Abstract
Objective:
To assess what kinds of knowledge policymakers in a sample of English primary schools utilised to make decisions about their school’s sex and relationships education policy.
Method:
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with policymakers at three primary schools in the southwest of England, and documentary analysis of the schools’ sex and relationships education policies was done. Policymakers included head teachers, subject leads and other teachers. A social constructivist approach informed the research design and data analysis.
Results:
In all three schools, the principal sources of knowledge in the policy-making processes for sex and relationships education were a commercially available curriculum package and staff knowledge (including staff opinions). All three schools drew on policies from other schools, but at times this process appeared procedural rather than critical. Local authority expertise was a source of knowledge for two schools.
Conclusion:
Findings emphasise the importance of having trained and experienced educators for sex and relationships education in schools and the need for schools to have ongoing support to share learning and identify new knowledge on the topic.
Introduction
Early and effective sex and relationships education can help children and young people make positive, informed decisions in their relationships; to be more confident about their bodies and their development; to ensure good sexual health when they do have sex; and to be more inclusive of people whose sexual and gender identities are different from their own (Berelowitz et al., 2013; Cullen and Sandy, 2009; Department of Health [DoH], 2013; Macdonald, 2009). Research has found that children’s interactions are gendered and sexualised, sometimes in harmful ways (e.g. homophobia and bullying), before they leave primary school (Gutman and Brown, 2008; Renold, 2000; Ringrose et al., 2012). Data on young people’s sexual behaviour and knowledge show that they are often unprepared for sexual relationships when they do begin to have them (Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group [TPIAG], 2008; Torjesen, 2012).
UK government–sponsored reviews of sex and relationships education in schools have recommended that the subject be made statutory and strengthened (Berelowitz et al., 2013; External Steering Group, 2008; Macdonald, 2009; Women and Equalities Committee, 2016). At the time of writing, ‘relationships education’ has only recently been made a legal requirement in English primary schools as part of the Children and Social Work Act (2017). The Department for Education has yet to decide what the mandatory programme will entail. Until 2019, individual schools will continue to have discretion with regard to the sex and relationships education they deliver.
One of the ways reviews have recommended that sex and relationships education should be strengthened is to improve school leadership on the subject (DoH, 2013; External Steering Group, 2008; Ofsted, 2013). Leadership for sex and relationships education helps ensure that the programme is effective and provides a structure within which staff can feel supported and confident in delivering the lessons. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of research regarding leadership and decision-making about sex and relationships education. In contrast, there is a substantial body of academic work relating to the effectiveness of different models of sex and relationships education (Alldred and David, 2007; DePalma, 2013; Mason, 2010); children and young people’s opinions and perspectives on the topic (Allen, 2008; Pound et al., 2016; Turnbull et al., 2010); parents’ roles and attitudes towards sex and relationships education (Alldred et al., 2016; Frankham, 2006; Turnbull et al., 2011); and nurses’ and teachers’ opinions, training and practices in relation to sex and relationships education (Chalmers et al., 2006; Hayter et al., 2008). Abbott et al.’s (2016) work on how teachers have formulated sex and relationships education lessons offers interesting findings, but these relate to secondary schools. This article aims to contribute research on the types of knowledge that primary school decision makers have used in developing their school’s sex and relationships education policy and programme.
This study can be situated in the field of policy analysis as the process of decision-making for sex and relationships education policy is recognised as a local political process, within a school, through which a policy is agreed (Dunn, 1981). Fischer and Gottweis (2012) define policy-making as ‘an ongoing discursive struggle over the definition and conceptual framing of problems, the public understanding of the issues, the shared meanings that motivate policy responses, and criteria for evaluation’ (p. 7). The policymakers discussed in this article include primary school head teachers, curriculum subject leads and teachers.
