Stop. Tell the real story.

As a sex educator who delivers workshops on relationships and sex to young people in UK schools, I’ve witnessed the multiple damaging affects of austerity in our classrooms.

The young people we work with have faced layers of cuts throughout their childhoods: to their youth services, education systems and welfare outside of school. In 2017–18, it was reported that 4.1 million children were living in poverty in the UK, which equates to 9 out of 30 children within the classroom. We’ve seen children turning up hungry to our sessions, breakfast clubs filling the gaps and emergency measures being put in place to provide food during summer holidays.

Meanwhile, there is another crucial service in young people’s lives that is quietly being destroyed: relationship and sex education (RSE). As a service that straddles both education and health, it has been doubly damaged. Many young people who will not receive sex education at their underfunded school will turn to sexual health services outside of school.

But the harsh truth is that these services will not survive another decade of austerity.

Like the NHS, sexual health services have been driven into the ground by budget funding cuts from an austerity government since 2010. But what makes sexual health services especially vulnerable is the way that money is spent on them. In 2013, Andrew Lansley, the then health secretary, moved the public health budgets that pay for them from the NHS to local councils, meaning they were far less protected. Then to make matters worse, in 2015, George Osbourne cut the public health grant to local councils by 7.4%. Since then, spending on sexual health, advice and promotion has fallen by 35% between 2013/14 and 2017/18.

This means that many clinics are being forced to close, and the remaining ones bear the brunt of lengthy waiting times of 3 hours or more. Young people are having to travel further to be seen and hundreds of people are turned away every week, and left untreated.

This, as always, affects the most marginalised. Public Health England found that LGBTQ+ people are twice as likely to contract an STI, and less likely to get treatment, whilst STI’s affect black people at a higher rate than any other ethnic group.

Sexual health clinics are a safe space to seek advice, and support, especially when you might not be able to have these conversations at home. However, the majority of young people we work with have no idea where, or even what, their nearest sexual health service is.

Confusion surrounds sexual health in the classrooms we work in: ‘miss, why do people even have sex?’, ‘what does contraception mean?’ and ‘does masturbation cause memory loss?’ Lack of funding and innovation in RSE has left them unequipped with the knowledge and skills they need to navigate their sexual health and keep themselves safe. And of course, this feeds into the mental health crisis that young people are facing.

New mandatory legislation means that all secondary schools will have to provide RSE as of September 2020. But yet again, this has not come with allocated funding attached, meaning school budgets will have to spread even thinner.

With a rise in STI’s, alongside a lack of inadequate RSE and sexual health services, how do we expect young people to lead happy, healthy sexual lives?

Cuts under another Tory government will destroy what is left of this provision. It’s time for change for these young people. Your vote alone isn’t enough anymore — we need to get out there and speak to people, share our stories and listen to theirs.