School sex education is often ‘out of touch’

School sex education is often negative, heterosexist, and out of touch, and taught by poorly trained, embarrassed teachers, finds a synthesis of the views and experiences of young people in different countries, published in the online journal BMJ Open. Schools’ failure to acknowledge that sex education was a special subject with unique challenges was doing a huge disservice to young people, and missing a key opportunity to safeguard and improve their sexual health, concluded the researchers. They based their findings on 55 qualitative studies that explored the views and experiences of young people who had been taught sex and relationship…