Mr. Niall Behan:

I wish to respond to two questions, the first of which was on the role of outside facilitators. We agree with what a number of speakers have said on the matter of a whole-school approach and that RSE should be based in schools. That said, our role could be around complementing that process, helping with resources or with particular aspects of delivering the programme. Problems arise when the outside facilitators become the deliverers of the whole RSE programme and it becomes a box-ticking exercise.

The question of ethos can be quite complex. Ethos ties into the teachers' discomfort with the content of programme. There is a worry about the ethos of the school and about whether, for example, a teacher should be talking about contraception. That is part of what gives the RSE programme its low status. The UK authorities tried to improve the status of RSE a number of years ago by making involvement in it a requirement for promotion to school principal. That brought more teachers into the RSE programme there and encouraged them to stick with it.