Condoms should be advertised BEFORE the watershed - health experts

Condoms should be promoted on TV before the watershed to ensure safe sex messages get through to the young, according to health experts.

A panel that advises ministers has demanded the removal of ‘restrictive and outdated broadcasting standards’ that prevent condom advertising before 9pm.

The Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group made the recommendation as part of its fifth annual report to Government.

In a wide-ranging report, the group made a renewed call for sex lessons to be compulsory in all schools and for pupils to get greater access to contraception, including long-acting injections.

And it recommended that parents be sent advice packs on how to talk to their children about ‘the birds and bees’.

Launching the report, group chairman Gill Frances said that more conversations about sex and relationships were needed, ‘both at home and at school’.

‘Parents are a child’s first educators and they need to know how to talk about the issues if we are serious about reducing teenage pregnancy in this country,’ she said.

‘We need young people to be able to make informed decisions, to stop and think, and to be able to resist peer pressure to have early or unsafe sex.’

The report said it was ‘extremely disappointing’ ministers had so far failed to put sex education on a statutory footing in the national curriculum.

It is also calling for schools to get explicit guidance about what to teach at each age and for more pupils to get access to contraception in school-based sexual health clinics-Pupils, parents and teachers should also get a new website containing approved advice on sex and relationships.

This is because attempts to search for advice on school computers were often frustrated by filters which block sites containing sexual words.

And the group wants to see ‘restrictive and outdated broadcasting standards reviewed and overhauled to ensure positive sexual health messages, including the advertising of condoms, are communicated effectively before the 9pm broadcast watershed’.

Campaigner Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, said: ‘The last thing children need is to see condoms advertised on daytime television.’

He warned that many of the proposals would ‘take parents out of the driving seat and put the state in their place’.

And he accused the group of throwing up a ‘smokescreen’ to exclude parents from having-proper input into what is taught in school sex education lessons.

Mr Wells said: ‘Whereas schools are currently required to consult parents about their sex education policies and to respect their wishes, the IAG wants to impose a governmentapproved curriculum on every child in every school without reference to parents at all.

‘Then, once the statutory curriculum is in place, parents will be expected to conform to it. This is really all about taking parents out of the driving seat and putting the state in their place.

‘What this is really all about is the sex education establishment trying to impose upon every child in every school something many parents and teachers are uncomfortable with - and which has no proven benefit whatsoever.’

But the report insisted: ‘Good sex and relationships education delays the age of first sex and increases the use of contraception when sex does occur.’