This briefing presents an important opportunity for us to share twenty years of experience and research findings with educationalists, commissioners and policy makers. It is clear from the agenda  that this 'Government Knowledge' briefing on Wednesday June 24 aims to grapple with the practicalities and challenges of making statute young people's entitlement to comprehensive Sex and Relationships Education (SRE).

What is the gist David's contribution? See full text

Be it adolescent obesity, smoking or sexual health, in the field of public health and health education, improvements can only result in some kind of behaviour change on a population basis. Unlike almost all other curricular areas, health education and SRE aims to help young people adopt or adjust specific behaviours - promoting those behaviours that reduce the chances of them damaging their health and well being and, just as importantly,  damaging the health and well being of others.

At a time when such methods were described as 'indoctrination', Apause used the best available evidence and theory to develop a programme that was behaviourally effective. We made the desired behaviours explicit and we also made it clear how these behaviours would be promoted in terms of classroom practice.  In due course, we came to believe that classrooms are a kind of theatre in which learners became increasing empowered to become effective actors in the dramas of their lives.

What also became clear was that once teachers, parents, governors and religious leaders knew what their young people were participating in, what they were actually expected to do, there were very few issues over which we could not reach a workable consensus.  After all, who could argue against promoting the value of respectful relationships, or the condemnation of bullying or coercive/non-consensual sex?  We made it clear that Apause students would not only see models of assertiveness presented by peer educators, but then would be expected to demonstrate their own capacity to perform such assertiveness techniques in front of the rest of the class.  This absolute transparency of our aims, methods and evaluation protocols addressing a range of psycho-social dimensions to sexual health was not merely there to achieve programme fidelity.  It was integral to the essential process of building consensus.

In short, David's argument is that if SRE sticks to a broadly public health agenda and makes it explicit in terms of promoting healthful behaviours and the classroom practices that involves, the chances of overcoming initial impediments are greatly increased.