A social constructivist approach informed the design of this study and is relevant for understanding the use of the term ‘knowledge’. Berger and Luckmann (1966) were among the first to suggest that a person’s experience of ‘reality’, and their understanding of what counts as ‘knowledge’, is specific to and created by the social context. Later, Stanley and Wise (1993) wrote, ‘it is the consequential nature of social facts which constitutes their “factness”’ (p. 141). This article unpicks some of the knowledges that primary school decision makers have used (e.g. government policy and curriculum resources) to develop sex and relationships education policies and focuses particularly on how these knowledges establish problems and the priorities in this area. Proponents of evidence-based education would argue, as Slavin (2002) does here, ‘It is essential that schools focus on the evidence base for their programs … schools should be expected to use methods known to be effective in general’ (p. 19). However, some critiques of evidence-based education claim that policy-making can be democratic and collaborative, valuing different kinds of knowledge and experience, and as a result achieve broader ends than mere instrumentalist effectiveness (Davies, 2003; Shine and Bartley, 2011). Ball (2013), in particular, has written extensively about how neoliberal governance has reconstructed the ways in which schools and educators understand and deliver education, and his perspective offers another valuable lens that contributes to the analysis.
Methods
Research setting
The study was conducted in three primary schools in a mid-sized city in England. The schools included an independent school (hereafter, Fleming Primary 1 ), an academy (Wingfield Academy) and a local authority–managed school (Latimer Primary), and they ranged in size from fewer than 70 to over 450 pupils. The three schools have distinctly different socio-economic and cultural compositions and are located in different parts of the city. The data presented below are not attributed to particular schools in order to preserve anonymity and also to prevent forced distinctions. The differences between the schools are not the focus of this article.
Methods
Following unsuccessful attempts to recruit schools by invitation, the schools were recruited through the author’s professional contacts. The head teacher of each school was first contacted, informed about the research and requested to invite other relevant policymakers to participate in the study. Five or six individuals participated from each school (19 individuals in total).
The relevant sex and relationships education policies were obtained from the school website or a staff member.
The study was given ethical approval by the University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies Ethics Committee before data collection commenced. Participants were provided with information about the research project and what their participation would entail. They had at least a week to consider this information and gave their consent in writing, through a detailed consent form, before interviews began.
Most respondents participated in two semi-structured interviews, and most interviews lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. The first interview provided insights into the respondent’s personal experiences, attitudes and values in relation to sex and relationships education. The second interview explored the process that the school went through to agree their sex and relationships education policy and programme. The interviews were conducted in a private room at each school at a time suggested by the respondent.
The interviews were transcribed and the transcripts were imported, together with the written policies, into the qualitative software package NVivo 10. The data were coded according to emerging themes, and further analysis was conducted upon closer reading of the data.
Findings
The analysis identified five principal forms of knowledge influencing sex and relationship education policies:
Commercially produced curriculum resources;
Staff opinions and views;
Guidance from local authority experts;
Learning from other schools;
Government guidance.
These forms of knowledge are listed in order of significance, as suggested by the interview data. The findings emerged from questions designed to solicit data about the types of resources respondents had utilised in the process of deliberating about their sex and relationship education policy. These questions included, ‘What resources were used in developing the policy?’ ‘What about books, websites, DVDs, etc?’ and ‘Did you involve any external experts?’
The written sex and relationship education policies provide much less detail about the policy deliberations, unsurprisingly since they are products, not records, of these processes and since they range in length from two to seven pages. Fleming Primary’s policy concerns the entirety of personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education, not sex and relationship education alone, and the two state schools chose to name their policies ‘Relationships and Sex Education Policy’. These documents reinforce some of the respondents’ discussion about their school’s sex and relationships education policy, but in other ways they contradict what respondents reported. A range of names were used to refer to the subject – from Relationships and Sex Education, to Sex and Relationship Education (as in current government guidance, with relationship in the singular), to Relationships Education (the name used by government for the primary curriculum that will become statutory) – which is reflective of the plurality across schools’ sex and relationships education policies and government statements. This article uses ‘sex and relationships education’ throughout, except when referring to a policy or document that uses a different term.
