Mal Fletcher comments on the role of parents, schools and government in sex education

What's more, healthy parenting provides the needed insight into how emotionally prepared an individual child is to receive instruction. It is self evident that children mature in different areas of thought and behaviour at different rates.

Information that will help one child at a given age might actually do more harm than good for another at the same age.

Classrooms provide a great environment for collaborative learning. They're not so useful when it comes to helping individual children process sensitive psycho-emotional material.

For this reason a number of children's agencies are calling on schools to offer more in the way of relationship training, as distinct from purely sex education.

Schools clearly play an important role in supporting children's relational development. Respect for the opposite sex, for example, should be an overt part of every school's value system and clearly communicated to its students.

Where sexual relationships are concerned, however, schools will never offer the best source of primary instruction or support.

If schools could play that role, we might be seeing rates of sexual coercion and violence dropping rather than rising, as they apparently are.

It is because sex is not simply a mechanical act and that its best context is a committed relationship, that a well-rounded sexual education requires a form of 'coaching' as well as mere instruction.

Children need personal mentors through the development phases, not simply teachers.

Parents, and personal carers, are best placed to offer this. They alone can be with the child through the ups and downs of development, picking up the pieces if or when something goes wrong.

Teen pregnancy rates, never low in the UK, are often used to demonstrate that parents can't do the job; that government must step in to fill the void, via schools.

Indeed, government agencies have lately become quite aggressive in trying to ensure that even privately-run schools provide instruction not just in biology and basic sexual technique, but in alternative sexual lifestyles.

Strangely, the ultra-liberal political lobbyists who insist that governments should stay out of adult bedrooms, also boldly assert government's right to invade the bedrooms of adolescents.

Yet these new figures show that while sex education has become ever more graphic, children are becoming less well prepared for meaningful relationships.