February 22, 2009
The Sunday Times
Kate Sawyer, a teacher, writes hilariously from the classroom on her struggle to stop her sex-crazed young charges from becoming teenage parents like 13-year-old Alfie Patten
When I was first given the job of head of PSHE in my comprehensive school, a friend asked me to explain what exactly that entailed. He listened carefully and summed up simply. “I see,” he said. “It’s all the bits the parents should do.”
To a degree he was right. When my brother announced that a male and female rabbit only had to look at each other in different hutches to become pregnant it was our mother, not the school, who overcame blushes and put him right. I doubt there is a single 10-year-old in the land now who thinks rabbits need only look at each other to breed. Not now that half of them are breeding like rabbits themselves.
PSHE — personal, social and health education — recently became PSHEE when the government added “economic wellbeing and financial capability” to the guidance it feels parents cannot or do not deliver to their children.
You can see why if you listen to Alfie Patten, the nation’s latest cheeky chappie. Asked how he will cope financially, having fathered a baby at 13, he replied: “What’s financially?”
So what is it all about, Alfie? Are you the victim of lust, a bad family, bad teaching or just bad luck?
It seems as though every expert in England has a point of view about Alfie and where he went wrong. I am not an expert. I am simply a teacher. From offices and libraries the pundits’ opinions have poured forth. I am writing from the muck and litter of the average classroom. I am surrounded by teenagers with their noise, vitality and truculence and, above all, their opinions.
My comprehensive is not in an inner city. Drink and drugs have appeared in the classroom but no knives. If Tess of the d’Urbervilles were alive today she would probably be in my classroom (and still getting pregnant).
We are in an old-fashioned market town with its share of closed-down Zavvis. Our children are a healthy mix of farm children bussed in, children from rough council estates and the children of the newly “poor” middle classes.
When our children go truant they are either found drinking in the park or hiding in the cornfield. It is as fair a cross-section of society, neither one extreme or the other, as any school in the land.
Our nation has a shockingly high level of teenage pregnancies, but sometimes I feel that everything comes down to numbers and statistics and the true stories behind the numbers are put aside. That, I suppose, is why I applied for the PSHE job.
I went into teaching because I love Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Betjeman, not because I had any interest in teaching about cannabis and condoms; but somewhere along the line I realised that education is about a great deal more than one particular subject.
We have to send these children out as close to being whole people as possible and that includes sometimes making up for whatever is missing elsewhere.
Perhaps the moment of truth for me was some years ago when I was trying to force an essay out of a girl who had suddenly given up working. She burst into tears and told me she could not concentrate on anything while she was so worried; she thought she was pregnant.
An hour later (going against every rule in the book) I was standing outside a lavatory cubicle reading Sarah the instructions on a pregnancy testing packet. I suspect I was praying as hard as she was while we waited for the blue lines. She was not pregnant. She hugged me and wept some more and thanked me. The next morning she brought me the essay.
A group of 14 to 15-year-old boys recently asked me if I thought they were “having sex”. (It was in some way related to the text, but I was clearly being tested as to shockability.) I answered truthfully. Yes, I thought some of them were, most of them weren’t and all of them were thinking about it. But (because I am, after all, a teacher) now was not the moment to be thinking about it.
Not surprisingly boys are on the whole less discursive on such matters than girls. They’ll shout rude things across the room but they are unwilling to talk in anything more than smutty generalities. Girls, on the other hand, come to ask for advice. Particularly, I suspect, if they are not talked to very much at home.
I walked into a classroom of girls once to be asked: “Miss, can I ask you something that’s nothing to do with Romeo and Juliet?” When I told her yes, Marie said: “Is it all right if I don’t sleep with my boyfriend? I don’t want to yet but they all say I’m being tight.”
Her relief when I told her that it was certainly all right was almost palpable and her dilemma turned into a general discussion within the classroom. I was flattered to be trusted in this conversation, but also curious to learn more about their attitudes.
The first thing is we should not think that all young teenagers are sexually active; many more aren’t than are. It is hard to get a grip on actual figures as people lie in both directions — why shouldn’t they? But it is the ones who are sexually active that are concerning.
