New sexuality guide for teens out of touch with reality

Tuesday, 6 May 2025

**Katie Fitzpatrick is a professor of health and well-being education in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland. *She* was the lead author of the previous relationships and sexuality education guides for schools.**

OPINION: The Minister of Education has released a new draft sexuality education policy guide for schools, a policy change which, bafflingly, is happening before the writing of the new curriculum in health and PE it’s intended to support. This is the result of the National Party’s coalition agreement with New Zealand First.

The draft guide is very simplistic and only contains a short introduction and range of learning statements. It also goes against the last 20 years of research in New Zealand and internationally, and contradicts the advice of the Education Review Office, the New Zealand Classification Office, Unesco and the WHO.

As a result, this new draft guide, which addresses learning for all students from years 1 (5-year-olds) to 13 (18-year-olds), takes sexuality education in schools backwards more than 25 years, to a time before online dating and the mass availability of online pornography.

In fact, the new guidelines fail to mention the word pornography at all. This is concerning because research conducted by the Classification Office shows that one in four children in New Zealand have seen pornography before the age of 12, as have two thirds of teenagers under 17.

A closer look reveals a wide range of silences in the draft guide, many of which should be deeply concerning to parents and teachers, and to young people. Here is a list of words and concepts that don’t appear at all in the guidelines: dating, equity, body image, intimacy, identity, sexism, feminism, ethics, norms, popular culture, queer, gender diversity, health services, trends, misogyny.

The word “gender” only appears alongside discussion of gender stereotypes, which reflects a very narrow and outdated approach. Indeed, gender is reduced to the terms “male” and “female” and all other words connected with gender such as boy, girl, woman, man, non-binary, trans, etc are simply not there. Why the denial of language that is in common use and in official dictionaries? Is this a repression of knowledge?

The draft guide is also completely silent on the provision of health services, such as nurses and counsellors, in schools and whether schools should be safe spaces for women, LGBTQI students or for teachers.

School toilets and uniforms, an issue of interest and debate, are not mentioned at all and neither are school policies on sexual harassment or inclusion. The guide says nothing on who should teach sexuality education and on what kind of training or knowledge they need to do it. The Māori and Pacific content contained in the previous guide and all references to Te Tiriti o Waitangi are missing.

So what’s in the draft?

While the Minister is aiming for what she calls a ‘“knowledge rich” curriculum, the draft guide has no conceptual basis, and it is unclear what research it’s based on. The Māori concept of hauora (well-being), which has been an accepted and celebrated aspect of the curriculum since 1999, is absent and there are no links to research.

This draft strips out the knowledge and content of the previous guide in favour of a simplistic and outdated approach. The word “dating”, for example, never appears but there is a single reference to the rather retro notion of “going out”.

Statements about reproduction and contraception are strangely worded and read as if they’re from another era. For example, at year 8 (12 to 13-year-olds), the draft states that students will understand that “male and female bodies have reproductive systems that work together during fertilisation”.

This statement is curiously decontextualised and places sex only in the context of heterosexual reproduction. How quaint and inaccurate. How deeply problematic.

By contrast, the document removed from schools, the most recent guide, suggested a much more sophisticated and knowledge rich approach to learning for students in high schools with statements such as: “Understand various differing approaches to conception and contraception and how these relate to social norms, choice, consent, and well-being.“

The latter approach to learning is truly knowledge-rich and grapples with the complexity of being human in a world in which sex and human reproduction is connected with science, social norms, identity and relationships. Someone needs to tell the minister, for example, about IVF and the fact that same sex couples can become parents.

The new draft is completely out of step with the times. We are living in an era where young people need to navigate online communications in a digital age of freely accessible pornography, where dating begins on apps, and where Instagram and TikTok are key sites of information about body image and identity.

Times where high sexual violence statistics and increasing online misogyny, homophobia and transphobia mean that there is urgency around young people learning the protective knowledge of consent and body autonomy, and how gender power relations impact relationships.

These are times where students who identify as takatāpui and LGBTQI+ are more likely to be bullied at school and, as a result, suffer poor mental health.

Are we really okay about looking away from all of this and denying children and young people knowledge about their own lives, about their bodies and about healthy relationships?