The Education of Young People

The Education of Vulnerable People ED3215

Assignment 2

The aim of this assignment is to evaluate an existing strategy and develop an original strategy to tackle problems encountered by young people. The first part of the assignment will critically evaluate the Government’s strategy to tackle teenage pregnancy rates in England. One aspect of the strategy is improvement of sex and relationships education (SRE) Toynbee (2007) states that; “by law every school must have a policy on including SRE in its personal, social and health education curriculum”.   This law does not stipulate what the SRE policy should cover, so sex education across the country can differ depending on what school you attend. If your school is religious then it’s possible that your SRE policy is not to have SRE. The curriculum only stipulates that a science lesson covering the basics be delivered.

Another factor to be considered is that parents have the right to withdraw their child from a sex education session. The provision of sex education can be challenging as it involves tackling sensitive issues and accurate information must be delivered not only on sexuality but on family life and vital health issues.   Ofsted’s Chief Inspector David Bell reported that, “high quality personal, social and health education is vital to young peoples’ development in and out of the classroom.” (BBC News 2005)

The Department of Health produced a research paper in January 2007 entitled Teenage Parenthood and Social Exclusion. A multi method study in which it found that;

            Many women cited poor sex and relationship education as a reason

            for their own pregnancy and for the high level of unwanted teenage

          pregnancy in general. They related experience of receiving sex education

          in schools that lacked relevance to their lives and was insufficiently hard-

          hitting.

It’s clear that although the Government have a strategy for schools to have a...