Govt calls for overhaul of sex education

 

Respectful attitudes to sex would become a core part of sex education in schools under an overhaul recommended to the Government.

The revamp would aim to broaden the subject beyond a narrow focus on the physical mechanics of sex and reproduction.

The proposal has come from Parliament’s health select committee after a cross-party inquiry which found New Zealand’s high teenage-pregnancy rate was partly the result of inconsistent and sometimes non-existent sexual and reproductive lessons in schools.

Sex education is mandatory, but the 18-month inquiry found programmes were “fragmented and uneven”, parents were able to keep children out of them and classes often focused on physical aspects of sex.

The select committee recommended that the Government give all schools two years to create programmes that meet Ministry of Health standards.

The Education Review Office would monitor whether schools were meeting the needs of students of all cultures, ethnicities and sexual orientations.

Cabinet ministers said yesterday that they would “partially accept” the recommendations.

The committee made 130 recommendations for changes to sex education and to healthcare, maternity care, alcohol abuse, nutrition and early intervention programmes.

The Government accepted 55 recommendations, partially accepted 54, noted 14 and rejected seven.

Committee chairman and National MP Paul Hutchison said he was encouraged by the Government’s overall response and was optimistic it would adopt the sex education proposals.

“Given the issues with the Roastbusters case and other recent cases, there’s a growing view that we need to do this. I would hope that the Government will look to the evidence and then form a basis of action.”

Others were sceptical.

Family Planning chief executive Jackie Edmonds said it appeared the Government had no intention of requiring the ERO to monitor whether schools were meeting students’ needs in sexual health and education.

The inquiry found that the ERO had been “very passive” in monitoring sex education.

Labour health spokeswoman Annette King said the Government’s response was a “two-fingered salute” to two years of hard work because it did not commit to deadlines and half-heartedly accepted the recommendations.

Late last year, Prime Minister John Key said the Government would have to tread carefully in expanding sex education in schools because some parents felt it would cut across their responsibilities, while others felt more education would enable young women to know their rights.

Dr Hutchison said the Government would have to consult parents and schools. ”I think this area needs to be made … acceptable to the majority of parents and students so that they will regard human reproduction and health as a normalised part of general education, rather than putting their head in the sand over it.”

A former board of trustees member who resigned over “unacceptable” sex education classes at her school opposes recommendations that sex education programmes be mandatory for all schoolchildren.

Jo-Anne Sim resigned last month as a trustee of the Blaketown Primary School on the West Coast after a teacher taught what Ms Sim said were explicit lessons that were not appropriate for Year 7 and 8 pupils.

The classes included discussion about oral and anal sex, flavoured condoms, and pleasure points – despite parents having been told in writing beforehand that pupils would be taught only the basics.

Ms Sim said families should be given a choice when it came to educating their children about sexual health.

“Some parents like to be the people who give that advice in the family and guide the children at the right time,” she said.

But if sex education was to be taught in schools, it had to be by a health professional.

- NZ Herald

Categories: Education, Government, health, ms sim, Parents, Schools, select committee, sex education, sexual health

Are Your Children Being Affected by the School System?

Parents believe that sending their children to school is the best thing for them, and they’re sent off each morning with the best intentions. They believe that formal education is what children need to become productive and happy in adulthood. But is this really the case? Conventional wisdom says that more money and a more challenging curriculum, along with better teachers, would solve the issues in public schools at the moment. But what if the real problem is the school itself? The fact many people may not be accepting is that school as an institution is failing children today, and society as a result.

Children are required to be in school and as a result of that, their freedom is greatly restricted – far more, in most cases, than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, adults have been compelling children to spend even more time in a school setting, and there’s now been evidence to prove that it’s damaging many children psychologically. Children naturally learn better in conditions outside of those such as school, where they can learn with more enthusiasm and on a deeper level. Compulsory education has become a fixture of our culture for several generations, and more and more people are attaching to the concept of longer school days and years. People assume that the way schools are developed now has emerged from scientific evidence of how children learn, but this isn’t the case.

 

Schools are more a product of history than research, and the blueprint for them was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children how to read the Bible without questioning it, and to teach them to automatically obey authority without questioning it. But when these schools were taken over by the government, and as a result made compulsory, the basic structure never changes and the methods of teaching remained unchanged. The teach and test method is spurred on by a system of rewards and punishments, rather than by a real desire to know about the subject in question, and this isn’t the best way to learn – certainly not in children who should have more enthusiasm to learn on a deeper level. We need only look to some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators, many of which left school early or said they never enjoyed it, from Edison to Einstein, to see that children learn in different ways. One size fits all-teaching doesn’t help the majority of students find their passion in life.

