Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I welcome Professor Pam Alldred, who is joining us remotely. She is a professor of youth and community studies at Nottingham Trent University. If there is anything that you wish to add to that biography, Professor Alldred, please feel free to do so. Thank you for giving up your time to contribute to the Committee's inquiry into relationships and sexuality education (RSE). I invite you to give a presentation of up to 10 minutes or to make initial remarks, after which there will be questions from Committee members. All the evidence that we hear today will be included in the inquiry papers in order to inform any final report that we produce. We look forward to hearing from you.

Professor Pam Alldred (Nottingham Trent University): Thank you very much for the chance to brief the Committee, for which I am really grateful. Besides working in youth and community studies in a social work department, I am a member of the Sex Education Forum (SEF) and a reviewer for the journal 'Sex Education', and I have done special issues of that.

I have researched relationships and sex education for about 20 years in secondary schools across whole boroughs, looking at taking a multiple-perspective approach by working with heads, teachers, pupils, non-school attending young people in the area and school nurses. In one case, I did an in-depth study of all the schools in one local authority. I have also worked with primary schools, looking at the issue of engaging parents with relationships and sex education. Over the past 10 years, my work has concentrated more on violence, safeguarding and consent. A theme that runs through my projects is that I usually work with children and young people and with the professionals who support them. There are a few points in my research where I talk about professionals and what, they say, they need to do their work well.

I have prepared a quick summary of about eight or nine minutes long that flags some things for you. In a nutshell, my overall view is that RSE or, perhaps, personal, social and health education (PSHE), with perhaps citizenship in there too, is the most important area of the curriculum. No other area has such an important bearing on decision-making, rights awareness and the ability to discuss and decide on issues that could affect health, fertility, well-being, violence and so on.

The headline points that I want to give you are, first, that we need to demonstrate the value of something by putting it on the curriculum. We have to show that it is important to tackle all violence but especially violence against women and girls by tackling it centrally in the curriculum. Secondly, we need to communicate our values through the education that we provide. Our discussions on equality, inclusivity, healthy relationships and sexual consent as a right send out important messages. When we do not cover them, we teach that they are illegitimate, low-status or even stigmatising topics to discuss. Thirdly, we have to give children and young people the language that they need to ensure that something is speakable and nameable. That is crucial for dealing with domestic abuse and for understanding healthy and unhealthy relationships. It is therefore crucial for enabling disclosure and for enabling safeguarding work to happen effectively. Those are my motivations for the work.

I will now give the Committee a few points about the whys, after which I will talk a bit about the whats. Following a really helpful tip, I also have a few examples of what, we know, does not work.

Why do I think that RSE is so important? What do I think that it can do? I will start by talking about health information being a human right. Children and young people have the right to information with which to protect their health. That is a straightforward requirement for education to provide. It is also a form of citizenship education for children and young people to know about their rights and responsibilities. In peer relationships, that means knowing that there are boundaries to consider for themselves and knowing how to communicate those boundaries while respecting the rights of others. Doing that forms the basis of healthy relationships.

There is then safeguarding. Yesterday's damning report on the English system and the study of 193 child sexual abuse cases shows that we are failing to listen to children and young people effectively. We need to do better there. A lot more attention will now be paid to how we do safeguarding, and that might prove to be a boost for relationship education and sex education. The largest project that I have done found a need to raise the status of discussions in school about sex and relationships in order to show that grades are not the be-all and end-all and that the importance of discussing respect, relationships, values and sexuality cannot be overstated.

Finally, we need to tackle stigma and the shaming of people for being different from us, for making different decisions or for having different values. That is such a core strand that has to run across the curriculum. We can do particularly useful work in that area by thinking broadly about different forms of difference.

The whats that are my recommendations to you to inform your recommendations are about comprehensive relationships and sexuality education. There is international and interdisciplinary consensus on the need for sexualities education for children and young people, and I do mean "children". The curriculum should start in year 1, whereby it is said to children, "Yes, I think that you should put your coat on, but, OK, you can decide" or, "In this case, I am telling everybody to put their coat on". In other words, there needs to be clarity for children about what we ask them and what we tell them. It could be that we ask them before we wipe their nose, for example. The curriculum schedules — several different schemata — that we have from the PSHE Association and the Sex Education Forum have a sensible, age-appropriate starting point, which is with animals. Most children will already know the information that they deliver, which is that the mummy cat met a male cat and had kittens. It will be at that level. The concerns about age-appropriate information are therefore really overstated. We do not need to worry about that with the published schemes.

