This weekend column: Sam Shepherd on why she thinks sex and relationship education should be compulsory for all children

ANOTHER week, another crushing disappointment from Downing Street. This time it’s David Cameron’s decision not to back compulsory sex and relationships education (SRE) in schools, despite support from select committees, teaching unions, the Children’s commissioner, the Chief Medical Officer, the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and many other organisations.

SRE "includes the development of life skills and respectful attitudes and values, with a strong emphasis on relationships, consent, rights, and communication skills, helps pupils understand on and offline safety, consent, violence and exploitation, is both medically and factually correct, treats sex as a normal fact of life, is inclusive of difference, helps pupils understand a range of views and beliefs about relationships and sex including some of the mixed messages about gender, sex and sexuality, recognises and challenges gender inequality and reflects girls’ and boys’ different experiences and needs".

At the moment, SRE is mandatory from age 11 in state-maintained schools but NOT in academies – which increasingly make up most of secondary education – and parents can withdraw their children from any aspect of SRE that isn’t part of the science curriculum.

Even the Education Secretary thinks this is a terrible state of affairs. But not Dave. And so Nicky Morgan’s been reduced to pledging to improve the quality of existing sex education rather than making sure that ALL children are taught how to navigate the increasingly choppy waters of relationships.

On behalf of my daughter, this terrifies me.

I was a student at the height of FHM’s popularity, when it was taken as read that a young woman who wanted to be a pop culture success would, at some point, strip to her underwear and spread her legs for the young men of the UK to pore over.

My friends, all nice young men, most of the time, spent literally hours comparing-and-contrasting the girls in each issue. My boyfriend at university had several stuck on his ceiling.

He wasn’t such a nice young man, as it happened, and perhaps a six foot poster of Caprice he could stare at while he lay in bed should have been a clue, but that’s the thing: for girls in the 90s it was totally normalised.

If you wanted to be popular, you posed for a lads mag. And if you didn’t, or didn’t approve of people who did, you were a prudish killjoy.

This attitude infected every aspect of my life as a teenager. It was perfectly normal for a man you didn’t know to put his hands on you as you walked past him on a night out.

If a stranger you’d never seen before tried to get you to slow dance with him in a club, saying ‘no thanks’ wasn’t enough. Saying it 10 times wasn’t enough. The only way to make them go away was to tell them you had a boyfriend – because what other possible reason could there be for you not being interested?

Things HAVE changed. It’s not quite so acceptable now for a stranger to grope you in a nightclub. Lads' mags don’t really exist anymore. But in many ways it’s worse.

Celebrities don’t pose in their pants for the newspapers any more – so instead tabloids take pictures of them going about their daily lives and headline them ‘flaunts her physique’ when all they’re doing is walking to the shops. Fourteen-year-olds learn about sex from porn websites, sending half-naked selfies is common and the internet means bullying is everywhere, at all hours of the day.

In a ChildLine survey of 13 to 18-year-olds, 60 per cent said they had been asked for a sexual image or video. One in three 16 to 18-year-old girls experience unwanted groping at school.

Equipping our children to handle the pressures they’ll face is vital. It’s not enough to give them a banana and a condom when they’re fifteen while explaining to them that sex at their age is technically illegal but they’d probably get away with it.

It’s not that I’m saying there's no good SRE education in schools. But it should be standardised, compulsory, in all schools, with age-appropriate information as soon as they’re old enough to understand it, and it should be a continuously developing conversation throughout their school years.

Here’s what I want the boys my daughter will grow up with to be taught: you have no rights over her. It’s not okay to tell a girl to smile because it makes her prettier. That girl on the bus really would rather read her book. That the fact she’s wearing her best dress doesn’t mean she wants you to proposition her. The way they do it on the internet isn’t the way you do it in real life. You are not the boss of her.

And I will do my best to ensure she knows this: It’s always okay to say no, and a boy who’ll give you grief for it is not the sort of boy you want in your life. Never send anyone anything over the internet. Lust and love are not the same, and it’s not a good plan to get them confused. Forgive yourself for your mistakes. Trust your instincts.

And if your boyfriend’s got a life-sized poster of a half-naked girl on his ceiling, lose him off. He’s probably not a keeper.