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The article focuses on the outlines of the official policy of Great Britain from the late 1980s to the early 2000s; illustrating how successive governments have accepted and reinforced dominant ideologies about children, sex and sexuality. Recurring themes are identifiable in statutory and non-statutory policy, including: responsibility for and content of sex education, moral values, controversial issues such as homosexuality, HIV/AIDS and advice to under 16s. Shifts in emphasis are also evident, reflecting political agendas and contradictory philosophies underpinning education and health policies. While the Thatcher era reaffirmed Victorian values--marriage, family, parenthood--conflict between education and health policies led to confused and confusing messages. Since 1997, New Labour initiatives have attempted to resolve these contradictions while failing to address the implementation of children's rights. In conclusion the article proposes adoption of a rights-based agenda for sex education policy and practice, using implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a starting point.

This chapter discusses the crisis in education in Great Britain. While the legislation governing education in Britain provides for children and young people to be tutored at home or in fee-paying residential schools, the majority attend compulsory day schools from the ages of 5 to 16. Late nineteenth century educational reforms were seen as progressive and enabling insofar as children, for the first time, received formal education as an integral part, if not right, of childhood. Traditional theories of education, while diverse, broadly accepted that the function of school was to prepare children and young people for life and adulthood, ensuring the acquisition of appropriate knowledge, skills, attitudes and values in a structured and disciplined environment. What was deemed appropriate, however, was determined primarily by the correspondence, in terms of curriculum relevance and appropriate skills, between schooling and work. While this broad framework has prevailed, critical approaches have challenged the consensual representation of schooling, exposing the formal processes as regulatory and determining, derived in and reflective of broader structural inequalities within the political economy. The reaffirmation of traditional principles and the attack on pluralist ideals concerning consensus became hallmarks of the New Right agenda brought to fruition by successive Thatcher administrations. The full range of recent education reform is considered and critiqued in the context of a rights approach to children and schooling.