Frank and fearless sex education in secondary schools is needed, and clear and age-appropriate relationship education from early years is good practice. We know that comprehensive sex education does not lower the age of sexual debut. We know from an international meta-analysis that comprehensive sex education does not significantly alter the age of first sex with another person but makes the first sexual experiences with someone else more likely to be safer sex.

There is a significant gain to be had from that education.

I will now talk about anti-violence work. On the slides that I sent the Committee, there is a link to the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) work, which was work that I did with Vanita Sundaram. Anti-violence work has to be framed in the equalities work. Its base needs building from that base upwards. That may sound obvious, but it is crucial, and it is partly about the whole school trying to model respectful relationships: among the teachers, from the head to the junior staff; across all staff members, not only teaching staff; and among pupils. That also means community education, discussions with the community and a societal-level discussion.

The two main hows that I want to flag are inclusivity and the value of approaches developed in informal education. On inclusivity, a big, two-year international project for which I had EU funding talked, in the broadest sense, about violence with children and young people and the professionals who work with them. It looked at gender-related violence, which was deliberately a broad category in order to include violence against women and girls and violence based around gender but also homophobic violence and transphobic violence. We know that the rates of sexual violence, verbal abuse and physical abuse are highest for the trans and non-binary communities, while the rates of sexual violence are highest for bisexual women. All violence is a problem, but we can see some particular extreme confluences of violence.

I prefer an approach that thinks broadly and problematises violence as a whole rather than one that looks at who experiences it and gets hung up on the identities that we are looking to protect. It is much more valuable to problematise violence and abuse as a whole and to let students apply that principle to different relationships in different moments. Doing that comes from knowing how sexual harassment is racialised, which is Sundaram's work. She is one of my close colleagues.

I will now talk about youth work approaches. I have been training youth and community workers in universities for the past 12, 13 or 14 years, and I am really struck by how effective some of the methods of educational practice — the pedagogies — are that youth workers use. We might be attending to children and young people's own language, own concepts and own concerns and being attentive to readiness to discuss. In general, that is a feature of good practice in schools, but, owing to time, the curriculum and class size, it is not always allowed for. Any ways in which youth work approaches can be applied in education are really helpful here, and one of the books that I flag in the slides is on how helpful critical pedagogy is in sex education.

In one of my studies, I compare the approaches to sex education of teachers, youth workers and school nurses, and that generates a really interesting list of tips for good practice, including specific methods such as third-person narratives and vignettes and the distancing techniques that we use to enable people to learn about things without their being asked to share personal experiences. I do that in the consent education. I do it with university students as well. There is a lot of work on how effective those approaches are in enabling a classroom to feel able to tackle intimate topics safely. That is one strand of the how.

How we talk about values and value differences should be centred so that we talk about value differences and differences across race, ethnicity, faith and genders. We put it all in there and ask people to use their experience of being othered to help understand other people's experience of difference. We appeal to them on quite profound principles, and doing that is normally really effective. A couple of London boroughs have done campaigns that showed how effective doing that was. Tower Hamlets, for instance, had a lot of homophobic abuse in a particular area. Its No Place for Hate campaign seemed to bring different communities together to support one another. It is a majority ethnic minority and majority Muslim area, and the campaign was seen as a good way in which to form alliances across differences and show allyship.

The study that I mentioned that was done in all the schools in one local authority returned the most detailed findings about teachers in particular. Where teachers also had some youth work experience, however, that was particularly valuable, and they felt more confident talking about sex and relationship education. Teachers, of course, need to feel supported by a senior management team, which needs to be visible in managing and leading relationship education. The senior management team needs to be a face in that conversation. A specific issue that was raised with us in the study on violence against women is that teachers flagged the fact that they wanted support to discuss with young people social media influence and misogynistic media content. They wanted some support with addressing that in the classroom. That is a particular issue from my latest study that I want to flag to the Committee.

