Sex ed providers exposing eleven-year-olds to ‘graphic and sexualising’ material

School materials on explicit sex acts and aimed at children as young as eleven are available from the UK’s leading education network.

Tes (formerly the Times Educational Supplement) has an online database of around 900,000 resources for teachers, which can be uploaded by members of the public.

One game advertised for children between eleven and 14 years old asked pupils to discuss activities including watching pornography, masturbation, using sex toys and anal sex.

Paedophilia

Cre8tive Resources, which produced the game, told The Times it was only suitable for 13-year-olds and up, but categorised the resource for ages 11 to 14, rather than 14 to 16.

Another resource asks 14-year-olds: “If polyamory and homosexuality is natural, could you class paedophilia as a sexuality?”

And a pack of 125 lanyard designs for children as young as seven includes preferred pronouns, with options including “non-binary, a-gender, gender-fluid, gender-neutral, androgyne, and omnigender”.

‘Assault on childhood’

Conservative MP Miriam Cates said: “It is disappointing that these resources appear on the Tes website and is further evidence of the unregulated Wild West of relationships and sex education teaching materials.”

She added that “exposing children to graphic, extreme and sexualising material is an assault on childhood, a failure of safeguarding and falls foul of rules on indoctrination and age-appropriateness”.

The Family Education Trust said the materials did not meet Department for Education guidelines calling for “relationship and sex education to be ‘sensitive, age-appropriate, developmentally appropriate and delivered with reference to the law'”.

Tes stated that its resource network is not “selected or pre-approved by Tes and does not represent the views of Tes”, although it removed the highlighted materials for investigation.

Indoctrination

Campaigners have expressed concerns about a charity that criticises parents for “gendering their children even before birth based on the identification of external genitalia in scans”.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Archewell foundation has partnered with Equimundo’s Global Boyhood Initiative, which has a curriculum for children as young as seven on “challenging limiting gender stereotypes” that was piloted in some primary schools last year.

The initiative claims that research suggests “boyhood is not fixed, unitary and stable. Rather, boyhoods are multiple, plural, fluid and changing”.

Tanya Carter of Safe Schools Alliance UK said: “Children are male or female, boys or girls” and schools “must be very careful that anything delivered to children is for their benefit and not because adults want to spread their particular worldview”.

Prime Minister

Earlier this month, Rishi Sunak committed to bringing forward a review of statutory guidance on Relationships and Sex Education in England in response to a question from Miriam Cates MP.

Mrs Cates told the Prime Minister that children are being “subjected to lessons that are age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate, often using resources from unregulated organisations that are actively campaigning to undermine parents. This is not a victory for equality, it is a catastrophe for childhood.”

The DfE is currently collecting evidence, with a consultation on updated guidance expected later this year.