Commercially produced curriculum resources
Policymakers at all three schools reported that they selected a commercially available package, called Andromeda hereafter, as the core curriculum for their sex and relationships education, as well as the broader subject area of PSHE education. Kirsten, a member of the pastoral staff at Wingfield Academy, said,
I found [Andromeda], and [Andromeda] had everything, and so because I found such a good scheme, I thought, ‘right, we’ve got such a good scheme, this works’. Maybe in the future … I’ll then start to look elsewhere and bring other things in, and look for other resources, but at the moment, it just seems to fit in so well.
Subsequently, Kirsten confirmed that Andromeda was the central knowledge, and the written policy reflects the importance of Andromeda, incorporating verbatim the aims, objectives and other text from the scheme.
By ‘this works’, Kirsten was referring to her mandate: ‘as PSHE lead, it is my job to measure the success of PSHE, how children are developing and their progress’. Kirsten indicated the primary reason for selecting Andromeda was that it was a complete package, including planning, lessons, and resources and assessments to monitor progress. She said, ‘by the end of the year we’ll actually have some sort of graph or table of progress … which would be amazing’.
Audrey, a member of the senior leadership team at Fleming Primary, said,
our [Andromeda] PSHE curriculum that we’re now following has got, apart from the first term, has got assessments in it, for the children, for the staff. So you can see, and you have evidence of what you’ve taught, how you’ve taught it, and where the children are in relation to where they should be.
This suggests that in choosing to use the Andromeda curriculum, the school elected to follow its instructions on what they would deliver and how. Furthermore, the inclusion of tools for documenting and assessing the lessons was among the reasons why the school selected Andromeda.
The school’s current Relationship and Sex Education Policy does not mention the Andromeda curriculum, but it does mention other resources. Respondents noted that the school was in the process of trialling the Andromeda curriculum; if all went well, Andromeda would be included in the written policy. Simone, the head, explained, ‘the paperwork is sort of secondary. Our policy is sort of meant to be a practical document that reflects our practice … [the policy] will be reviewed annually’.
Staff opinions and views
Data suggest that two of the schools had developed their sex and relationships education policies in line with staff opinions and views on the subject. Audrey, a member of the senior leadership team at Fleming Primary, said,
[as a staff,] we got to the point where there was a consensus of opinion … we sort of agreed that certain things should be taught in certain timescales.
Simone, another member of the senior leadership team at Fleming Primary, said,
What we had decided together as a staff to deliver, because we looked at the [Andromeda] framework, and we decided that we didn’t want to do what was recommended for year sixes, so as a result we’ve dumbed down, or we’ve moved the goalposts up in that one … We wanted everyone to feel comfortable, that’s the main thing.
Simone suggests that although they followed the Andromeda lesson plans and curriculum, the staff decided collectively what children should learn at what ages, with staff comfort as a key consideration. She explained that the involvement of staff was instrumental to distribute the teaching of sex and relationships education across teachers. Previously, Simone was the only one delivering it. She said,
… the staff weren’t ready … to take it on and deliver it … my job was to hold their hands through it … my role in policy … is to make sure that our practitioners are fully aware, fully informed, and are capable of delivering the syllabus of material with the resources they are happy to utilise.
By increasing staff confidence to deliver lessons (through training) and ensuring the policy reflected their views, Simone persuaded other staff to help her deliver it.
At Latimer Primary, the personal comfort of staff was secondary. Although the school did not consult directly with pupils or parents, staff knowledge about pupils’ needs was brought up by several respondents. Wendy Grace, a member of pastoral staff, said,
I feel you can’t pigeon-hole a class or a cohort to say, ‘oh we need this’, you need to have maybe three different programmes … we know we have cohorts where we might have children who may be, may have sexualised behaviour, so we might like to tweak that programme, for that particular class, because we know that we need to put that support in, for that particular child … I wouldn’t want anybody to just say, ‘oh, I have this and it is the be-all and end-all, because it’s not.
Wendy and others at this school emphasised the need for the sex and relationships education policy to be flexible to accommodate different pupils. Teachers’ knowledge about pupils and their expertise in sex and relationships education were considered essential for developing a suitable policy.