Teachers also wanted to know that they had the confidence of the school community should parents complain, but what they need is the opportunity to access training, if they feel that they need it, and not to be compelled to cover relationship education if they are not confident. We have to look at teachers' background disciplines and recognise that STEM educators are sometimes not as used to discursive approaches and values discussions. Asking an English teacher to cover form tutor duties is probably different from asking a physics teacher to cover form tutor duties. Ideally, what is needed is for all adults in a school to have the confidence to discuss relationships, safeguarding and some level of sexuality education with young people.

There is also real value in bringing in external speakers, who can be experts. They can talk about more up-to-date or more difficult and challenging topics. I have evidence from children and young people that they like that. In my first study, I found that children and young people prefer there to be some boundaries between their home life and their school life and are therefore often happy to have personal conversations with external experts rather than with their tutors. Both roles are important and valuable, however, so they can complement each other.

There are a lot of experts in the field from specialist organisations that are happy to do RSE work. There is also school nurses' expertise, so I will flag that. My study with school nurses led to increased awareness of how much training they have in order to have discussions with pupils in group and individual settings. School nurses are potentially a resource already in schools.

I will give a couple of examples of "It doesn't work if ... ". We know that it does not work if we mandate teachers who do not want to discuss relationship education or sex education.

We know that it is not helpful if they feel pressured or in conflict with parents. We know that it is all the more important that teachers are able to talk about sexual orientation and sexualities because pupils may be feeling unsafe at school — recent work that I have done has shown that — and on the streets and at home. That might be a different situation from one where there are faith differences and pupils might have the support of people at home.

On gender-based discussion groups, it is not appropriate any more to have single-sex discussion groups. We can see that all pupils need to know about menstruation. Discussing it among just the girls leaves it a taboo topic, and doing so will always leave some people out. We could also look at female genital mutilation (FGM) and how valuable it has been for children in schools in Islington to all follow a programme that taught them about that. That meant that some boys were able to safeguard their sisters. Those are issues for community education.

We should not approach education as being identity-led. A teacher once said to me, "There are no gay children in this class. It is OK; we do not need to cover that". Somebody who was at that school took his own life the following year. He, reportedly, had struggled to come out. We definitely cannot have that approach. Education is for social justice for all and is not to be individually tailored, as the previous sex and relationships education guidance for England and Wales was. There is great practice on that in Wales and Scotland.

I can stop there.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you for your presentation. We will move on to questions from members.

When you talked about what RSE should be like, you said that it should be "comprehensive", which is the term that comes up repeatedly when we discuss this. One thing that our inquiry is looking at is whether the curriculum in Northern Ireland is fit for purpose in delivering what it should and in meeting the needs of young people. If you were designing minimum content for a curriculum, what would you put in it as a baseline to comprehensively cover RSE? I know that that is a big question.

Professor Alldred: It is.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It is about giving us a sense of the areas that would need to be in RSE for the curriculum to be considered comprehensive.

Professor Alldred: As I said, I endorse the two most detailed schemas that I have seen, which are from the Sex Education Forum and the PSHE Association. Those are both really thorough and comprehensive. By "comprehensive sex education", I mean that it has to attend to all people, all relationships and all forms of sex. It has to be inclusive of those who are LGBTQ+ and must not assume that there is particular sexual practice in particular relationships: it is about trying not to have assumptions about who does what. The term "CSE" — comprehensive sex education — is used in the literature to distinguish it from abstinence-only education, which is the main contrast. If we are doing abstinence-only education, we are probably not helping someone to make a decision about what sexual activity might be safer than another or how to increase the sexual safety of something that they are going to do.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Could I ask a follow-up question on that basis?

Professor Alldred: Sure.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Another thing that we have been thinking about is whether it is appropriate for the RSE curriculum to be standardised or for schools to have flexibility in what they deliver. We have heard divergent views on that. Is it appropriate for the curriculum to be standardised, or do schools need flexibility?

