Sex ed for all is long overdue

Last week, the Labour MP Samantha Niblett announced her new “Summer of Sex” campaign to overhaul the country’s sex education curriculum. She had teamed up with a porn film-maker – the perfectly named Cindy Gallop – to spread the joy of orgasm and sexuality to her fellow MPs. Her patriotism knew no bounds: she planned to bring sex toys into parliament, “if security allows,” while Kemi Badenoch took her chance at a gibe: “It gives a whole new meaning to fiddling while Rome burns.” Somewhere between the imagined No 10 dildo deliveries and the suggestion that the BBC might dabble in “adult content”, the whole thing tipped easily into farce. But her campaign raised a genuinely provocative and unusual question: should we be receiving lifelong sex education?

The idea sounds faintly ridiculous at first, like being called back for remedial adolescence. Sex ed is, in the British imagination, synonymous with a mortifying hour in a badly-lit classroom, perhaps a banana, and a teacher who would clearly rather be anywhere else. It is something you endure and then never revisit. By adulthood, we are supposed to have absorbed everything we need to know, as if sexuality were a static body of knowledge rather than something that evolves with our relationships, our bodies, and the culture around us.

But according to Niblett, that assumption looks increasingly fragile, and she’s not alone. When I interviewed the journalist Sophia Smith Galer after she published her book on sex education, she told me that one of the most striking gaps in the research was not what we were teaching children, but what we were failing to offer adults.“I think it's quite clear that NHS trusts could benefit from sex educators,” she told me, “people get trained for first aid, for mental health emergencies, but where are our sex educators? No one understands that sex might be thought of as part of social wellbeing, our health.” Niblett is prodding at the same concept with her “summer of sex,” saying she isn’t a “massively empowered, sexually flamboyant” person, “I’m hoping that this summer of sex is also an education for me.”

Across the UK, starkly different realities are playing out: young people are having less sex than ever and older people are getting an increasing number of STIs. We can guess similar things are to blame for both these phenomena, a combination of online dating and the effects of lockdown both on marriages and teenagers. Sex education in schools is widely acknowledged as a mess, but it doesn’t even exist for the rest of the population. The last five years have seen the highest-ever number of sexual assault reports, but this epidemic of rape has never been considered a “public health” problem. The backlog of rape cases waiting years to go to trial continues to grow. But still no one in the UK is currently mandated to have consent-based sex education beyond learning the legal limits of the word, whether they are schoolchildren or sexual offenders.

In comparison, in Denmark, comprehensive sex education begins early and is embedded within a broader framework that treats sexuality as a normal part of life, rather than a problem to be managed. Conversations about consent, pleasure and relationships are not confined to a single awkward lesson but recur throughout education. The emphasis is about communication and understanding rather than risk avoidance. It’s working: Danish surveys consistently show higher levels of sexual activity and satisfaction than in the UK, with close to half of adults reporting weekly sexual activity, almost double comparable British figures, and relatively low levels of reported sexual anxiety and stigma.

In 2009, when Denmark had its lowest ever birth rate, the government started a public health campaign called ‘Do it for Denmark’, which broadcast advertisements on television encouraging couples to go on holiday and have sex. However clumsy or narrow its framing, it reflects a deeper assumption that sexual behaviour is shaped by culture, and that culture can be influenced through open discussion rather than silence. The result was not simply more sex, but a different relationship to it, one that appears, by most measures, more relaxed and less fraught.

The Netherlands offers a similar lesson. Their sex education is part of broader personal development, beginning in childhood and continuing through adolescence. Consent is introduced early as a matter of mutual respect and communication, rather than as a legal boundary encountered later. By the time individuals reach adulthood, the language of consent is already familiar, because it has been normalised over time. As well as a robust legal system for victims of sexual assault, it means that many people grow up with a clearer sense of how to negotiate boundaries, recognise discomfort and communicate openly, skills that cannot be improvised in the moment.

By contrast, the UK still tends to treat consent education as reactive and partial. It appears in school curricula, but often inconsistently, it surfaces in university workshops and then rarely again. Then it is invoked asymmetrically in criminal law and never framed as a public health issue, only a criminal one. But now, Niblett’s vision, which she will expand on in a Commons debate in the autumn, gives us an opportunity for reform, to move beyond fragmented interventions and towards a more continuous model that recognises consent as a skill that needs to be educated and developed over time.

The risk is that this conversation gets lost in the noise. It is easier to laugh at the idea of MPs brandishing sex toys than to grapple with the more difficult question of why so many Brits feel ill-equipped to navigate their own intimate lives. But the joke, like most good jokes, lands because it touches on something true. Britain does not need a “Summer of Sex” so much as a more grown-up conversation about it.