Let's not talk about sex, baby
The 'gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines' are being axed. Critics believe the guidelines are ideological and parents don't know what's going on. They're kind of ... right.
Somehow - somehow - I missed the class where they taught the students to put a condom on a banana. I only heard about it years later from an old schoolfriend who was still reeling from the awkwardness. In a different time and place, it might have been less awkward; but this was a provincial Catholic high school in the early 90s, where the closest we’d previously got to sex ed was an excruciating and too-late talk about puberty, delivered by a visiting nurse.
You could say this was a lack of education, but that’s not quite true. A lesson was taught us by the silence. Bodies were a thing to be spoken of sparingly, and only in terms of their functions - not in terms of our autonomy over them, or heaven forbid, their capacity for pleasure. The banana thing, I’m guessing, was a grudging coda. If we must let ourselves and others down, well, maybe a condom could keep us from heaping shame onto that disappointment.
You’ve got to laugh this stuff off. Even now, aged 47, I still don’t know how to have safe sex with a banana. I can’t even work up the courage to ask one on a date.
That’s how I grew up. I don’t want to come across like I’m trashing faith-based perspectives. If my feelings for Catholicism were a Facebook relationship status, it’d be ‘it’s complicated’. But when my older son, still then my daughter, wanted to go to a Catholic high school, I was uneasy.
Still, I let her. I felt it should be her choice. My kids are good decision-makers, and even when they’re not, my threshold for intervening is high. You weigh these things, always, as a parent; balancing the harm a kid might do themselves with a poor judgement versus the harm to your relationship, the trust between you, if you take decisions away from them. And anyway, I figured, the world has moved on: my kid will get something better than I got.
Here’s what my daughter learned about sexuality at high school.
[Image description: A handout with a tract of Catholic teaching describing ‘homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity’.]
My daughter was still finding himself when this scrap of paper was handed her by a teacher. She was in year 10, and it was 2015. She didn’t even tell me at the time. She said later, it didn’t seem relevant. Maybe she laughed it off.
So yes, I have opinions on relationships and sexuality education. We all do; opinions that come from a range of beliefs, and from experiences both good and bad.
As part of its coalition agreement, National and New Zealand First have committed to ‘Refocus the curriculum on academic achievement and not ideology, including the removal and replacement of the gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines’.1 These are the guidelines the Ministry of Education provides to schools to help them teach relationships and sexuality education.
The specifics of the policy aren’t yet clear. Asked for further detail by the media, the Prime Minister added:
"It's been very variable even within schools and between schools because the guidelines have been just that - guidelines - that have been variously interpreted.
"They actually need a clear curriculum definition, expert opinion, age appropriateness, parents consulted and actually having an option to participate or not participate."
What exactly are these relationships and sexuality education guidelines? What’s going on in our schools, and should we be worried? And what do parents and kids actually want? I feel an explainer coming on.
Let's begin: a brief history of Aotearoa’s awkward sex conversations.
From its conception - see what I did there? - relationships and sexuality education, and its forerunners, have been ideological. An ideology is, literally, a set of ideas. Some ideas are better than others, and that’s why we debate them. But there’s no such thing as an idea-free discussion about sex or relationships or gender, as we’re about to see.2
In Aotearoa, sex education - if you can even call it that - began in the early 1900s. There were no coordinated programmes, but high schools might teach what was called ‘sex hygiene’. This focused on preparing students for marriage, which meant avoiding pre-marital sex and masturbation. Masturbation was, after all, thought to cause mental illness. At this time, the idea of ‘race improvement’ was also a thing, which sometimes meant encouraging white middle-class people to marry and have white middle-class babies. If you’re about my age, this might describe the kind of sex education your grandparents received.
