Rishi Sunak promises to protect 'our precious children' amid sex education concerns

UNESCO's guidance echoes the outlook and many of the prescriptions of an earlier document issued by the World Health Organsation, which caused a backlash from the Government, MPs and activists following a Telegraph report on its recommendations aimed at toddlers. The UNESCO guidance published in 2018 "directly informed" sexual education laws in Wales, according to Welsh government documents, and an earlier version of the same guidance was cited in laws passed in Scotland, though neither country adopted all of its recommendations. A Scottish Government spokesman said it was "for councils and schools to decide" how to deliver sexual education "within the framework” provided by Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. Instead, it points to a widely used WHO definition, which asserts that good sexual health also "requires" the possibility of having “sexual experiences” that are "pleasurable". Guidelines issued in 2014 for secondary schools by Hackney Learning Trust, a government funded body responsible for educational improvements in the borough, which has 55 secondary schools with more than 40,000 students, cited an earlier version of the UNESCO document under a section titled: "Evidence of effectiveness - what does good SRE look like?"