 

As a society, we tend to ignore findings such as these, and yet we’re not surprised that children are unhappy in schools. Much research has gone into this sort of subject and a lot of that has come back to show that people of all ages learn best when they’re self-motivated and are looking into answers of questions they themselves have a yearning to know. Learning in such a way is joyful, not forced. This is proven in early age, when children grown through their own efforts to learn to speak, jump and run, through their own desire to learn. Why are schools not encouraging this way of learning more, rather than forcing them to learn about things they have no desire for?In order to make children as happy as they can be, without hindering their learning ability, schools need to latch on to what children enjoy and how they learn, rather than using the system that’s been in place for so long out of nothing more than habit.

Categories: Children, children learn, deeper level, learn, learning, people, School, Schools

Do Schools Have the Ability to Diagnose Mental Disorders?

You may feel that your child’s mental wellness and wellbeing is really nothing to do with their school or education, and is an issue for psychological professionals (if it’s an issue at all). In truth, a school often has to step into the role of amateur psychologists. Some schools in the United States even receive extra funding from the government for every child in their care who has special needs; this can be dangerous as it sometimes means that schools may try to diagnose children with mental disorders such as autism or ADHD simply to receive extra funding.

 

One couple, Michael and Emily Thompson, found themselves on the receiving end of this saga when they got a call from their son’s school, inviting them to come in to speak to his class teacher. When they got there, they were told that their first grader had high functioning autism, and should be placed into a special class in the school. They were asked to sign paper for this, which they refused to do. This was – understandably – an emotional experience for them and they then took their child to see an independent and licensed psychiatrist, who conducted his own tests and then informed them that their child did not have autism. They then went back to furiously confront the teacher, and later learned that the school had a monetary incentive for diagnosing children with special needs.

 

If you find yourself in this position, the most important thing to remember is not to panic. Somebody at your child’s school is most certainly not equipped to make this diagnosis for your child, and so you really don’t need to be concerned if such an idea is floated. You should certainly not sign any paperwork until you have had any diagnosis confirmed by an outside authority.

Categories: autism, Child, diagnose, extra funding, Mental disorders, receive extra, School, Schools, special

Surprising Study Questions Environmental Impact on Teen Diet

Categories: built environment, diet, environment, Fast Food Outlets, Food, impact, Research, School, Schools, teen

Why Do Schools Need to Get Involved in Teen Mental Health?

In this day and age, it’s natural to be concerned about your child’s mental wellness, but is that the school’s responsibility? According to new charity MindFull, mental health lessons should be on the timetable in every secondary school in the UK, as too many pupils with symptoms of depression or anxiety are let down or ignored.

 

According to Emma-Jane Cross, founder of MindFull – which has launched a new online counselling service to support and advise 11- to 17-year-olds – poor mental health among young people was ‘one of the last great medical taboos in the UK today.’ She said that too many teenagers ‘are having to resort to harming themselves on purpose in order to cope, or worse still are thinking about ending their own lives.’ In the charity report, the authors urged, ‘We need to move away from only tackling the symptoms of acute poor mental health and wellbeing to focus on education, prevention and early intervention. Young people need to be encouraged to speak out about their mental health and wellbeing and feel confident that, when they do, they will receive the support they need as swiftly and as easily as possible.’

 

Lucie Russell of the YoungMinds charity, commented, ‘Children and young people are growing up in a toxic climate. They exist in a 24/7 online world where they never switch off, where cyberbullying, consumerism and pornography, sexting and the pressure to have the perfect body bombard them daily, where any exam grade below a C means failure and employment prospects are bleak. We know from our extensive work with young people that the support they so desperately need when they aren’t coping is grossly lacking but we also know from services that they are under huge funding pressures and are overwhelmed with demand.’

 

According to Health Minister Norman Lamb, the government is ‘placing an unprecedented emphasis on mental health’, particularly for children and young people. ‘More than a third of children and young people now live in an area where children and adolescent mental health services have been transformed,’ he said. ‘We are investing £54m into improving access to mental health treatments for children and young people.’

Categories: cyber bullying, Schools, teen mental health

How Can BMI Screening Affect Your Child’s Emotional Health?