From the late 1960s, limited sex education became available in some high schools. But there were hoops to jump through: parents had to be consulted, the principal had to write a report, and school committee approval was needed. And primary schools? They couldn’t teach about sex, but the Department of Education issued a document to make sure teachers were informed enough to talk to parents. The document’s objectives were ‘The development of wholesome attitudes towards sex in the individual [and] [t]he preservation and enrichment of family life’, and it discussed reproduction, the difference between boys and girls, and puberty (depicted as something embarrassing). All in all it was a step forward, but a pretty small one. If you’re about my age, this might describe the kind of sex education your parents received - if they were lucky.
Finally, in 1985, sex education became part of the school curriculum (although it wasn’t compulsory). The prohibition on sex education in primary schools was lifted, but only for the older kids. In the late 80s, a proper health syllabus explaining puberty was introduced, and the legal restriction on advising kids under 16 about contraception was removed. At the same time, HIV/AIDS - its fear, its devastation - swept across the globe. Risk of disease, unintended pregnancies, and the clinical aspects of sex, including condom use, took centre stage. If you’re about my age, this might describe the kind of sex education you received, and it might have felt like a hot mess. Sex was now a choice, but choose wrong and you’d be punished.
At the turn of the century, a survey found young people still thought their mates were a better source of sex information than their schools or their parents. Still, this was a moment of ideological change. The education system seemed to realise sex can be more than rubbing genitals to produce terrible mishaps; and in 1999, sex education became sexuality education. It was now compulsory for years 1 to 10 with some exceptions (the same as today), and was supported by the first set of guidelines, published 2002. Sexuality education was meant to be more holistic, encompassing the mental and the social, the emotional and spiritual aspects of sex. If you’ve got kids about the age of my kids, this might describe the sexuality education they received.
Were we there yet?
Not quite.
In 2015, the 2002 guidelines were updated - for example, sexual and gender diversity got airtime, as well as the realities of life online.3 Credit where it’s due: this update took guts. But the 2015 guidelines walked a political tightrope, and they didn’t create the change our kids needed. In 2018, when the Education Review Office (ERO) looked at how well schools were promoting wellbeing through sexuality education, the report card was at best a C minus.4
[Image description: A graphic from the 2018 ERO report, showing that 19% of schools reviewed taught sexuality education somewhat well, and 27.5% taught it not well at all. The rest taught it well or very well.]
Ironically, it was Tracy Martin, a New Zealand First Minister, who found the political courage. She looked at the 2018 ERO report and said “F*** it” (I’m paraphrasing her a little), “we need to do better”.5 And that - ladies, gentleman, and lovely readers of every gender - is how we got the 2020 relationships and sexuality education guidelines that we lose our shit over to this very day.
What’s actually going on in our kids’ lives?
From now on, I’m going to follow the latest terminology and talk about ‘relationships and sexuality education’, abbreviated to ‘RSE’, whenever I talk about the current approach. Got it? Let’s keep going.
Before we start making judgements about the RSE guidelines, we need to talk about what our kids actually need. To do that, we have to face the world our kids are growing up in; the limits of our own abilities to protect or to control. And yeah, this conversation gets uncomfortable.
Let’s begin with the good news (depending on how you define ‘good’).
Young people are having sex less than previous cohorts, and waiting until they’re older to start.6 Teenage pregnancies have halved in the last decade.7 Abortion rates for those aged 19 and under have dropped by more than half, from 2,890 in 2011 to 1,253 in 2020.8 These ‘traditional’ indicators aren’t all rosy - young people are still half-arsing the condoms and contraceptives.9 But if you believe access to sex information encourages kids to do it, well, this picture doesn’t support your theory.
Now to the not-so-good news. A changing world is throwing all-new challenges at our children. There’s the double-edged sword of the online world: the connection it offers, but also its potential for bullying and exploitation, its unrealistic bodies and influences. There’s the pressure to share nudes, and the harm when they’re reshared. There’s consent - made more complex when online life and digital images are involved. We know kids are struggling with this stuff because they’re telling us.10
Maybe above all, there’s porn. We don’t want to talk about our kids watching porn - not you, not me, not any of us. But we have to, with urgency, because it’s so much worse than we imagine - and our kids are largely facing it alone. Here goes.