Guidance from local authority experts
At Fleming Primary and Latimer Primary, several respondents talked about the role of the local authority expert advisor on sex and relationships education in supporting them to develop their sex and relationships education policy.
One school had sought out the support of the local authority expert advisor on sex and relationships education, Murray, and he conducted three training sessions with staff. During the training, he said that they looked at
what your influences were, what are your beliefs now about how you teach this, a little bit of content, a bit about the best way of teaching, a bit about the sensitivities of parents and the difficulties, just giving them some space to think through what their fears were.
Audrey, a member of the senior leadership team at Fleming Primary, said,
I think [Murray] made it all right for staff to go, ‘actually, I am not dealing with this bit. No, we’re not answering that. Let’s put that over there, children, we are dealing with this’. And I think he sort of let people go, ‘actually, I can do this, because I don’t have to answer everything the children say. If I think it’s inappropriate, we don’t need to do it’.
The external expert had a role not only in influencing the materials and content that the school selected but also how staff felt about sex and relationships education and, as a result, how they contributed to the policy.
At Latimer Primary, respondents mentioned that they had had a significant level of support from Murray when they last revised their sex and relationships education policy. Murray’s support in the past included facilitating a community session with local imams and cultural leaders to discuss sex and relationships education and to seek their support. The benefit of this was still relevant, so they did not seek external support at the most recent review under study.
Learning from other schools
Fleming Primary and Wingfield Academy used knowledge from other schools in the development of their sex and relationships education policy. Fleming Primary consulted written policies from other schools and adopted or adapted parts from three of them for their own policy. Simone, a member of the senior leadership team, said,
… we looked at lots of different policies that other schools had produced in regards to relationships and sex … we narrowed it down to I think it was three policies that we liked bits of, but we gave the policies of the entire team to the staff and said, ‘look, have a read of them, see what you like about them, see if they reflect our practice … and then we can make it ours’.
Simone had also attended PSHE network meetings hosted by the local authority and attended the local authority’s PSHE course. She said,
Through the PSHE course, I spoke to a lot of PSHE leaders in secondary schools to find out exactly what they do … I was very worried that in sort of diluting what was recommended, that our children would miss out, or that they would have this horrific shock in secondary school, and I didn’t want that. But I was reassured, by speaking to so many different secondary school PSHE leaders, that no, we were absolutely fine.
This suggests that after participating in the local authority’s PSHE course, Simone felt reassured that her school’s more conservative approach to sex and relationships education (compared to recommendations she had seen) would not leave her pupils uninformed. This is, perhaps, an unexpected outcome of a PSHE course.
Patrick, a member of the senior leadership team at Wingfield Academy, said,
We’re part of four Bridgestock [academy] schools, so we don’t particularly work with other [city] schools … We only took [Andromeda] on because … one of the other schools said, ‘We’ve got’, – I was looking for another PSHE system – ‘We’ve got [Andromeda], send your person’ – Kirsten – ‘to come to our school’. She went, watched some lessons, looked through the scheme of work, thought, ‘yeah, that’s much better than what we’ve got’, so we adopted it from them.
Kirsten’s account differs somewhat, but confirms that knowledge about Andromeda for sex and relationships education had come from another school:
When I worked in my previous school, Mooreshead, they had just bought [Andromeda], so I knew a bit about it. When I approached the head last year … she was like, ‘yeah, if you can get it for free!’
Kirsten had experience of Andromeda at another school, and this was the basis for her recommendation that Wingfield Academy acquire the scheme for its sex and relationships education programme. While the school did acquire Andromeda, financial output and convenience appeared to be significant criteria in the decision-making process, as opposed to, for example, the resource’s suitability to Wingfield Academy’s school community or the quality of the scheme.
Respondents at Latimer Primary mentioned that speaking to other schools and looking at policies from other schools are something they would normally do in the process of revising policy, but they did not do this as part of the specific policy process under study.
Government guidance
Respondents at Latimer Primary suggested that they felt constrained and restricted in their decision-making about sex and relationships education due to the Department for Education’s 2000 Sex and Relationship Education guidance. None of the policymakers spoke about any additional, constructive knowledge obtained from government documents.
