Teenage-led sex education could be an innovative way forward
25 November 2008
A Medical Research Council funded study has found that a teenage-led sex education programme was popular with pupils and may have led to fewer teenage pregnancies. But the programme did not affect the abortion rate.
The UK has one of the highest levels of teenage pregnancy in western Europe. The Department of Health has developed a strategy aiming to halve the 1998 under-18 pregnancy rate – 46.6 pregnancies during 1998 for every 1000 girls under 18 - by 2010. Part of this strategy is to improve sex and relationships education (SRE) and many believe that peer-led SRE may be a good approach to try.
The Randomised Intervention of PuPil-Led sex Education (RIPPLE) study, published in the open access journal, PLoS Medicine, compared the effects of a new peer-led and the existing teacher-led sex education given to 13 and 14 year-old pupils. Twenty-seven schools across England and 9,000 pupils took part. In the peer-led programme, trained 16-17 year old peer educators gave three one-hour sessions to younger pupils in the same school. The sessions included practice with condoms, role play to improve sexual negotiating skills and exercises to improve knowledge about sexual health. The researchers then used routinely-recorded data on abortions and live births to find out how many female study participants had an unintended pregnancy before they reached 20 years-old. The findings revealed the peer-led programme delayed girls having sex and may have led to them having fewer babies than girls in the teacher-led programme. But the peer-led programme had little effect on other areas of sexual health.
The lead researcher, Dr. Judith Stephenson from the Division of Population Health at UCL (University College London), said:
“The findings of this peer-led approach are encouraging in terms of reducing the number of teenage pregnancies and the fact that pupils preferred being taught by their peers. However, peer-led sex and relationships education is a considerable undertaking for schools and people often have high expectations about what peer-led sex education can achieve. This study shows that in reality the benefits can be modest but the peer-led approach should still be considered as just one part of a much broader strategy, including teacher-led education, aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy.”
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Notes to editors
Access to the paper: http://medicine.plosjournals.org
The Medical Research Council supports the best scientific research to improve human health. Its work ranges from molecular level science to public health medicine and has led to pioneering discoveries in our understanding of the human body and the diseases which affect us all. www.mrc.ac.uk
Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. In the government’s most recent Research Assessment Exercise, 59 UCL departments achieved top ratings of 5* and 5, indicating research quality of international excellence.