In 2018, the Office of Film and Literature Classification surveyed 2,000 young people aged 14 to 17.11 I’ll simply quote some of their findings, without editorialising. The hurt in these stats speaks for itself.
67% of teens in the age group have seen porn (75% of boys, and 58% of girls).
1 in 4 young people first saw porn before the age of 12, and 71% weren’t seeking it out when they first saw it.
15% of young people see porn at least monthly (21% of boys, and 9% of girls) and 8% see porn weekly or daily (13% of boys and 3% of girls).
1 in 10 young people became a regular viewer of porn by age 14.
69% of regular viewers have seen violence or aggression, and 72% have seen non-consensual activity. This includes a focus on men’s pleasure and dominance of others, and women being demeaned or subjected to violence or aggression.
73% of young people who are regular viewers use porn as a learning tool.
1 in 5 recent viewers of porn have tried doing something they’ve seen.
72% of recent viewers saw things in porn that made them feel uncomfortable.
42% of regular viewers would sometimes, or often, like to spend less time looking at porn - but they find this hard to do.
One kid surveyed, a 17-year-old boy, captured exactly the ambivalence of a generation of children raised with porn (and a warning that this is confronting):
“Positive: It shows young people, who may not have received any decent sexual education, how the mechanics of sexual interaction happens. It also shows some people that their desires are not unnatural or immoral. Negative: It sets a benchmark that is way too high for many young people, in terms of their performance. Males who can’t ‘bang away’ for hours, and girls who won’t take an*l or accept c*m on their faces, feel that they will fail to satisfy their partners, and so encourages depression and social withdrawal.”
For the record, I’m not necessarily against porn, and I definitely don’t want to stigmatise kids for being curious about it. Nor do I think the answers to this crisis sit only with RSE. But scroll back up to our brief history of Aotearoa’s awkward sex conversations. They were mostly geared to adults - to adults’ squeamishness, their need to maintain an order based on certain ideas - and not the needs of kids.
That adult-centric view still persisted in 2019, when Family Planning surveyed young people about their experiences of sexuality education.12 When young people were asked what topics they’d been taught, here’s how they answered.
The most commonly-learned topics were the old school ones: STIs (81%), puberty, physiology and anatomy (80% of kids), and conception and contraception (76%).
These topics were followed by relationships (66%), alcohol and drugs as they relate to sex (54%), and consent and coercion (53%).
Lagging behind were the most neglected topics: sexual violence (29%), sexual diversity and gender stereotypes (27%), porn (22%) and sexting (21%).
And this while students have been doing stuff like protesting sexual harassment and petitioning for compulsory consent education.13 Maybe that’s why only 66% of young people surveyed felt that at least some of their sexuality education was useful, and an appalling 10% found none of it useful at all.
[Image description: A graph from the 2019 Family Planning youth survey, showing how useful young people found their sexuality education.]
Back to RSE and the whole kerfuffle. What exactly are parents’ rights?
This bit is kind of tricky, but hang in there, chums. Trying to figure out how our education system works drove me to drink - but it’s important to understanding our RSE story. Here’s my best attempt.14
Aotearoa’s education system deliberately gives schools lots of flexibility, so they can meet community needs. There’s a ‘top layer’ of rules in the Education and Training Act 2020, but the Act doesn’t say to schools, ‘You must teach like this or that’. Our education system tends to let schools decide how to teach – but when it does direct how teaching should happen, it uses lower-down rules (secondary legislation).
These lower-down rules include the rules around the curriculum.15 Under these rules, the curriculum is super flexible. Schools have to teach eight curriculum learning areas, mostly getting to decide the how so long as they do an OK job. But there’s kind of an exception to all this flexibility - you can maybe start to guess.
One of the eight learning areas in the curriculum is ‘health and physical education’. It includes RSE. But RSE gets treated differently. Instead of just hanging out in the lower-down rules, being all flexible with the other curriculum learning areas, RSE is singled out in the Act. Why? Because it’s so important to our kids’ wellbeing we can’t leave it chance, so we’ve got to enshrine it as a right within the law?
NOPE. The Act says:
Schools have to consult with their community (including parents) on the health curriculum (including the RSE bit). It’s the only part of the curriculum where consultation is required.
Parents can withdraw their kids from part or all teaching related to sexuality education. It’s the only part of the curriculum parents have an automatic right to pull their kid from.
Yep: the rights in the Act related to RSE are for parents, not kids, and they include the right of parents to stop their kids accessing RSE.
Righto, where do the RSE guidelines fit into this whole tangle? In a moment, we’re going to look at the content of the guidelines, and I’ll reveal whether the Ministry of Education really is trying to turn your children into godless transgender fornicators. For now, I want to note that the guidelines are a bit confusing. The Prime Minister has a point.
To be clear: the RSE guidelines are well-written, evidence-based, and do a great job explaining what ‘good’ looks like.16 But they smoosh together a bunch of rules from different places (the Act, the lower-down rules, and other laws and rules altogether). They also chuck in a bunch of recommendations and suggestions. That makes it hard to know when schools have to do stuff, and under what authority, or when they’re just being encouraged to do stuff. For example, do schools have to make sure trans kids can access the toilets that match their gender, or is this just a ‘nice to have’? Do schools have to review their uniform policies for inclusiveness – and if yes, do they actually have to act on the results?
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out. In fact, after hours hunched over my laptop and trying really hard, I threw a tantrum and gave up.
OK, we’ve covered a whole lot of ground. Here are the points I want you to hang on to.
We saw how under the Act, parents already have the right to withdraw their kid from RSE. No kid is required to do RSE against their parent’s will. That means people opposed to RSE aren’t trying to restrict information to their own kids – they can do that already – but to your kids.
The right to withdraw kids from RSE has sod all to do with the guidelines. It’s in the law – a law both Labour and National governments have upheld. And it’s not under threat. Even if it were, this right could only be removed with a law change – fannying around with the guidelines wouldn’t do it. We need to carefully scrutinise claims that the guidelines are taking away parents’ rights.
It’s WAY premature to assume that just because something’s in the guidelines, it’s being taught at your kid’s school. Outside the parents’ rights in the Act, schools still have flexibility in how they teach RSE, including choosing the resources they’ll use. And anyway, we saw how the guidelines are a mix of must do and could do. No one gathers a complete picture of what schools are actually up to.
Crap. Things just got a whole lot more complicated, didn’t they?
So, what exactly is in the 2020 RSE guidelines? How spicy are we talking?
I’ve taken one for the team and actually read the new RSE guidelines, unlike most of the people moaning about them. I can confirm they’re LONG: one document for years 1-8 and one for years 9-13, totalling 124 godforsaken pages. And like I said, they’re not clear on must do versus should do. Any simple rundown is impossible, so here’s the plan. I’ll summarise the vibe of the guidelines, followed by a true or false quiz to answer your burning questions.
First up: the critics are right. The 2020 RSE guidelines do push the envelope further than previous guidelines.
As you’d expect, the 2020 guidelines set out ‘key learning’ for students at different ages. For wee kids at primary, that means stuff like naming body parts, safe and unsafe touching, making friends and respecting others. Older primary kids learn stuff including puberty changes, conception and contraception, different kinds of relationships (sexual and other), and scrutinising media messages. I found only two things I think could be contentious - schools might want to teach how puberty blockers work in science class, or explore gay and trans rights symbols in technology class. But, context: these were suggestions, and part of a long list, not some specific agenda.
