The petition was signed by tens of thousands of people,almost 7000 of whom added not just their signatures but also their own devastating accounts of what they had experienced as teenagers,largely in Sydney.
Chanel Contos is disappointed with the response of the NSW Education Department to a new consent curriculum.Liliana Zaharia
These testimonies helped spark a national conversation about how women and girls are treated in Australia,and how to foster healthier attitudes among young people towards relationships and sex.
The NSW Parliament voted in October 2021 to overhaul the state’s curriculum when it came to consent,and a new national health curriculum with explicit references to lessons on consent and respectful relationships was also agreed upon last year.
That curriculum as well as the support of Contos,who declared it a comprehensive minimum standard upon which individual schools and states could build.
So it is surprising and deeply disappointing that the NSW Education Department s in the state’s public schools,in light of the new curriculum,as reported in today’sSun-Herald.
Independent schools in NSW are obliged to teach the national curriculum,but NSW Education claims its PD/Health/PE curriculum,which it designed and rolled out in 2018,is good enough,even though this was the curriculum in place when Contos began her petition in 2021.
The NSW curriculum adopted in 2018 makes age-appropriate consent education mandatory from kindergarten,but schools can decide how much time and emphasis to give the topic within the broader PD/Health/PE subject area. That gives individual schools wriggle room to gloss over what can be an awkward and controversial topic.
While the NSW Education Standards Authority says it will be reviewing the PD/Health/PE syllabus as part of broader curriculum reforms already underway,the NSW Education Department is of the view its curriculum already covers the lessons included in the new national agreement. It is also yet to deliver on a promise made in May to roll out new material to teachers to help them deliver consent lessons in line with the 2018 curriculum.
This somewhat lacklustre attitude to consent education in our public schools is not OK. Nor is it OK that private school students will receive lessons using the new national curriculum from this year,while public school students risk missing out.
News this week of a surge in reports of sexual assault in NSW since the launch of a new online reporting system adds to the evidence that sexual assault in our community has been massively underreported.
Politicians and advocates also met this week to discuss how to make online dating safer. A survey of almost 10,000 dating app users published by the Australian Institute of Criminology last year found that three in four users had been subjected to sexual violence.
These developments further reinforce the need for a complete reset on how we help our young people to build happy and healthy personal relationships in this country.
The NSW Education Department needs to reconsider its position on the national consent curriculum and work out how to incorporate it into lessons at public schools without any further delay.
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