When it comes to sex education, Dr Sophie King-Hill has some thoughts.

As a senior fellow at the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham, she has years of experience working with young people in this area, and although she welcomes the new statutory relationships and sex education guidance introduced in 2020, she sees a flaw in it.

King-Hill is adamant that if schools really want to provide effective sex education and keep young people safe, then the shame around talking about sex and sexuality needs to be removed. This year, she’s embarking on a new project to do just that.

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With grant funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, and in collaboration with Brook, a sexual health and wellbeing charity for young people, and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a UK-wide charity dedicated solely to preventing child sexual abuse, she is investigating sexual behaviours among 13- to-18-year-olds in the UK.

Improving sex education in schools

Ultimately, King-Hill wants to understand what constitutes normal sexual behaviour for this age group, and then develop an assessment tool that helps teachers to identify what constitutes normal, harmful or problematic sexual behaviour in students and then put the appropriate support in place where necessary. Here, she talks to Tes about the project.

Why do you think your research is so necessary?

There is an inherent reluctance around acknowledging that children have an emerging sexuality. When we don’t recognise this, feelings of shame grow and, in my experience, as soon as somebody starts feeling ashamed about something, they won’t look for information or support.

When looking at research around this, there is clinical data on harmful sexual behaviours, but it’s very rare to find anything about what is normal for children and young people.

But how can we educate and support them, if we don’t know what’s going on? How can we keep them safe? Hopefully this project will open that door.

What do you mean by ‘normal’ sexual behaviour?

It’s age-appropriate, developmentally normal, consensual between two people, without a power imbalance. There are no feelings of shame, and both have got to want to do it.

In the research, we will also look at trends. For example, there might be a behaviour happening online - sexual activity happening on online video chats, for example - which is common across young people. This behaviour might make us feel uncomfortable as adults, but if it’s safe, consensual and developmentally appropriate, then we are going to have to look at it and say, “Actually, that’s probably normal behaviour.”

We know that sexual behaviour does occur online, but do you think Covid exacerbated this?

All behaviour moved online - it’s normal now to have drinks over Zoom with people - so it stands to reason that a lot of sexual behaviours have moved online as well. However, we always make the assumption that all online sexual behaviours are bad in relation to young people. I wonder if they are, and that’s what this project is going to look at. 

It’s not about damning the sexual behaviours of children and young people, and saying, “No, you can’t do this...don’t send messages... don’t do that.” It’s actually saying, “Here is how to do this safely.” This is where the project will feed into the relationships and sex education as well as policy, because as soon as we know what is going on, we can be giving them the information they need to keep themselves safe.

How are young people going to be involved in the research?

We have a steering group of 20 young people who are going to help us design the survey, the research questions and the approaches we are going to take. We always impose our views on children and young people, but really what we need to do is listen to them. So, it’s not just the information itself that’s innovative, but also the approach that I am going to take.

How do you think the results will impact on teachers’ daily practice?

The data itself will inform what we teach children and young people in relationships and sex education in schools.

I am also going to produce a tool that will be a first-point assessment for teachers and other professionals. If a child is displaying sexual behaviours, for example, they will be able to consult the tool and see what they need to do next, whether that’s putting support in place, or if, actually, no action is needed because it’s healthy sexual behaviour.

Teachers are under so much pressure; they are picking up the pieces after Covid and dealing with news about sexual harassment in schools. Staff are expected to highlight when sexual behaviours are an issue, on top of rolling out the new RSE curriculum. This tool will be a really helpful source of support.

Will it change the way that we train teachers to deliver sex education?

When sexual behaviours manifest, schools are one of the places where they’ll be manifesting the most because, naturally, it’s where students spend a lot of their time, consistently, in groups. It makes sense, then, that a lot of these behaviours are going to be seen in schools, and how teachers manage these behaviours is important.

We need a national approach to support the resources, support and training for teachers in this area: naturally, some will be better at it than others, but we need to create consistency.

I also want to impact policy, commissioning, practice and social media platforms as well. As soon as I have the data and I have an assessment tool, I can be lobbying the government to do more, but until I know what they need to do more on, I can’t do that.

What are your expectations regarding the findings?

I think there are going to be more healthy sexual behaviours online than we are accounting for. We might see a bit of a shift in young people in how they are looking after themselves sexually, in terms of attitudes towards contraception: is it such a taboo subject any more? I don’t know, maybe not.

I think perhaps young people are also going to be a little more candid when talking about sex and sexual behaviour than we have previously seen. We haven’t given them a voice before, and I do wonder if they are going to relish talking about this. But you never know with research; it always surprises you.

Claudia Civinini is a freelance writer