When kids hit high school, as you’d expect, the key learning keeps going with the biological side of RSE - more on puberty, conception and contraception. Sexual and gender diversity gets greater emphasis. Kids are encouraged to grapple with social and ethical issues, critique different media, and articulate their own values, culture, identity and whakapapa. And they’re challenged to come up with strategies for coping with tricky situations. This teaching scenario doesn’t come from the guidelines specifically, but is the type that might be used for year 10 or 11 key learning:17
My girlfriend sends me nudes of herself without me asking. My mates are jealous, they don’t get sent this sort of stuff, so I share her pics with them. She doesn’t know I share them. I don’t think she would mind, but I’m not going to tell her in case she stops sending them.
For the senior kids, key learning also mentions puberty blockers, but in the context of bodily changes over a lifetime (for example, menopause is in there too). Porn, alcohol and drugs crop up, in the context of thinking about risks, personal values and consent. Sexual pleasure appears too, in the fairly unsexy context of considering health policies and law changes. The most contentious thing I could find was the following suggestion for science class: ‘consider how biological sex has been constructed and measured over time and what this means in relation to people who have variations in sex characteristics’.
In terms of spiciness, I would rate the key learning across the 2020 RSE guidelines as a medium butter chicken. So what are people worried about exactly? Our true or false quiz will shed more light - but for now, here’s my thought.
The envelope-pushing in the guidelines isn’t the key learnings, the things kids should be taught. It’s the wider set of ideas: the suggestions for schools’ processes and cultures. This stuff implies not just teaching kids, but changing the behaviour of adults.
The explicit human rights perspective, which says every sexual, gender or cultural identity has worth - and that means thinking about bullying policies, homophobic and transphobic language, toilets, uniforms and more. The expectation that all forms of family will be welcome at schools. The idea that kids should be able to use their preferred names and pronouns, and the acceptance that gender isn’t fixed or binary. The whole-of-school RSE approach, so topics can be canvassed in different subjects, not relegated to a few awkward hours in a designated class. The expectation that kids will be active participants in RSE, chucking around ideas, exploring their own values and asking questions; not having lecture-style information delivered in a one-way transaction.
If it’s scary to relinquish control over our kids’ bodies, well, just wait until we let them use their brains.
Is it time for a good old moral panic? Take my quiz to find out.
Here’s what struck me when I researched this piece: all the rumours swirling about the 2020 RSE guidelines. Some are misguided or batshit. Some are cynical. Some are being promoted deliberately. What’s fact and what’s fiction? I found a few of the answers surprising. Let’s have a look.
True or false: The new RSE guidelines are just ideological, with no evidence base.
This is false. There’s a metric shit tonne of evidence supporting the guidelines, from Aotearoa and around the world.18 Family Planning summarises research on the benefits of good RSE:
Improves sexual health outcomes.
Prevents child sexual abuse.
Increases communication between rangatahi and parents, carers, and whānau.
Reduces sexual harm and sexual violence.
Helps develop critical thinking skills around online content and social media.
Fights prejudice and builds awareness of discrimination.
[Creates] better overall health outcomes for young people as they go through life.19
Seriously, which things on that list would you not want for your kid?
True or false: Parents are being shut out of kids’ sexuality education.
OK, this one is kind of … true. Remember the 2018 ERO report that gave sexuality education in schools a C minus? It found 29% of schools didn’t have satisfactory connections with their communities - mostly because they weren’t consulting on the health curriculum, as they should by law. Crap.
And the thing is, parents care. We have a key role supporting kids’ sexuality education: it matters that we know what’s going on. But evidence shows a lot of us still don’t feel comfortable or competent talking to our kids about this stuff. That may be why surveys find that parents support RSE - even a survey by conservative RSE opponents, Family First.20 Parents want to be involved, and for the right reasons.
[Image description: During my research I visited the Family First website, and I found a video of Bob McCoskrie protesting about an app with sex information for young people. Since then, whenever I feel a little down, I just think about Bob McCoskrie listing sex acts that make him angry. Don’t try this at home, Bob!]
True or false: Under the new RSE guidelines, schools are condoning any and all sexual activities, and even teaching kids to have sex.
