Rather than banning sex education, Broadstairs writer Melissa Todd argues our children need a great deal more of it.

Here, she outlines why it is so important - and why we cannot rely on families to teach it…

Before announcing the snap election, the Government set out plans to ban sex education for nine-year-olds, although currently nine-year-olds do not receive sex education. It was almost as if it was a last-ditch desperate shamefaced effort by the Conservatives to make themselves seem cool and relevant pre-election, before they plunge themselves into richly deserved defeat, followed by decades of obscurity.

In fact, nine-year-olds receive “relationship education”, which concentrates on radical topics such as healthy friendships, and keeping oneself safe online.

Rather than proposing bans on sex education, I would suggest children need a great deal more of it. Every study ever conducted finds a correlation between quality instruction and lower rates of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted infection, helping children deflect sexual assault by giving them understanding of consent and appropriate behaviour. Given over nine-tenths of child abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child, we cannot inevitably rely on families to teach this stuff. I wish we could, but we can’t.

Anyway, children are not remotely innocent. Often I wonder if people who claim children to be innocent have ever actually met any. When my son was 4 I was called into Garlinge primary and informed by his teacher he’d caused bedlam by telling the class he’d seen a dog with an enormous willy. I managed to look sombre and shake my head in an approximation of disappointment. But, well, he had, and he knew enormous willies are funny, and worth talking about. As, probably, if you’re honest, do you.

“Rather than proposing bans on sex education, I would suggest children need a great deal more of it…”

All the toddlers I’ve ever encountered like to discuss bodily parts and functions with more enthusiasm than any Onlyfans model. This idea of childhood innocence - of childhood at all - is a comparatively recent invention, by Victorian men, who’d probably met about as many children as I’ve met unicorns.

They decided to promote the notion that children were charming little creatures, closer to God, presumably in the hope the sight of a beautiful, innocent child’s face would surely make sinful adults repent their wicked ways, give up the gin, be grateful for their back-breaking shifts in the boot black factory.

So naturally it was the duty of all adults to keep children in this innocent, dependent, joyous state as long as possible. Only middle class children, obviously, not the scruffy lumps they stuffed up chimneys. Childhood is a bourgeois affectation.

If children are not taught about their bodies and their bodies’ functions they will look to pornography to fill the void. I have made a lot of pornography, and while I don’t particularly want children viewing my work, I’m aware there’s no way to stop them. I would only feel slightly at ease with this inevitability were I confident my younger viewers had received some balanced, sombre education on these subjects, to consider in conjunction with my own, hopefully amusing output, which is meant for entertainment, not instruction. Children may not be innocent, but they are often ill-informed.

The Tories also promise primary school children will receive no instruction on ”gender ideology”, an idiotic, meaningless phrase of alarming origin and history, invented by the Catholic church, not an organisation with the best track record at safeguarding. This too is indicative of a feeble effort to solve a non-existent problem. They tried it in Florida and wound up with the “Don’t say gay” law. Start marginalising one minority, the rest soon suffer.

Refusing to educate children doesn’t leave them innocent. It leaves them vulnerable.