I have heard horrific stories, from the children themselves, about how they carry on. Claire, who needed the morning-after pill because after a “party” she had willingly lain down on a park bench and allowed four boys, one after the other, to have sex with her. “I just thought it was a laugh,” she said, “but I’m scared now.”
Jaydon, who left home to live with her boyfriend and his father, fell out with the boyfriend and became pregnant by his father because she needed a place to stay. Sonia, in care, became pregnant and her baby was taken away soon after birth with suspicious bruising. Sonia carries a picture of the baby around, sees her every day under supervision, but is not allowed to be alone with her.
I have heard of concerned mothers who, rather than suggest to their 14-year-old daughters that they wait a little longer to consummate their relationships, put candles around the child’s bedroom, light joss sticks, strew condoms on the pillow and leave their children to it.
A 13-year-old told me that her mother had made her have the contraceptive implant because “she knew I was having sex so she thought it was safer. I was consumed [sic] against a fish and chip shop wall when she was 14 and she didn’t want me to have a baby the same way”.
That mother was one of the wise ones. While my school bucks both the national and local trends with its low level of pregnancies (ones that are allowed to go to term, at any rate) it is, time and again, the daughters of 15-year-olds who become mothers at 15. Our children, who leave us at 16, usually manage to wait before “consuming” their own babies, but some don’t wait long. A few are born within a year.
All these stories point to the same assumption. It is all right to have sex — wiser to be protected from pregnancy, but perfectly all right to “shag”. That’s part of the problem — the carelessness of the vocabulary shows the carelessness of the undertaking of the act.
So when I was asked if I, as a teacher, was surprised by Alfie’s story, I could only answer no. Not by Alfie, not by Chantelle Steadman, his “girlfriend” who was allegedly sleeping with more than five boys at the time her daughter Maisie was conceived, and not by the boys who have come forward to claim paternity.
I think we used to flirt with lots of boys when I was that age but they don’t flirt much now. They cut straight to the chase, skip the flirting and go straight to the bed. The Alfie story is shocking, of course. Surprising, alas not.
The non-statutory curriculum for PSHE says, of the sex and relationship component, that “it helps [students] to understand human sexuality and the significance of marriage and stable relationships as key building blocks of community and society”.
Yet so much of PSHE ignores the latter half and focuses instead on how not to fall pregnant or catch a sexually transmitted infection. As one girl said to me recently: “Miss, they’ve been showing us how to put condoms on penises for years, but they never talk to us about relationships or how we choose.” Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.
The danger is that so much information is being blasted at these children on how not to conceive, where to go for help, the dangers of chlamydia, that the implied subtext is that it is all right to experiment with sex whenever you want. The curriculum does say that learning the advantages of delaying sexual activity should form part of the content, but how often is that touched upon?
I have formed a sex taskforce at my school; a group of teachers (all, interestingly, women) who have volunteered to be part of the sex education programme. We sat and stared blankly at a blue plastic penis while a schools nurse trained us in condom use. We were told by the nurse that we were not to talk about flavoured condoms as we were not to imply that sex was for fun.
We were shown a little mat with a hole in to protect the boy/man giving cunnilingus (I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t heard of it before) and where the children could pick one up. We were given femidoms and condoms and chlamydia testing kits and Lord knows what else and by the end of the training hour I wondered what the children were going to be left thinking that sex was all about.
Is it a horrible, dangerous territory where the only way to proceed is to be wrapped in cling film from head to toe and hope for the best? Or is there any chance of emphasising that sex in the right context (which is clearly not on a park bench with four boys in a row) is a good thing one day, just maybe not yet?
Jason, a lazy, charming boy from year 11, came late into school the other day. He apologised, saying it was his turn to look after the baby while his girlfriend was at work. After a while he had decided to come into school anyway and had brought the baby with him. The baby was clean and sweet and had a much more expensive pram than anything any of my children slept in. I could not help but coo over the child and smile upon its child-father.
Jason turned to his friend and grinned: “See, I told you babies pulled the birds.” An About a Boy moment — but a good 20 years too early.
What, to Jason, was the point of fatherhood? The pram as a show-off accessory? The baby as a conversation opener? Was it anything at all to do with looking after and loving and advising and guiding this boy through his first 18 years?
