How abstinence-only messages infiltrated thousands of schools like mine – and set sex education back decades

It’s about time that we acknowledge that government guidance is being used as an excuse for inaccurate and bigoted ideas to be freely taught across the UK, writes Roya Shahidi

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Using the analogy of a piece of tape losing its stickiness on your hand to show how each sexual partner causes a loss of emotional connection is not sex education.

Yet this was the approach of an organisation who recently gave a talk to students in Year 9 at my school. And the name of that talk? “Save sex for marriage”.

I found it hard enough to believe that such backwards ideas were being freely spread in a non-religious environment, but when I found out how widespread the rollout was, I was shocked further; they had given this talk to 157,750 teenagers, according to their website. I naively thought that abstinence-only sex education was pretty much obsolete in the UK, reserved only for a few deeply religious, closed off schools.