Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa is concerned schools have been left without information on how to teach students about relationships and sexuality after the Ministry of Education removed guidelines from its website.
“This is age appropriate, evidence-informed, best practice guidance and it’s really disappointing to see that it’s disappeared before there’s any new guidance issued,” Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa director health promotion Fiona McNamara said.
The move answered a coalition agreement promise with New Zealand First. Winston Peters had referred to them as “woke out-of-touch guidelines”.
In a recent review, 85% of school leaders told the Education Review Office they were useful.
“I think that by removing the guidelines, it does take away the support for any new teachers that are involved in the health education or creating the programmes that we need to do with our students,” Haeata Community Campus health teacher Carolyn Leeson said.
Leeson referred to the guidelines along with the 2007 curriculum and other resources to inform her learning programme on relationships for Year 9 and 10 students.
The guidelines contain information about “consensual, healthy and respectful relationships being essential to student wellbeing”, according to the Education Review Office.
Guidance on navigating pornography, cyber bullying, social media, gender identities and sexualities are also covered.
“Our whole world is changing and social media for us is obviously a real big issue within all our year groups,” Leeson said.
“They were up to date in that sense and really useful,” McNamara added.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of that material detailed in the 2007 curriculum and the curriculum doesn’t go into that level of detail.”
ERO reported that some whānau have strong views on gender and sexualities.
McNamara called on the Ministry of Education to provide more guidance to schools, with the new health and physical education curriculum not available for schools to use and to give feedback on until next year and not compulsory until 2027.
Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa provided curriculum-aligned relationship and sexuality resources to around half of schools and provides free guidance for teaching different ages and school visits from staff.
“A lot of schools are just deciding to put a hold on teaching relationships and sexuality education at the moment because they just don’t know what’s going on and they don’t want to get it wrong,” McNamara said.
“It’s a huge issue. It just means that there are young people who are going to miss out on this education.”
Education Minister Erica Stanford said schools should continue to use the 2007 curriculum “until the new one’s delivered later this year”.
A spokesperson for the Minister later said that the Minister was referring to a draft of the curriculum being available later this year.
Stanford said the guidelines were “confusing the issue”.
“They were not detailed, they were not year-by-year and they were causing more confusion for schools,” she said.
The ERO said the guidelines provided more detail than the curriculum on what to cover at different years and how to teach it.
The watchdog also said optional use of the guidelines was contributing to inconsistency among schools, on top of the flexibility of the 2007 curriculum.
