Experts call for sex education for 4 year olds

Leading British charities are calling for sex education to be taught to children as young as four in an attempt to bring down the rising rates of abortion and sexually transmitted infections.

The two top sexual health charities, the Family Planning Association and Brook say providing some level of sex education at an early stage may help deter young teenagers from rushing into sex.

The charities have called for sex and relationship education to be compulsory in schools and say it should be a subject in its own right.

They want sex and relationship education to be more in depth in school programmes and suggest that teaching children about sex from a young age could help cut abortion rates and sexually transmitted infections when they become adolescents.

The charities believe young children should be taught the names of body parts and about sex and relationships and say every primary and secondary school should be legally required to provide sex and relationships education.

They also say that secondary schools must ensure young people have access to free confidential contraceptive and sexual health services.

The charity Brook says education in sex and relationships education across the UK is patchy and yet another generation of children and young people do not get the education they need to form healthy relationships and protect their sexual health.

Chief executive of Brook, Simon Blake, says many young people have sex because they want to find out what it is, because they were drunk or because their mates were and says the evidence suggests that early sex and relationships education, before children start puberty, means they start having sex later and are much more likely to use contraception and practise safe sex.

The government has recently issued new draft guidance on well being for schools and the Sex Education Forum, the national authority on sex and relationships teaching, has also called for personal, social, health and economic education, which includes sex and relationships, to be made statutory.

Julie Bentley from the Family Planning Association says it is is not about teaching four-year-olds how to have sex but more about primary school children learning the basics so that they can understand more and more complex concepts at a later stage.

Currently all children are taught the biology of reproduction but parents can opt to remove children from personal, social, health and economic education lessons, where they learn about the emotional and relationships side of sex.

The Sex Education Forum suggests that recent research indicates that as many as a third of England's secondary schools are equipped with an on-site sexual health clinic.