Professor Alldred: That is a tricky one. There is a risk either way. I would go for a standardised curriculum. I would want to know that all schools are talking about violence. Staff are emboldened when they can see a curriculum and know that it is not just a bee in their bonnet and they will not be criticised for it. It is a real help for them to have core topics and core subjects. It might be that there can be room for negotiation about how they approach topics. If they think that something will be particularly sensitive with their class or with particular pupils, of course, they must use their professional judgement, but having a curriculum that is standardised is really helpful. It is an awful responsibility for busy teachers if they have decisions to make about what as well as how, so I would take that off their shoulders.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you.

Mr Sheehan: Thanks, Professor. You said that it can be useful to bring in external providers to deal with the more difficult or challenging areas. What areas might be challenging or difficult?

Professor Alldred: One such area might be violence in relationships. In my area, you can get really good support in the curriculum to discuss domestic abuse, which is broader than violence, from some of the survivor services. There is Women's Aid and a similar provider, or there is an organisation called Equation, which is a LGBT relationship support organisation that supports same-sex couples who are experiencing violence and does relationship education. I recently saw one of the packs that Equation uses, and it is the broadest form of anti-abuse education. It has cartoons of somebody being excluded at school, cartoons of somebody being actively bullied and a cartoon of somebody cringing away from something in the home setting. It starts a conversation about power and abuse with pupils. It was starting those conversations at the broadest or most widely applicable, level.

I guess that that supports the point that I was making about having those conversations really broadly, including on what is OK and what is not OK; what is giving somebody a decision; and what is not respecting their decision. Those things can be applied in really different settings. That means that somebody who is applying the conversation that you are having to sex is thinking about that, but somebody who is not thinking about sex or is not motivated yet by sex might, really helpfully, be applying it to the sports that they play or to other settings. In that sense, it is a proper spiral curriculum in that the values are embedded before they are applied in a sexual relationship or a relationship.

Mr Sheehan: Thank you.

Professor Alldred: There are lots of general organisations with information on this. Amnesty International has some good education packs that can work in a lot of settings.

Mrs Mason: Thanks, Professor, for that presentation. My question follows on from Pat's question on external organisations and arises from stakeholder engagement that we had with a group of young people. There was a young girl at our table who was discussing how she had received RSE in her youth group, which, obviously, sits outside the school setting. She was very confident about RSE and in discussing the issues because she had had that education. She said that that made it much easier for her when it came to discussing the subject in school. She said that there was a noticeable difference between those who had attended her youth group and those who had not. There was, possibly, sniggering and pupils who were uncomfortable with it when it was being presented in school. Are there other examples of where there could be wrap-around provision for such initiatives? Should that be in all of the youth groups that are funded by the Education Authority (EA) here? Is there a space for that?

Professor Alldred: Absolutely. In my experience of talking to and training youth and community workers, they are not surprised that relationship and sex education are on the agenda; they know that they will be talking to young people about that. They also know their safeguarding responsibilities. Teachers may have done their safeguarding training and be clear on that too, but they are not as willing or ready to talk about sex and relationships.

Due to youth work's informal setting, opt-in nature and youth-centred approach, youth workers can deliver that in a more nuanced, sensitive and responsive way. If a comment is made in a youth group discussion, I hope that every youth worker will pick up on it and respond to it then and there. Rather than looking at whether there is a curriculum item on the issue in 17 weeks, I hope that they have the conversation straight away and do not miss the moment. It is important, educationally, to seize that moment. Youth workers probably also work with smaller groups. Classroom sizes can make it a little more unwieldy. There may be one table that is sniggering away and one table that is engaged but interrupted by the mass — the numbers — and the formality of formal education.

There are lots of things that we can take from the experience of informal education. One is that point about spontaneity and being ready to have the discussion, to pick up on a term or phrase that young people have used, even if it is slang, and to do the interpretative work, asking, "What does it do when we use that word? Are there any better words for that? Are there any words that don't insult anybody in the process?". That is such a helpful conversation to have, is it not? It is about using their words and using that moment in the conversation.

I would love all teachers to feel a little more trusted and confident to do that and a little more confident to respond in the classroom. It is just as important to respond to something that somebody asks in a classroom. If we do not respond, we make it look as if that thing is not askable and that we cannot talk about it. We restigmatise it, make the topic shameful or shame the person asking about it. None of those things are helpful. I would love teachers to be as confident as youth workers in responding in the classroom in that moment. I know that that is a big ask. Some of us are comfortable with the spontaneous classroom stuff, but, for other people, it is terrifying or personally uncomfortable for all kinds of reasons.

