Dr. Jacqueline Fallon:

The idea of consent does not begin at the point Ms Honan is describing. For curriculum coherence, I would go all the way back to the early childhood framework. We are very concerned about young children having the opportunity to exercise choice and have their opinions consulted in order that very young children can get used to that idea of making their own decisions. We can then track that through the approach we take in the primary curriculum so that by the time we get to explicitly dealing with those issues of consent, those young people have had years of developing a comfort level in describing their own feelings about the choices they have to make.