Iris, a member of the pastoral staff at Latimer Primary, noted that whatever other processes the school engaged in (e.g. consultation) and whatever other documents they utilised in formulating their policy, the school is accountable to government guidelines:
… ultimately, in terms of the school, whether we like it or not, the local authority and government tell us the line, and that’s the line we don’t cross.
She does not name the 2000 government guidance in this passage, but she referred to it elsewhere along the same line of thought, and the head teacher of the school also discussed the limitations created by the government guidance.
At Wingfield Academy, the two respondents who mentioned the government’s position seemed unfamiliar with the government legislation and policy. Annette, a member of the senior leadership team, said,
Well as far as I know [sex and relationships education is] not compulsory. Am I right?
Annette is correct, but her intonation and body language suggested that she was not confident, she was looking for confirmation.
Kirsten, a member of the pastoral staff at Wingfield Academy, was unaware of any content in the government policy regarding same-sex relationships, but noted that since there was content on same-sex relationships in the Andromeda curriculum, it must be acceptable to the government. She said,
[Andromeda has] pictures of two men, with a child, and because it’s normal now, so I’m not too sure, because if [Andromeda] has done it, they must have got the OK [from the government] before they released this all to schools.
This passage emphasises the authority and credibility that Kirsten assigned to the Andromeda curriculum. Arguably, Kirsten should have been aware that the government had not approved the Andromeda curriculum. However, she may have read in the Andromeda materials that it was developed in accordance with the government guidance and mistook this for government approval.
Amy, a member of the pastoral staff at Latimer Primary, said,
I think [the government guidance is]… quite vague of what you can include in S and RE … we’ve tried to be quite specific because, otherwise, you know, we wanted to be consistent across the school, so we want to make sure that teachers know exactly what is expected of them.
Amy’s understanding was that the government guidance was not specific enough to be useful for the school’s sex and relationships education policy. In addition, she suggests that for sex and relationships education to be delivered consistently, teachers must have precise guidelines.
In contrast to the interview data, the written policies at Latimer Primary and Wingfield Academy, both state schools, suggest that government sources of knowledge were quite important. All three schools referenced the Department for Education’s 2000 Sex and Relationship Education guidance, but, in addition, the state school written policies mentioned Acts of Parliament – guidance, reports and consultations from the Department for Education and the DoH, an Ofsted report and a White Paper on education. None of these additional documents were referenced in both state schools’ policies, which suggests a lack of consensus about the government’s advice on sex and relationship education.
Discussion
The findings presented above demonstrate that the schools in this study consulted a range of types of knowledge in their policy deliberations about sex and relationships education. The ways in which these knowledge(s) are talked about suggest a multiplicity of motivations and aims among respondents, with regard to what they set out to achieve in their sex and relationships education policy. Scheurich (1994) wrote, ‘there are virtually always alternative truth games with different degrees of power in different situations. There are, in addition, consensual values and interpretations that constrain what is allowable within a school’ (p. 25). ‘Truth games’ played out at Fleming Primary, where Simone, a member of the senior leadership team, described holding her staff by the hand and ensuring their views were reflected in the school policy, as she covertly persuaded them to deliver sex and relationships education so that she did not have sole responsibility for the subject. At Kirsten’s school, Wingfield Academy, decision makers (including Kirsten) shared the opinion that the most important value for Kirsten’s role, as subject lead for sex and relationships education, was performance, and this influenced her decision-making. Her mandate, as described to her by her head teacher, was to demonstrate progress in the subject, so the primary criteria she used to select a sex and relationships education curriculum was how well it would support her to demonstrate the performance of pupils. Simone and Kirsten were motivated to achieve different ends, and those ends contributed to the construction of the issues, problems and solutions in their sex and relationships education policies.
The following discussion discerns some of the most common, most concerning patterns observed in the data regarding the types of knowledge that informed primary schools’ sex and relationships education policies and analyses what this tells us about what Berger and Luckmann (1966) might have called the socially constructed reality of sex and relationships education.
