal, social and health education” (PSHE) curriculum in academies, put forward Baroness Massey of Darwen and Baroness Flather, was struck down by lawmakers 245-156. Christian Today reported this week that the curriculum would have included lessons on homosexual relationships, divorce, and abortion.
As the legislation was being debated post-committee in the house, Education minister Lord Hill of Oareford indicated that he opposed the placement of the initiative in the Academies Bill, saying that “the best place to consider these issues is in the round, when we get a chance to look at the whole question of the national curriculum later in the year.”
According to the Christian Institute, Lord Waddington, a Conservative Peer, said that the purpose of the academies is to have “greater freedom than other schools rather than less.”
“Surely academies should be free to choose not to provide sex education for children of primary school age when the school and parents think that it would not be appropriate,” he said.
The pro-family groups Christian Concern for our Nation and the Christian Legal Centre had fought the proposed regulation.
Lord Hill signaled that the curriculum would receive another chance at becoming law in the fall.
Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has drafted recommendations for schools to begin teaching sex education to children at the age of 5 years old, it was reported last month.
The goal, according to NICE, is to bring down Britain’s high teen pregnancy rate. The method used amounts to the same steady prescription of explicit sex-ed funding that is estimated by the Department of Children, Schools and Families to have cost British taxpayers £260 million in the past decade.
Meanwhile, the teen pregnancy rate, one of the highest in Europe, has only suffered a 13.3% dent between 1998 and 2008, far short of the Labor party’s 50% goal promised in 1999.