Former Minister of Education Dame Billie Miller has called for mandatory, age-appropriate family life education programmes to be implemented at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels.
“I have always had difficulty in understanding why the one thing which has the potential to derail all of the investment that we are making in education, we don’t want to make it mandatory,” she said while making a contribution via telephone to VOB’s Brass Tacks Sunday yesterday.
The topic for discussion was Sex In Schools And Solutions To The Issue.
Dame Billie said in the early 1980s, she tried to implement a family life education pilot programme but it did not have the “buy-in” at all levels of the programme and was not successful.
However, she said that what they learnt from that pilot was that not every teacher could teach family life education; they had to be trained to do so. (LK)