From an evidence-based education perspective, the most conspicuous gap in the knowledge that the schools utilised is scientifically rigorous, peer-reviewed evidence (Davies, 2003; Slavin, 2002). Scientific research was rarely mentioned. It is worth noting that reading and assessing scientific research to contribute to school policies are generally not part of primary school teachers’ work, in any subject (in part because many subjects are set by the National Curriculum), but this also underlines the somewhat precarious situation that currently exists, whereby teachers without any special expertise on the subject are asked to put together their school’s sex and relationships education policy. While respondents did not practice ‘evidence-based policy-making’, the written sex and relationships education policies also did not suggest that respondents deliberately rejected this model of policy-making in favour of a more democratic and inclusive policy process that values diverse forms of evidence and knowledge. For example, schools failed to acknowledge in their written policies the importance of community knowledge and of staff expertise in developing their sex and relationships education policy. Conversely, none of the three schools involved parents in the policy-making process; the sex and relationships education curricula and policies were delivered to parents as finalised products.
By examining the written sex and relationships education policies alongside interview data, it is clear that there are two versions of the sex and relationships education policy at each of the three schools: that which exists on paper and that which exists within the hearts and minds of the practitioners and decision makers who lead sex and relationships education (hereafter, the ‘policy in practice’). These policies are related, and there are overlaps in the criteria and knowledges that underpin them, but they serve different purposes and reflect distinct social constructions of sex and relationships education.
First, I will address the issue of policy in practice. Data presented above show that at Latimer Primary and Fleming Primary, staff views and opinions were highly regarded in decisions about sex and relationships education policy. Given the importance of staff expertise, it was relevant to assess the range of experience reflected across respondents (Alldred and David, 2007; Mason, 2010). At Wingfield Academy, in-house expertise was limited to a teacher who had attended two 1-day courses on PSHE education. At Fleming Primary, the head recognised the lack of staff capacity, and she engaged the local authority subject advisor to deliver training to all staff. She was herself, by all accounts, the person with the most expertise on sex and relationships education, stemming mainly from a 1-year certificate course in PSHE education. Latimer Primary had by far the most in-house expertise, with at least four staff who had attended at least one relevant comprehensive course and three staff who each had years of experience, training, commitment and interest in sex and relationships education.
Given the disparity in levels of expertise on sex and relationships education, in a context where schools use their own discretion to decide what sex and relationships education they deliver, and in the absence of consultation of scientific knowledge, future research could focus on where primary school decision makers’ ideas about sex and relationships education come from.
Andromeda, the commercially produced curriculum package selected by each of the schools in this study, undoubtedly informed the policies in practice. In Ball’s critique of modern education policy, he suggests that education is conceptualised as a producer of the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy ‘derives from the idea that knowledge and education can be treated as a business product, and that educational and innovative intellectual products and services, as productive assets, can be exported for high value return’ (Ball, 2013: 19). Knowledge is, thus, commodified. Ball further argues that the knowledge economy erases the importance of human relationships in producing value in education. These arguments are well supported by the findings in this study. Andromeda was promoted by the local council, which offered a subsidy for local schools to purchase it. The schools in this study then used the curriculum to inform their sex and relationships education policies, and the level to which Andromeda was relied upon was closely related to their level of in-house expertise. Given the substitution of human expertise for a commercial curriculum package, we must question the authority and credibility of the Andromeda curriculum.