As schools in the US take an expanding role in the fight against obesity, they are increasingly flagging at-risk children using an imperfect weight measure called the Body Mass Index (BMI), a ratio of weight to height. However, while schools are doing their best to improve child wellness, critics and parents have argued that BMI testing in schools does more harm than good to a child’s wellbeing; causing bullying, eating disorders and a more intense pressure to diet.

One such affected child was the daughter of Jennifer Dreller, who was discreetly weighed during gym class as part of a routine fitness assessment. However, the experience severely impacted the 10-year-old’s self-esteem. During a forum on childhood obesity, Dreller told a panel of health experts, ‘“How much do you weigh?” became the question of the month among fourth-grade girls. My daughter has cried many nights worrying about her weight since this experience.’

BMI screening can be misleading, but it has remained the primary tool for classifying if you are normal weight, overweight and obese. According to the Institute of Medicine, school-based BMI screenings are specifically recommended because research shows that many students don’t have access to a primary-care doctor. Paediatrician Lynn Gettleman Chehab, who runs the school clinic obesity programme at Evanston Township High School, explained, ‘Schools have a changing role in wellness because that’s where kids spend most of their waking time. It’s a crucial time for prevention, but many kids aren’t going to the doctor unless they’re sick.’

While obese children have a 70% chance of being obese as an adult, putting them at risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, several types of cancer and osteoarthritis, BMI may not be the best way to tackle the problem at an early age. Yes, a high BMI level correlates with future health risks, but it can be problematic as a screening tool for individuals. The relationship between your BMI and body fat can be influenced by your age, sex, ethnicity and muscle mass – which BMI screening doesn’t account for – and it can’t distinguish between excess fat, muscle or bone mass. This means that healthy athletes, muscular individuals and racial and ethnic minorities with different body compositions can have a high BMI.

Categories: BMI Screening, Schools, Self-esteem

How Does Parent Involvement Change with More Data?

School and district leaders are focusing their attention on their own schools and others in the public system, but according to a new study, gathering broader data from charter and private schools could help to make quicker district improvements and fairer comparisons among schools. The study argues that district leaders need to use data from the education ecosystem, rather than simply focusing on their own schools, as 28 percent of public students don’t attend public schools – instead, they attend independent charter schools of district-run schools. With this in mind, officials should be tracking all education pathways to ensure that educators and parents can get all the information they need.

 

Because there is a general lack of knowledge with regards to this data, few agencies have understood the power that lies in having access to this data for the improved management of their schools. If districts don’t take full advantage of their data, they’re missing out on the opportunity to strategically manage and make course corrections. Most school data systems don’t provide parents with the chance to make subtle choices, even if they’re offering programmes that require the parents to do so. In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Information Network for Successful Schools is making high quality data available on a variety of indicators, from student behaviour and growth rates, to academic achievement. This data can often be difficult to find and isn’t available for every school.

 

There are three recommendations from experts to help improve this situation. Firstly, it’s advised that states and districts offering programmes should make comprehensive data available to parents, including the academic achievement and growth rates, in addition to the programme details. Secondly, states should develop longitudinal data on all schools, including private and charter schools, so that the institutes can be fairly compared. Lastly, states should develop tools to help both parents and those who aren’t familiar with the system so that they can analyse the charts and information easily.

Categories: Children, Parents, Schools

Will Sex Education be Watered Down?

It is thought that sex education in schools could be at risk of being “watered down” if the proposed changes to England’s science curriculum go ahead. According to a team of experts, sex education should be “unambiguously” included in science lessons. A coalition of organisations has formed to promote this idea.

The letter has been signed by more than 100 organisations and individuals ranging from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to Mumsnet, the Sex Education Forum and the National Children’s Bureau. The group argues the planned changes will not help schools create an honest and open culture around sex and relationships and is more like to foster problematic ideas within schools. It urges the government “to put any adult squeamishness about sex aside”.

Its mission statement says: “The National Curriculum science is the only compulsory part of sex and relationships in education in schools and must teach children about how their bodies work to prepare them for growing up and to protect them from harm.”

The group is specifically concerned that children will not be taught about sexual reproduction and puberty at an early stage and that some will already be experiencing changes in their bodies without having been taught about what to do with them and that they are a normal aspect of growing up.

The Sex Education Forum says that the plans leave a gap in teaching about reproduction in primary school. The forum highlights the section in the draft which says that six- and seven-year-olds should be taught about the process of reproduction and growth in animals but which also says that at this age pupils “should not be expected to understand how reproduction occurs”.

Will Sex Education be Watered Down?

Categories: Education, education forum, forum, reproduction, Schools, science, sex education, taught