Mrs Mason: Thank you.

Mr Baker: Thank you, Professor. I have a wee follow-up question on youth work.

A couple of weeks ago, Dr Susan Lagdon presented to the Committee on work that the Ulster University carried out with youth leaders. One of the youth groups that I work with in Lagmore was heavily involved in that work. As you said, our young people do not feel that they get the right RSE in school. It is about confidence. Youth work does not happen in just the youth club; so much work is done with hard-to-reach young people who hang about the streets. That engagement happens; it is about having the confidence to do it. It is about what more we can do and what we can do better.

While there is a place for youth workers, the gap in our schooling is a big problem. Our young people have identified that gap. They want RSE to be delivered in school by their teachers, because they trust them, but those barriers keep being put up. It seems to me that they want RSE to be across the curriculum. It is not a case of debating the morality or the science of something: they want it across and throughout their education. They tell us that loud and clear, but, for some reason, the gatekeepers close the doors to them. It feels as if our young people's voices are, once again, being missed in a lot of the discussions.

Professor Alldred: That is right. You are flagging detached youth work. There is formal education and informal education that takes place in settings, but there is also detached youth work. Those are precious resources. I cannot remember what jurisdiction these figures are for, but we have seen something like a 70% cut in youth work funding over the past couple of years. That sector is beleaguered, which means that projects lose experienced staff and, if they get further funding, have to re-recruit. That means that they lose a wealth of priceless experience.

You are absolutely right about keeping those resources in different places. I might not want to have that conversation and might not want to ask that question in front of "him" in that classroom, but I might be happy to ask it in a youth work or one-to-one setting. Young people are also more likely to have one-to-one conversations with youth workers. That is a really valuable moment.

Just to flag it, school nurses are another source. In the schools that I have worked in, the contracts of school nurses have been cut and cut. They are only there during term time, they have only a minimal presence, and, as soon as they have anything like a new drug on the block or a pandemic or a vaccination schedule to roll out, they have too much on their plate. However, they are qualified to deliver group and individual education on sex and relationships.

Did you mention something else?

Mr Baker: It is just what I hear from the young people. It is about the relationships side of it and violence against girls and women. That is a big piece for our young men to be taught. That should be prioritised in school, and there is a place for it in our youth sector, because that message is coming through loud and clear from the youth sector.

Mr Crawford: Thanks, Professor, for your presentation and your time before Committee this afternoon. It is much appreciated.

If I picked you up correctly, you said that you started your research 20 years ago. In what ways have attitudes towards sex education in schools changed among parents, young people and teachers in that time? Has there been positive progress?

Professor Alldred: Yes, I think so. I am also a parent of three teenagers. Most parents now recognise that there is a world of online material that is way different from our experience in our childhood and youth. That means that young people cannot decide to step away from stuff. They cannot make decisions about what they are exposed to, because it will come at them and they will see it in different places. That gives parents a bigger recognition of the role of professionals. Professionals being ready to talk about things is really valuable. An image that a teacher notices in school may well have been round a whole class or part of it. Parents may not be aware of that, and they may not be aware of the whole genre. That applies to everything from sexist imagery to abusive imagery.

We have seen critiques that have, generally, reached parents of the amount of porn that is violence and young men getting their sex education from porn and adopting or learning norms such as the assumption that women like choke experiences as part of sex. There have been some awful cases written up, where young men had learnt normalising messages from extreme pornography that are really worrying and damaging. That kind of material is what makes parents say, "Yes, please: have those conversations in school as well. Yes, I want to be talking to my kids about that, but I also want teachers to be tackling it. They will have a different angle; they will see different material; and they will have a jumping-off point on what some other child has seen in a video that my child might have been the next to see". That has changed.

The situation with biological sexual health has also changed. The chlamydia rate is highest amongst 16- to 25-year-olds, and the new infection rate is really worrying. There is what some researchers have described as an infertility "time bomb" due to that, so we also have medical reasons to think really carefully.

