Has this campaign been solely focused in the UK or are there plans to take it global?

This campaign was very much UK focussed, but this is a massive issue globally. If you look at statistics in the United States for example, the number of states where consent education is not mandated but abstinence education is, represents a massive problem. This is an issue where there are great practises in various countries where we can look to and learn from. The Netherlands is one example of a country where they have done sex education right – they’ve been much more proactive on this than we have.

I saw an amazing study comparing sex education and the outcomes in the UK and in the Netherlands. They found, unsurprisingly, that it didn’t have the impact that people fear, in The Netherlands. It didn’t raise teen pregnancy rates, or lower the ages of the first time of having sex. The biggest difference between the two countries was actually in the reason that young people gave for why they had sex for the first time. In the UK it was because they said they felt like they had to, because everyone else was doing it, or because they wanted to see what sex was. In The Netherlands, overwhelmingly, they said it was because they thought they were in love. For me, this is a perfect encapsulation of why sex education is so important. It’s just so much healthier.

In many schools I’ve worked in, there is education around the biology of menstruation, but no education on the management of menstruation. Is that something that you have found to be an issue here in the UK?

I think menstruation is another area that’s seen as taboo and stigmatised. I don’t think schools are doing a good job at all of opening up the subject and making girls feel able to discuss it. I think that’s a particular problem given the recent revelations about the scale of period poverty in the UK. We’re very quick to think of period poverty as a developing world problem, but in reality, we also have to face the fact that there are girls in the UK who are missing school because they don’t have access to sanitary supplies.

Laura Bates on why we urgently need better sex education in schools