I seized on the second part of the general statement about sex and relationships education (“to understand . . . the significance of marriage and stable relationships as key building blocks of community and society”) and designed a lesson on marriage. It was a good lesson. I taught it myself and it generated thoughtful conversation about responsibility and parenthood and such like. But one of the PSHE teachers came to me and refused to teach it.
She said it made her “uncomfortable” and was “not relevant”. I pointed out that “stable relationships” were to be emphasised as much as marriage; no one was to feel uncomfortable, that is the whole point of good PSHE. Still she refused. If parents don’t, and teachers won’t, teach children the basic tenets of moral responsibility, what chance do those children have?
Moral responsibility: these two words are the crux of the whole problem. Parents hold their hands up in despair, the government pushes the job back to the teachers and no one ends up doing the job properly. No one will take moral responsibility, partly because the very word “moral” is frightening and threatening to a large proportion of our hedonistic, materialistic society and partly because the “responsibility” always lies elsewhere.
How can we turn this around? As a mother I am infuriated when I receive letters from the government telling me how to avoid my children becoming obese. (Take exercise, eat healthy food, etc. Well, there’s a thing.) I don’t believe any parent in the land receives those letters and reads them seriously and highlights key phrases and uses them as a guideline. Of course not. So it is no good sending letters home about moral responsibility.
My fear is that we have a lost generation but there is hope of a brighter future. Yes, we should be teaching these children how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies (and the dangers of drugs, etc) but we should also be teaching them — or giving them, for this is something you cannot teach — self-respect.
We should be teaching them through example and conversation and mutual honesty (within reason) about the importance of family, not just as a system whereby we are given an annual holiday and a BMX and a computer. Somehow they need to be shown that there is a better way and their own future families can be more whole than perhaps their present ones. That if families eat together and talk together and even argue together, they can communicate and understand each other better.
They say the English don’t talk, especially about anything that matters, but my experience shows me that these children are only too willing to talk. Maybe that’s where we should start — forget the condoms and encourage the English to communicate, especially across the generations.
We are all, every one of us who complains about a corrupt society, capable of contributing to that. If you cross the road when you see a group of youths in hoodies, you are only reinforcing their isolation and their perception of themselves as some special pack. If we treat them as feral, they become feral. And if they are already feral? Well, let’s be optimistic. Most wild cats can be domesticated.
I have worked with bad and even mad children. I have worked with children with no home to speak of, or a home in which they are the prime carers. I have worked with truculent, downright aggressive and asocial teenagers. And I can tell you this: with some children it might take a very long time, with others it happens more quickly, but I don’t believe there is a single child that will not respond to the simple technique of being talked to and listened to.
I have seen, in conversations with pupils, how they can learn from each other. One girl told me that her stepfather paid her a fiver a “moonie”. Another girl in the group, Sandra, who was not allowed to see her father unsupervised since he made her and her eight-year-old sister smoke a joint to quieten them down while he was looking after them, looked horrified and said: “That’s not right, Ina. He shouldn’t do that.”
It was Sandra, not me, who made Ina question what was going on, who raised the subject of how families should or should not behave, but I enabled them to have the conversation without fear of ridicule. (On the other hand, the mooner is now 18 and pregnant with her second child by a second boy. Her mother has four children by three men. Go figure, as the Americans say.)
Teenage pregnancies are not a political problem; they are a problem of the society in which we live. A society in which nobody, not even parents or teachers, can use words like “moral” without being scorned. That is why we teach children how to use condoms rather than how to say “no”. Because if we cannot use a moral argument we have to use a practical one.
I remember talking to a group of 16-year-olds who were arguing that times had changed and now it was considered fine to sleep around. These are not 16-year-olds in a steady relationship, just ones out for a jolly on a Friday night.
They said (perfectly politely) that I was just old and out of the loop. So then I asked them this: would they like to think of their mothers as similar to the “fun-loving” girls they now associate with? Dared they imagine their mothers partying every night, drinking vodka, lying down in the park for a quick one?
I was met with a horrified silence, followed by a groan of disgust. Couldn’t they see, I said, that one day they, too, would be parents and did it not matter to them how their children would think of them?
I think that conversation had more impact than a million blue penises.
Some names have been changed