Parts of the Andromeda curriculum were requested from the publisher to include in the data analysis for this study, but the request was refused on the basis that the curriculum is a commercial product, so the company would not share it unless it was paid for. The company did, though, invite the researcher to participate in a 1-day training session. In this, participants viewed a video that demonstrated sexual intercourse with an animated diagram of a penis entering a vagina. The video illustrated that sex was preceded by male (not female) arousal and proceeded to demonstrate human reproduction with diagrams of reproductive organs, thus conflating sex with reproduction. The trainer confirmed that this video clip – together with corresponding activity sheets, lesson plans and so on – was the only introduction to sex in Andromeda. The knowledge it represents is biological, medical, sexist and heterosexual, and although it may comply with the government’s 2000 Sex and Relationship Education guidance, it does not follow recommendations from research with young people who said that they would like social and emotional aspects of sex to be discussed, in addition to biological features (Allen, 2008; Pound et al., 2016). A full analysis of the Andromeda curriculum does not fall within the scope of this article, but this example is, nonetheless, highly problematic. In the context of other resources and highly skilled sex and relationships educators contributing to sex and relationships education policy, there still could be a place for Andromeda, but where staff expertise is lacking and Andromeda is the only curriculum resource, the pupils involved would stand to lose out.
A noticeable gap in the types of knowledge that informed sex and relationships education policies were the views of pupils and parents. As noted previously, young people’s views on sex and relationships education are well documented, and there are a number of studies that demonstrate the importance of engaging pupils and parents in decision-making about sex and relationships education (e.g. Alldred and David, 2007; External Steering Group, 2008; Wilkinson, 2017). Although respondents acknowledged that it could be interesting to ask pupils, or parents, their views, this was not part of their decision-making process for their current sex and relationships education policy. The only representation of pupils’ views came from staff experiences.
Next, I will discuss the written sex and relationships education policies. In the context of the interview data about the knowledge(s) that informed the school sex and relationships education policies, the written policies failed to acknowledge the role of staff in informing the policy and over-stated the role of government documents (particularly in the policies of the two state schools). The analysis suggests that the representation of knowledge in the written policies often serves quite a different function from the policies in practice.
The procedural inclusion of references to government guidance on sex and relationship education, and other government documents, evokes the performative aspects of neoliberal governance. Ball (2000) argued that school performances serve as proxies for output, and they are displays designed to demonstrate the worth of the school. A number of respondents mentioned Ofsted inspections, and several respondents said they anticipated that sex and relationships education would be made statutory, so they had revised their policies with a view to their being inspected. However, the schools did not genuinely hold the government guidance in esteem, based on respondents’ talk. Concurrently, staff who have significant expertise spoke proudly of how they personally had influenced their school policy, and yet this was not acknowledged in the written policies. The social construction of sex and relationships education in the form of a written policy, thus, exists on an instrumental plane designed purely to demonstrate accountability. This perspective also emerged in respondents’ talk – for example, Kirsten’s description of her objective, as subject lead for sex and relationships education, to demonstrate the progress of her pupils in the subject.
An important reflection about the results of this study is that they likely reflect a selection bias in the study sample. These three schools were confident enough about their sex and relationships education policy to volunteer to be scrutinised on their decision-making process, with little clear benefit for themselves. This is significant: one might infer that their policy processes may be some of the ‘best’ out there.
Conclusion
The results of the study offer insights to answer the question, ‘What kinds of and whose knowledge influence policy deliberations about sex and relationships education in primary schools?’ The expertise, perspective and opinions of primary school staff were important sources of knowledge that influenced the sex and relationships education programme and policy, and a commercially available curriculum package was another significant source of knowledge. Additional types of knowledge included training and expertise from the local authority, advice and policy text from other schools, and text from government documents. This article began to unpick the criteria decision makers in this study used to assign value to different types of knowledge, but a more comprehensive discussion and analysis is needed to do this thoroughly.
Although this study was limited to three primary schools, it nevertheless demonstrates that in-house expertise on sex and relationships education varies from one school to another, and their practices of accessing external expertise also vary. If all schools are to support all their pupils so that they can gain the benefits of good-quality sex and relationships education, it seems likely that they will require significantly more support than they receive at present. Schools must be supported to put pupils’ interests and concerns first and have the resources to develop in-house expertise and capacity to deliver high-quality, comprehensive sex and relationships education policies and programmes.
Schools may also benefit by having access to new and existing scientific evidence, packaged in concise, accessible ways, to integrate new knowledge into their existing policies and programmes.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council, in the form of a PhD studentship, which enabled the production of this paper.