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The Brazilian Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais, introduced in 1996, recommend the coverage of sex education within all disciplines, throughout a young person’s education. However, implementation is often inconsistent, teachers frequently lack training and resources, and content continues to be largely biological. This research investigates this apparent “gap” between ostensibly progressive sex education policy, and the realities of young women’s sex education experiences. It focuses on how young women in Lençóis, Bahia, Northeast Brazil understand the role of the State in their sexual learning processes, and how State-sanctioned sex education interacts with local sexual culture and informal sex education practices in their everyday lives. This research contributes a semi-rural, interior study, based on young women’s experiences, to the literature on sex education in Brazil, which has predominantly centred on urban, coastal young people’s lives, and included young people’s perspectives only infrequently. The thesis prioritises local sexual culture in the study of sex education, and promotes an understanding of the State as active at the level of the everyday. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-seven women aged 18–29, and contextualised with additional material. Findings indicated that lençoense sex education lacked uniformity, was viewed largely negatively, and seen as a localised process, mostly dependent on individual teachers. State-sanctioned sex education provided powerful messages of risk and risk-reduction, responsibility and respectability, while other important themes were identified as “missing”. Participants often looked to “informal” sources to plug the gaps left by insufficient State-sanctioned sex education, and the enduring taboo of the topic in many lençoense homes.

Sex and Relationship Education (hereafter, SRE) - a comprehensive sex education has a long debate in the Western worlds. This study explores the cultural and religious barriers of setting up SRE in a Muslim country, Brunei Darussalam. Using semi-structured interviews, I focus on key informants’ and young people’s perspectives on teenage pregnancy for instance, the policy context of school exclusion due to teenage pregnancy. I argue that the negative perceptions of SRE are stemmed from cultural taboo and customary practices of the country. This further suggests that these practices impose stigma effects that represent persistent patterns of dissolutions in reducing the rate of teenage pregnancy and HIV/AIDS transmission among young people. The other themes examine: perceptions of the respondents of the customary practice of social exclusion policy; positive and negative reactions to SRE; gender differences in sex and relationship; young people lack of knowledge associated with SRE; social issues associated with teenage pregnancy; attitudes toward NGOs; perceptions of the current school-based sex education and positive and negative attitudes towards SRE. This study also calls for pedagogical implications for future practice in the education sector. Finally, this study concludes with a brief discussion of the study.

This thesis presents the first in-depth ‘home international’ comparison examining England’s and Northern Ireland’s policy processes with regard to making sex and relationship(s) education a statutory component of their national curricula for secondary schools. Drawing on policy network analysis, advocacy coalition and political decisionmaking literature more broadly, this study focuses on how policy actors in both regions conceptualise the debate around sex and relationship(s) education. It extends the ‘values in sex education’ discussion and focuses on the specific values informing policy discussions, as well as those embedded within/excluded from relevant policy texts, and the centrality of power around who or what groups are influential in shaping policy. Informed by a social constructivist epistemology and utilising a mixed method, case study design, this study’s data include Northern Ireland Assembly and Westminster Parliament Hansard transcripts, relevant legislation and statutory policy texts, and semi-structured interviews with 32 elected representatives, civil servants, third sector representatives, academics and local school practitioners. Employing thematic and content analysis to each text, a framework was created for both the England and Northern Ireland cases to determine how policy actors in both countries approach sex and relationship(s) education and the values driving policy development arguments. Cross-case comparisons indicate that SRE policy-making in England is primarily made through a closed, ‘top down’ policy strategy with the authoritative power of the ruling government overshadowing the perceived reputational power of those within the larger SRE policy network. Meanwhile Northern Ireland adopts a more open, partnership sharing, ‘ground up’ policy strategy toward RSE with relatively little influence from Members of the Legislative Assembly within the policy-making process. This study’s findings offers a new conceptual framework for understanding the different factors that shape the sex and relationship(s) education policy-making systems within both countries and provides a tool for possible policy learning in these countries more widely.