How Prepared Are Teachers to Provide Comprehensive Sexual Health Education?

Abstract

Quality sexual health education requires that the curriculum is taught by knowledgeable, skilled, and comfortable educators. However, we know little about teachers’ preparedness to provide comprehensive sexual health education. We surveyed 412 current elementary, middle, and high school teachers in one Canadian province to examine their attitudes toward, training for, and experience with providing comprehensive sexual health education. Teachers reported very positive attitudes toward sexual health education and most were in favor of introducing age-appropriate sexual health education in elementary school. Teachers reported little to no formal training at either the pre-service or in-service level but had engaged in self-directed learning. A multiple regression analysis found that teachers who were younger, with more experience providing sexual health education, positive attitudes toward sexual health education, and in-service training reported engaging in significantly more self-directed learning. Teachers with more experience providing sexual health education, positive attitudes toward sexual health education, pre-service training, and self-directed learning reported greater comfort in providing sexual health education. Although these results support the many calls for better teacher training, they also suggest that efforts to improve the quality of sexual health education instruction might be better focused on enhancing access to quality materials for self-directed learning.

Keywords:

• Teachers
• training
• self-directed learning
• comfort
• attitude
• comprehensive sexual health education

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the teachers for their time in responding to the surveys described here and Emily MacKenzie for her help in collecting the data and with manuscript preparation.

Disclosure statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data and associated scripts are available at osf.io/vwex4

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council under the Insight Grant Competition [#435-2020-0144].