Why DOES the SNP seem so obsessed with the sex lives of our teenagers?
After the two years Scottish children have endured, you would think the SNP-Green Government might want to think about making things better for them. that could involve a cast-iron guarantee that schools will never close again, the lifting of face mask rules in class or fresh investment in sport and arts facilities.
If our leaders were feeling ambitious, they could even aspire to restoring Scotland’s reputation as a world leader in education, an accolade that has been allowed to slip shamefully far in recent decades.
Instead, the issue this Government appears to want to be defined by is the grilling of children about their sexual preferences and experiences.
the deceptively dubbed ‘health and wellbeing’ survey has rightly been panned by parents and politicians across the board.
even SNP-run local authorities are refusing to issue it to children in their area, in clear defiance of their national masters.
Now we learn that a seemingly innocuous survey on teenagers’ use of bus passes is being used to probe the private lives of our young people.
Parents are wondering why the Scottish Government has become so obsessed about this topic. they think it is sinister, unnecessary and haven’t been given anything resembling a reasonable explanation for why it is happening.
Having led a parents’ group during a period where Scotland’s children have been treated appallingly at the altar of coronavirus restrictions, I have seen a fair few upset and desperate families at the very end of their tether.
I didn’t think anything could match the anger which was caused by the cancellation of exams for two consecutive years, the sporadic and catastrophic closure of schools for months on end, or the treatment of disabled and deaf children for whom a compulsory face mask was humiliating and exclusionary.
But these needless sex-based quizzes have come pretty close. It’s not a political issue either – parents on every side of Scotland’s constitutional and political divide share equal levels of disdain for this peculiar development.
the official line that gay and lesbian young people may be put off using public transport seems insincere and unconvincing.
And as we’re seeing all too often with politicians through this pandemic, it’s clearly a ‘one rule for us, another one for everyone else’ approach.
After all, when challenged in a freedom of Information request, senior government figures declined to answer the very questions being posed to youngsters.
too sensitive for them, but seemingly fair game for schoolboys and girls across the country. the latest revelations merely mirror a wider trend which is troubling mums and dads across Scotland.
even parents of children in the early stages of primary school have raised concerns that there is too much sexual education being injected into the curriculum at too young an age – although no one is saying there’s not a place for such lessons in the curriculum full stop.
recently, the Scottish Government finally admitted that the closure of the country’s schools did more harm than good to young people.
Ministers conceded that the wider educational, developmental and social harms caused ‘are becoming more of a concern than the immediate health harms, particularly for children and young people’. thousands of parents across Scotland could have told them this 18 months ago. We did, and were branded ‘cranks’ in the process.
Don’t be surprised if Scottish Government ministers belatedly reach the same conclusion about these intrusive and utterly unwanted sex surveys.
they should do us all a favour by withdrawing them right now and focusing instead on actual topics of education such as literacy, numeracy, sciences and languages. that’s an agenda we could all get behind, and one which will actually support our young people when they need and deserve it the most. n