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Condoms, pregnancy tests and morning-after pills are being offered in British schools to hundreds of thousands of children, some as young as 11.
Twenty-nine per cent of secondary schools in England now have sexual health clinics with one in 20 providing children with prescriptions for a variety of contraceptives without their parents being informed, according to research by the Sex Education Forum.
Lucy Emmerson, a senior development officer at the forum and author of the study, professed herself delighted yesterday "That so many schools have got as far as this - not just thinking about setting up a service but delivering it".
Her work, the first national survey of its kind, will be published today by the forum, an umbrella organisation which supports the development of sex and relationship education in schools.
The figures have been made public just days after the British Government disclosed that in England and Wales there has been a 10 per cent rise in the number of abortions among girls under 16 and a 21 per cent rise for those under 14, prompting calls for mandatory sex education in schools, with five-year-olds learning about relationships.
Thirty MPs have signed a motion calling on schools to do more. Some still restrict sex and relationship education to the legal minimum, teaching children no more than the mechanics of human reproduction in science lessons.
Critics have argued that too much information about sex and medical support in school encourages children to become sexually active. But Emmerson insisted that was not the case in the schools running clinics.
Contact with health professionals could lead children to choose not to have sex, she said, or to at least use protection.
Emmerson admitted that head teachers were nervous about how parents would react. "Some of the barriers are more a perception than a reality," she said. "But schools can take confidence from this report that they are not alone if they set up on-site services. In fact, they are joining hundreds of others."
- OBSERVER