The bee in my bonnet is the consent education that I do. We have to do consent education for people to understand and enact their rights. Even when you know what your legal rights are, all kinds of things prevent you from actualising them — embarrassment, not wanting to offend someone, thinking about the long-term relationship — and there are all kinds of reasons why people do not act. Knowing is just the first step in consent education.

Mr Crawford: That is great. I have one more question. It is a follow-up to what Cathy asked. It is about how the whole-school approach takes into account all who are involved in the school community; how they can play a role in preventing violence; and how all aspects of school life can make a positive contribution. How complex is it to implement a whole-school approach? Can the school do that on its own?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I know that that is a big question, but I ask you to answer it briefly, as our time is short now, unfortunately.

Professor Alldred: Two minutes?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Yes, two minutes is fine, thank you.

Professor Alldred: It is a really big ask of schools, I agree. I have a bid outstanding for nearly £1 million, and I am trying to write something about that with the National Education Union (NEU).

It is a really tough ask. I would want governors and teachers to be involved, and I would want heads and the senior management team to take a strong leadership role. It would be about sending out people like me who are in teacher education and in education in universities and can see the broader issues. Teachers can see the broader issues. They worry about them, and they say such things as, "We do not want concern with the effective — teaching for grades — to ruin our concern with the affective". That is teachers acknowledging that the pressure on them for grades and curriculum-relevant outcomes squeezes out the well-being stuff. They absolutely go into teaching wanting to have a broader impact on children and young people's well-being. It is about somehow holding on to that and making the job feasible for them.

There are lots of charities and campaigning organisations, including survivors' organisations. Almost all of them have educational packs, all of which are of some value, but it is a lot to ask an individual PSHE coordinator to take on the whole campaign throughout the school. Having strong equalities education in a school is the best starting point. It needs that for all the other reasons anyway.

Mr Crawford: Thank you.

Mr Martin: Thank you for your presentation, Professor. I had a couple of questions, but there is one that I want to press with you. You talked about the stages at which there should be PSHE and sex education. I do not want to misquote you, but I scribbled down that you said that that teaching should go all the way down to early years. Will you reflect on that and what it means?

Professor Alldred: I am just drawing to your attention the continuity between an adult reaching in and wiping a child's nose, as, I am sure, I have done many times, and saying, "Shall I wipe your nose", and saying, "I am going to do something to your body. Is that all right?". It is about working with four- and five-year-olds during early years and at early primary-school age to talk about their rights to their body to help put in place the building blocks for when they eventually talk about sexual consent. That will be years off, but there are stages in between of, "I am going to do something to your body", or, "Do you want to do something to your body?", or, "I am going to recommend that you put your coat on". At what point do we say, "I am going to put your coat on"? Do we say, "I think that you should put your coat on. Can you do that yourself?"? Do you see what I mean? Drawing that continuity with bodily autonomy is about, for example, thinking through whether we say, "Do you want to hug Granny?", "Will you give Granny a hug?" or, "Give Granny a hug". It is about teaching children about physical intimacy, including not picking each other up in the playground so that they respect each other's bodies and decisions about their bodies.

That is nothing scary or surprising. Teachers in early years and primary already have those conversations and discuss with each other whether to do something for the children, to insist that they do it or to offer it as an option. It is not shocking. Once the examples are put to that, there is nothing shocking or alarming in it. It is about having continuity in granting subjecthood to little people.

Mr Martin: You have answered my question, which related to issues of consent when it comes to the autonomy of what you described as a "little person". Yes, OK. That is fine.

Professor Alldred: There is a nice project that was done with year 5 about massage. Basically, they modelled consent education with pupils sitting down in their chairs, their partner asking whether they wanted to take their blazer off and, if they gave permission, giving them a bit of a shoulder massage through their shirt. That was a lovely example of learning about bodily consent but not yet applying it to sex.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you for your evidence, Professor Alldred. That evidence session was recorded, and it will be included in our inquiry papers and reflected in any final report that is produced. Thank you very much for the time that you have given to the Committee this afternoon.

Professor Alldred: You are most welcome, and you are most welcome to get in touch to ask about anything specific that I can add. Thanks ever so much. Good luck with it.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you.