False. Schools can choose what they teach, but the guidelines don’t talk about particular sexual activities at all. They just confirm the existence of sex and gay and trans people. Get over it.
True or false: The new RSE guidelines promote gay and trans ‘lifestyles’.
Somewhat true. The guidelines acknowledge diverse identities, and affirm the human rights of everyone, valuing each student’s wellbeing the same way. Not everyone’s cup of tea, ideologically speaking, but I’ll drink the whole pot.
True or false: The new RSE guidelines tell kids who don’t conform to gender norms that they must be trans, and encourages them to make life-altering body changes.
False, malicious, and typically spread by TERFs. We’ve seen puberty blockers are mentioned in passing by the guidelines. But gender transition isn’t discussed at all - except in a glossary at the end, where trans people are defined. Kids are invited to think about gender widely, not their own gender specifically - and there’s no suggestion whatsoever that a person who doesn’t meet gender norms may be trans.
True or false: Under the new RSE guidelines kids are taught about sex all throughout the curriculum, so parents can’t fully withdraw them.
Actually, this one is true. The guidelines reflect best practice, which is to weave topics throughout kids’ learning, rather than only have specific classes for this or that subject. Yes: for some people, this will be ideologically uncomfortable.
True or false: The new RSE guidelines downplay the importance of religion and marriage.
Mostly false. But this is important, so let’s spend a moment on it.
The new guidelines are respectful and clear: cultural and religious values are important to RSE. Kids are encouraged to think about different beliefs. Schools are urged to talk to churches when consulting with communities. There’s guidance on working with Pacific parents and talking about sex in ways that fit with their values. To be fair, marriage isn’t mentioned - but there’s no discussion of any different forms of relationship. Most religious folks can live with this. Some can’t.
We’re back to ideas. A parent’s right to withdraw their kid was an historical compromise: in the face of conservative opposition, it was the price of getting meaningful sex education into schools.21 Some kids missed out so the rest could have a chance to learn; an uneasy political bargain that still persists today. To meet the religious beliefs of some people, the guidelines would need to erase other ideas and identities. It’s sad, but sometimes the ideological gap between faith and sex can’t be bridged. And there’s only so much bridge-building a secular state can or should do.
What will happen if the RSE guidelines are removed and replaced?
Let’s be honest: we could improve RSE in Aotearoa. I think the guidelines themselves have a lot of strengths, but they could be clearer. Some groups and experts are calling for more resourcing for schools to teach the guidelines, more support from the Ministry of Education, a more prescriptive curriculum to make sure kids get what they need, and more scrutiny from ERO to make sure schools do a good job.22
Somehow, though, I don’t think these are the kind of changes the government has in mind.
It’s possible that removing the 2020 RSE guidelines, replacing them, wouldn’t do much. They’re guidelines, after all. Best case scenario, schools would continue to choose what they teach, and they’d do a great job. Worst case scenario, the government introduces rules to prohibit schools teaching certain things. I want to believe this is unlikely.
Probably, getting rid of the guidelines will have little practical effect, and be merely symbolic - a pushback on diversity, on ‘wokeness’, on the stirrings of a more mature national conversation. Schools will march on, and so will parents. But the message will be clear to our kids, especially the rainbow ones. And it’ll be our kids who get hurt.
Because there’s no such thing as merely symbolic. Symbols can be as powerful as they can be ugly. Maybe that’s the point of all this.
Laughing it off.
I last saw my older son on Christmas day. I picked him and his partner up from their flat in Wellington, brought them home to Upper Hutt. We sang in the car, Do they know it’s Christmas? Both my son and I love to sing. After year 10, he changed his Catholic school for Wellington High, and changed his gender at the same time; started puberty blockers at age 16, then testosterone at age 17. Nowadays he can reach the bass notes, and so we harmonised along the motorway - except for when we belted out in unison the godawful line, “Tonight thank God it’s THEM, instead of YOU”.
