Young people who can talk openly about sex with their parents tend to delay having sex and are more likely to use contraception when they do. Talking to children about sex Talking about sex to your child doesn’t mean you are encouraging them to have sex. The best way to start talking about sex is to: start when your child is young, as waiting before your child reaches puberty can make it awk...

The scandal that there are no grammar schools, though on the German Gymnasium model, thereby avoiding the crudity of the 11-plus. (And the scandal that there are no O-levels for the most academic pupils once they get there.) The scandal that there are no technical schools, of which there were never anything like as many as there should have been. The scandal that the special schools are still in t...

The Catholic Church knew about child sex abuse being commited by its priests and did nothing. That is disgraceful. What makes it even worse is that the reason they did nothing is simply because of the “potential scandal and bad publicity should the abuse be disclosed.” Well, they’ve got it in spades now. Last year, the Pope

The list of the 16 free schools that the Department for Education hopes will open in September 2011 revealed plans for two Jewish schools, one Hindu school, one Sikh school, one Church of England school and two Christian "ethos" schools

An MP said yesterday that a 13-year-old in his constituency who fathered a child to a teenage mother raised questions about the need for better sex education in schools. Nigel Waterson, Conservative MP for Eastbourne, said the case of Alfie Patten, who was 12 at the time of his baby's conception, was "a very sad story which will have a huge impact on both the parents and the child. I'm v...

Pope Benedict XVIth has signalled that the Catholic Church should involve civil authorities, including the police, in child sex abuse investigations

Compulsory sex education in primary schools will erode moral standards and encourage sexual experimentation, a group of hundreds of head teachers, school governors and faith leaders say today.

So, when your child reaches six years old, is that the right time to start having "conversations about sex"? The country’s biggest sexual health charity has published a sex education pamphlet for six-year-olds to encourage earlier discussion of the facts of life.  The 12-page comic-style booklet, which will be distributed to schools, asks children to identify the physical differences be...

Hey, for all the flak the Catholic Church has had over child abuse scandals, at least the Pope never issued a statement claiming that the real problem was that all this child rape may make people think worse of the Church.

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland may just now be beginning to understand how much it relies on trust - now that it has so little of it. Yesterday’s publication of the truly shocking 2,600-page report by Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse found that rape was "endemic" in more than 250 Irish Catholic care institutions from the 1930s to the 1990s, and that the church in I...