Writing About Health Education In ‘The New Social Curriculum: A Guide To Cross-curricular Issues’ (1990) – and The ‘Gillick Competence’

Have we moved on in the three decades since Barry Dufour as editor published The New Social Curriculum: A Guide To Cross-Curricular Issues? The book, published by Cambridge University Press in 1990, was then a fairly ground-breaking initiative to bring together various aspects of the school curriculum which might otherwise have been ‘squeezed out’ by the introduction of the English National Curriculum in 1987-9.
As his helpful Introduction to the book (pp. vii-ix) explains, Prof Dufour offered ways to incorporate via a cross-curricular approach several aspects of subject learning which many of us regard as essential, but were not then accorded by the Government the statutory requirement of ‘core’ delivery.

My task was to propose such incorporation for Health Education, a particularly delicate aspect of any school’s curriculum both because it is dependent on the knowledge, skills and willingness of teachers to deliver, and because it embraces such thorny issues as drugs and ‘sex education’, the latter set at that time in the context of ‘Section 28‘ (homosexuality, AIDS – and the related unarticulated suicidal fears of and for some young men) along with the moral panic about ‘teenage pregnancy’.  (An aside: the ‘Gillick competence‘ test had then only recently arisen as an issue, perhaps ironically after Victoria Gillick unsuccessfully challenged any provision of contraception advice to under-16s.  The Gillick consent concept as applying to a range of largely health and medical provisions – including in 2021 Covid-19 vaccinations in English schools – was not yet fully established when Barry Dufour’s book was published.)

Below is what I wrote as Chapter 4 of The New Social Curriculum.

It was a time of rapid curricular change, and I tried in my chapter to bring together the challenges of teaching about the ‘nightmares of adults’ (to use the phrase coined by Chris Brown, author of the preceding chapter), the demands of many and various parents, and the professional, legal and, indeed, personal concerns of many teachers, whilst also acknowledging the self-evident age-appropriate rights of children and young people to learn about their own bodies, how to access help and support for their physical and mental well-being, and how to look positively to their futures.

So have we moved on since 1990?

In many ways, yes.  But whilst the precise curricular hurdles to be cleared may vary over time, in Health Education contexts are rarely firmly established and difficult judgements will always have to be called. It is unsurprising that some parents and politicians – and even some teachers – have been inclined to steer clear of what is now termed PSH(R)E – Personal, Social, Health, (and Relationship) Education (see as one example this school’s curriculum).

Nonetheless, PHSEE – for more recently it includes also Economic Education – has step-by-step become an established and formally required element of the overall English statutory school offer.  Within that ‘social’ curriculum, the specific information shared via Health Education may change over time, but the conundrum of what to include when, and how, is perennial.

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Read more about PSHE and FACTASS, and about Education.

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Books by Hilary Burrage on female genital mutilation

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6684-2740

Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation: A UK Perspective (Hilary Burrage, Ashgate / Routledge 2015).
Full contents and reviews   HERE.
 
FEMALE MUTILATION: The truth behind the horrifying global practice of female genital mutilation  (Hilary Burrage, New Holland Publishers 2016).
Full contents and reviews   HERE.