We talked. I asked him how was getting on, given all the anti-trans hate that’s been happening. I wouldn’t quite say he was laughing it off, like he maybe laughed off the handout from the Catholic school, or like I laughed off the banana. But he said he’s OK: he lives in a bubble. He didn’t mean that in a negative way. He was describing what it is to be loved, accepted, supported. I smiled. No matter your kid’s age, that’s what you want for them.
I didn’t laugh it off, not really. I think about the past, how it still creeps into the now. I think how I never quite mastered consent: the boundaries I never quite developed, in many areas of my life; all the times I said yes when I wanted to say no, because a woman’s skill centres on the feelings of others.
I think about the kids I knew, who had babies before their time - because sex can never be only just sex or it would be wrong. I think about the girl I knew who got raped, and kids said well, she was stupid for leaving the party with him. I think about the boy who raped her, also with a kind of poignancy. I’m not saying he didn’t do wrong, didn’t know it. But everyone understood that’s the kind of things guys do, naturally, unless they’re gay. And he wouldn’t have wanted to be gay: not when he saw the gay kids vilified, abused, until the very day they left school or town. Still, for all the pain and shame they carried, those gay kids got to grow up. Not like the girl who was really a boy, and we all knew, but we couldn’t or wouldn’t say it. She only made it to age 20. Her life brought her no happiness, so she drew it to a close.
I never had the right conversations with my kids. They knew that I loved the shit out of them, the way most parents love most kids. They knew the door was always open to whatever they needed. But I didn’t know how. Online relationships? Rainbow kid stuff? Dealing with violent porn? I had no clue. Love is essential, but it’s not the same as knowledge. Kids need both: I was better at one than the other. And maybe I should have known what to do; but when they say it takes a village, they need to tell you it’s OK when different villagers know different stuff. Sometimes, the art of parenting is knowing you don’t have all the answers, you need a bit of help.
I looked at my son as I drove and I thought, yeah. I don’t know how we made it, but we did. Village, you did pretty good.
Thank you for reading, and always remember your five plus a day.
[Image description: An impressively firm banana.]
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The historical stuff in this section comes mostly from Dr Tracy Clelland, Jill Young and Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand:
Ignore the politics – many parents want to work with schools on RSE - SchoolNews - New Zealand
The 2015 sexuality education guidelines: file (nzshs.org)
The best comparable data I could find was here: Abortion Services Aotearoa New Zealand: Annual report (health.govt.nz)
Both sets of the 2020 RSE guidelines include information on the kinds of stuff kids want to know more about.
If you don’t mind the feeling of your life ebbing away, you can look at section 90 of the Education and Training Act 2020, Curriculum statements and national performance measures. It will explain the Minister of Education’s lower level powers to make rules around the curriculum - but these lower level rules go by various names, and they’re not together in one place, and the relationship between them isn’t explained. The best documents I’ve found are to do with the National Administration Guidelines and the National Education Goals, and they still made me want to cry.
The curriculum is actually made up of two documents - the New Zealand Curriculum, for English-medium teaching, and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa for Māori-medium teaching - but let’s keep things simple for now. The Ministry of Education has done a bunch of work to review the curriculum, but we don’t yet know whether the new government will take it forward.
This article sets out the evidence the 2020 RSE guidelines are based on: Relationships and sexuality education: Key research informing New Zealand curriculum policy - Katie Fitzpatrick, Hayley McGlashan, Vibha Tirumalai, John Fenaughty, Analosa Veukiso-Ulugia, 2022 (sagepub.com)
This is from a cracker RNZ podcast, Who should teach kids about sex and relationships?.
Thank you so much for this, e hoa - what an excellent and in depth look at these guidelines. They've been an invaluable tool in our mahi encouraging schools to take further steps in supporting their trans rangatihi, but you're right - the requirement for schools to be inclusive places is enshrined in legislation, and that will be much harder to change than a guideline.
This is amazing. Thank you so much for doing the work.