Mick Hartley

Well, this is nice:

An organisation that provides sex education lessons in schools has apologised for posting links on its website to “regrettable” material about fetishes, sex toys and introductory guides to “quick, rough, anonymous sex”.

The School of Sexuality Education has worked with about 300 primary and secondary schools to host age-appropriate workshops on sex and relationships. It is in a legal dispute with Clare Page, a mother from Deptford in south London.

When Page looked online at the organisation’s team of “facilitators”, she found website links that showed some of the people hosting the lessons also had commercial interests in the sex industry, such as selling sex toys and promoting pornography. One of the teachers described themselves as a “master fetish trainer”.

Page asked her daughter’s school, Haberdashers’ Hatcham College in New Cross, southeast London, who had taught a sex education lesson to the 15-year-old and what it entailed. When she was turned down, she appealed to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which also rejected her request, saying it was commercially sensitive and a copyright matter because the material belonged to an external organisation.

At a tribunal appealing against that decision, Dolly Padalia, the chief executive of the School of Sexuality Education (SSE), defended the decision to keep the identities of people teaching children about sex secret from parents. “Ultimately, that isn’t necessarily relevant because they’re representing an organisation and our approach and our work and our programmes, which is standardised,” she told the hearing.

However, she admitted that it was “regrettable” that any children who saw its website were only a couple of clicks from sexually explicit content about adult topics, such as sex toys, bondage and anal masturbation. She said: “The aim really was to not come across as this cold and clinical website that just advertises academic qualifications. We really wanted to demonstrate that we are non-judgmental and diverse [and] frame ourselves as an unembarrassable team. But I do appreciate this pointed out a weakness and not enough planning. I can understand why parents are concerned.”

"Only a couple of clicks from sexually explicit content about adult topics, such as sex toys, bondage and anal masturbation". Lovely. People with a line in adult sex toys coming in to schools to teach kids about sex: what could possibly go wrong?