Teachers in England say they need more time, training and resources to tackle the dangers of pornography in schools, against a backdrop of increasing incidents of pupils taking and sharing sexual images.
Delegates to the National Education Union’s annual conference heard that secondary schools were only able to allocate a few hours a year to teach the relationships and sex education (RSE) curriculum in England, giving them little time to discuss issues such as pornography and sexual abuse as they arose.
Jon Reddiford, a teacher from north Somerset, told the conference that he had recently experienced “a really horrible set of incidents” at his school involving year 11 pupils that could have been avoided with more RSE teaching in previous years.
“It had been going on for a long time before it emerged to staff that a number of the girls were taking explicit photos of themselves and sending them to their boyfriends, which were then being shared around. It later emerged that pressure was being put on the girls by their boyfriends to do this,” Reddiford said.
“It needed for the bigger picture to be tackled. The fact that these kind of images were easily available to 15- and 16-year-olds, and the fact that there wasn’t the space in school to discuss them in a way that was appropriate for teenagers … made it much harder for us to deal with it.”
Reddiford said it was important for the union to take a stand, “because the impact it had on our year 11s was absolutely massive and we could have dealt with it much better at the time”.
The delegates in Bournemouth unanimously passed a motion calling for “properly resourced, high-quality” relationship and sex education in schools and colleges, as well as consistent recording and reporting of sexual harassment, abuse and violence online and off-line.
Amy Fletcher, a teacher from Tower Hamlets who moved the motion, said: “We must acknowledge that young people will feel curious about sex, and they may look to pornography if they do not get excellent RSE in schools.”
Sarah Byrne, a delegate from Hackney, noted that the NSPCC had found that one in 20 pupils of primary school age had shared nude images with each other.
Byrne said staff were expected to teach the current curriculum “with zero training including, crucially, the requirement to address pornography. In my school it would be one hour per fortnight … How are we supposed to promote healthy relations and safeguard our young people in this context, with no time and no training?”
Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU, said that young children could be accidentally exposed to porn “because of algorithms” used by social media, with many lacking the maturity to understand or cope.
“Relationships and sex education needs to have enough time in the school curriculum to empower young people around the key areas of consent, self-worth and respect, because levels of sexual harassment in schools and across society are deeply entrenched and cause real harm and abuse,” Bousted said.