Sign Today: End Pornography in Classrooms

Relationships and sexuality education in Australian schools is largely delivered by outside organisations. They write their own materials, set their own agenda, and answer to their own boards. No parent appointed them, and no parent can remove them.

Parents are rarely shown the material in advance. Opting out is often difficult, discouraged, or quietly discouraged in practice. In many cases a family only learns what was covered after their child comes home and mentions it.

We are not asking for sex education to be abolished. We are asking for the standard that applies to every other decision made about a child at school: the parent sees it, and the parent decides.

We call on state and federal governments to:

1. Remove sexually explicit material from classrooms, and the outside organisations that supply it. Age-appropriate should mean what parents deem appropriate for that age — not what a third-party provider says is educational. We want to see all explicit material and sexual ideologies removed from the classroom. The training these organisations run for teachers should stop at the same time.
2. Publish every program and every resource in advance, and require real parental consent. A signature on a consent form is not consent if nobody has seen what will be shown. Parents should be able to read the actual material, not a summary of it, before their child is in the room. This strikes at the heart of parental authority.
3. Stop the public money flowing to the organisations delivering this material. Governments choose who they fund, and these arrangements were made without parents ever being asked. In the last 5 years alone, over $230 million in taxpayer money has flowed to these organisations. We say enough.