This week Ofsted shone a bleak spotlight on what it’s like for many girls and young women to be just that: girls and young women.

In a sobering report, inspectors revealed how prevalent sexual harassment and online sexual abuse is in the world that our children and young people inhabit. For many of them, incidents are so commonplace that they see no point in reporting them. 

What began with online testimonies about specific institutions posted to the Everyone’s Invited website has now morphed into something much more widespread.

Inspectors said:

• Nearly 90 per cent of girls and nearly 50 per cent of boys said that being sent explicit pictures or videos of things they did not want to see happens a lot or sometimes to them or their peers.
• Children and young people said that sexual harassment occurs so frequently that it has become “commonplace”. For example, 92 per cent of girls and 74 per cent of boys said that sexist name-calling happens a lot or sometimes to them or their peers. 
• The frequency of these harmful sexual behaviours means that some children and young people consider them normal.

Sex abuse in schools: An issue that affects us all

What has struck me most is the response to the report. There’s been little of the finger-pointing we might have anticipated, blaming individual schools or types of schools. There’s been little of the defensiveness we might have expected from those working in education

Instead, from across the leadership of England’s schools and colleges, there’s been an acceptance that here we have an issue that shames us all in a so-called tolerant civilised modern society.

Inevitably, it makes me look back on my 15 years of headship, leading a comprehensive school where we prided ourselves on a strongly inclusive ethos, wondering whether the experience of some young people at that school was like that described by Ofsted.

I don’t need to look at the Everyone’s Invited list to know the answer: it will have been.

Because the main message of the Ofsted report is that we should start from the assumption that sexual harassment is a feature of every school and every college, however proud we might be of our culture, our values, our behaviour policy. This is an issue that affects us all.

Which is not to say, of course, that schools and colleges alone can fix this problem. What has been exposed is a much deeper problem across society. 

Dr Mary Aiken explores this societal shift in her brilliant book The Cyber Effect. Her territory is cyberpsychology - the study of the impact of emerging technology on human behaviour. Dr Aiken looks at how the anonymity of being online changes our inhibitions, making individuals become bolder, transforming their judgements about how they would speak and behave in the real world.

She writes about how an adolescent’s sense of self is changed if who you think you are is dependent on how many people like, comment or retweet you. 

And she writes about the widespread pornification of modern life, quoting clinical psychologist Michael Seto, who issues this warning: “‘We are living through the largest unregulated social experiment of all time - a generation of youth who have been exposed to extreme content online.”

Not a problem that schools alone can solve

So this is not a problem that schools and colleges alone can solve. It has implications for what the responsibilities of being a parent in this brave new world might mean - how you bring up your child, the boundaries you impose, the freedom you give and refuse to give to your children.

And then, of course, there’s the responsibility of the tech companies - an area where the government has been far too slow to hold them to account. As the chief constable of Norfolk, Simon Bailey, said to me recently: “‘There are far more controls in place to stop a 13-year-old boy placing an online bet in the Grand National than there are to stop him accessing the most hardcore pornography.”

So Ofsted’s review this week has done society a favour. But this is now only the start of a process where we’ll need to look at and learn from what good practice looks like in:

• The teaching of relationships, sex and health education. We have a fledgling curriculum that needs to move centre stage. We need to learn how the most successful schools teach its content in a way that is relevant, meaningful and has a lasting impact on young people.
• The culture of our schools and colleges, and the sanctions that are there to respond to any incident of sexual harassment or abuse.
• The systems we have so that reporting an issue is something that pupils believe has positive consequences.
• Ways of helping parents to understand their responsibilities for regulating the online conduct of their child.

None of this is easy stuff. But then important things rarely are. In truth, the issues exposed by Everyone’s Invited and by Ofsted’s report this week are not new - the House of Commons’ Women and Equalities Committee highlighted many of the same problems in a landmark report in 2016. 

We must now make more progress in educating and protecting our children and young people - as schools, colleges and as a society - than we have managed in the five years since that report was published.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders