Great Britain has the highest teen pregancy rate in all of Europe; in 2002 alone, almost 40,000 pregnancies were reported. Much like in America, which also has a high teen pregnancy rate, debate has arisen about what to do about this problem, resulting in two sides, one which wants abstinence-only teaching in schools, and one which wants informative teaching about safe sex and contraceptives. While the British government has tried to avoid offending either side, it‘s also devoted to trying to cut down on teen pregnancy, and has promised to reduce teen pregnancy rates by half by 2010. Whether they’ve made an effort in that regard is debatable, but regardless, there are still problems with the current system of sex ed in British schools. While sex ed is mandatory, (although parents can withdraw their children from it if they want to), until recently, the focus was all very scientific and biological: the curriculum consisted of learning about the reproductive system, how a fetus develops during pregnancy, and the changes that take place during puberty and adolescence. Whether to teach about contraception and safe sex is left up to the schools to decide. As it is, many schools do offer more than the requirements; however, many teachers are not trained to properly teach about sexual materials. In addition, school legislation requires that teachers must inform parents if their children ask about birth control. In a survey done, many students were found to be angry about how sex ed is taught, as they feel what they learned focused purely on the mechanics, and that they were denied from learning about more explicit material.
Starting in 2005 though, new guidelines were given to sex ed teachers, encouring them to focus their teaching around relationships instead of biology. These guidelines, which are part of a teaching package called the PSHE, are not mandatory though, and many pro-informative sex ed campaigners have said that this type of sex ed won‘t be improved until it becomes mandatory. The sex ed part of PSHE focuses on teaching about having relationships with others, whether they be family, friends, or the dating type, and how to make good decisions when it comes to sex. Teachers are encouraged to use examples from teen magazines in their lessons as well. These new guidelines are expected to help cut down on teen pregnancy rates by providing teens with more information than they received before and helping to prevent them from receiving mixed messages about relationships and sex. However, other reasons given for the high teen pregnancy rate such as poverty and girls with teen mothers being more likely to be teen mothers themselves have yet to be addressed.
In a recently done trial study, teachers in 104 schools taught their students about trying other types of physical intimacy like oral sex instead of having sexual intercourse. The emphasis of this course was to teach teenagers to be more assertive in insisting how far they want to go sexually, and for them to learn safer alternatives to sex. The trial was a success, as the number of teens having full sexual intercourse fell by 20% in those schools. All of this seems to indicate that though the teen pregnancy rate is still very high and relationship-based sex ed isn‘t mandatory, the UK does seem to be somewhat on the right track when it comes to teaching about safe sex.