Ah, sex education. I remember it like it was yesterday. It would have been 1987. Our entire year assembled in the school theatre. A beige, moustachioed, Open-University-looking chap stood alone on the stage with a slide projector. We’d never seen him before and never saw him again. He had been hired in especially for the occasion, I fancy, in much the same way and for much the same reason Russia uses the Wagner group to supply combat troops.

On one of the early slides was a long list of synonyms for the male organ of generation. ‘Penis,’ he intoned solemnly, indicating the word with his pointer. ‘Willy,’ he said. ‘Dick,’ he said. ‘John Thomas.’ Pause. ‘Todger.’ You can imagine how this was all greeted by 250-odd thirteen-year-old boys. I don’t to this day know how he survived ‘Tummy Banana’.

And on he went. There was a grisly photographic slide, if I remember rightly, showing how a condom was to be applied to a man with ginger hair. There were some rudimentary warnings about STDs, and how you got them, a bit of biology and a couple of reminders about the age of consent. (No mention of sodomy or strangulation, but it was an all-boys’ school so I expect they reckoned we’d figure all that out on our own.)

There’s more than a whiff of moral panic here

Near the end, after he had gone through the labels on his diagram of a lady’s private parts with the slow care of a general preparing his troops for battle, he asked: ‘Any questions?’ I piped up, little smart-arse that I was: ‘Where’s the clitoris?’ No mention of this enigmatic organ had been made, but I’d already discovered Harold Robbins on my parents’ bookshelves and I was somehow aware that its location was one of the mysteries of adult life. As I remember it he hem-hemmed a bit, indicated the rough target area with his pointer and said words to the effect that they hadn’t considered this an important issue.

I hope that these days sex educators in schools will think that a question worth answering before it is asked. I doubt I need worry. By the sounds of it there are a whole lot of questions being answered that nobody was asking in the first place. The Tory MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger (full disclosure: Kruger is my well-loved cousin) founded the New Social Covenant Unit, which has just produced a substantial report on ‘What Is Being Taught in Relationship and Sex Education in our Schools’. Cates last week made the headline-grabbing claim in a parliamentary question that ‘graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely and 72 genders – that is what passes for relationships and sex education in our schools’.

This does not, it should be said, seem to be borne out by her own think-tank’s report. Somewhere on a blog, somewhere in a thick forest of links for relationships and sex education (RSE) educators, marked by an adults-only warning, on the website of one of the many organisations that teach RSE in schools, is a discussion of safety in erotic strangulation. But it’s a bit of a jump from that to the assumption that choking lessons are offered in most, or some, or any schools. Likewise, the report doesn’t seem to contain any evidence that most, or some, or any schools teach children that there are 72 genders.

I think there’s more than a whiff of moral panic here. You can no doubt always find some RSE teacher, somewhere, who’s saying daft or offensive stuff. A grown-up response is not to pretend this is the norm, still less to do so if your own researchers haven’t managed to find that teacher. And sex education these days almost certainly is a good deal fruitier than it was in my day or, ancient reader, in yours. Choking, bum jollies, sex with multiple partners, revenge porn and all the rest of it: many of us will shudder at the thought of our kids being exposed to these topics. But if they aren’t addressed in school, you can rest assured that, whether we like it or not, that side of the curriculum will be amply covered by the grotesque swamp of online pornography through which youngsters these days wade as standard.

But the case of one parent, Clare Page, should sound alarm bells even for those of us who are inclined to think that most RSE educators in most schools will be making a sensible good-faith attempt to negotiate that undoubtedly tricky landscape. Page’s 15-year-old daughter came home, it’s reported, rather flustered after being told of the importance of being ‘sex-positive’ in a RSE lesson, and hearing some salty remarks, apparently, about the perils of ‘heteronormativity’.

Page wanted to know what had been covered in the lesson, so she asked the school. They refused to tell her on the grounds that the lesson had been taught by an outside organisation (in this case the ‘School of Sexuality Education’). She put in a Freedom of Information request for the lesson plan and the name of the teacher. It was turned down. She appealed to the Information Commissioner and, again, was turned down on the grounds that it was ‘commercially sensitive and a copyright matter’. Now she’s taking the matter to a tribunal. I very much hope she wins.

We can argue back and forth about what children should be taught in this area. Perhaps you are an ultra-liberal type who really does think your kid will be better off learning in the classroom how to choke a partner. Perhaps, on the other hand, you think that any sex education in schools that goes beyond basic biology and the importance of consent is propaganda rather than education. But in both cases, you will be entitled to know what your children are being taught. If we’re to rebut the idea that crowds of marauding drag queens are stampeding through our schools teaching our ten-year-olds to be howling perverts, or even to make the case that they should be allowed to, we have to have the data.

Wherever you stand on the question, sex education is an important matter. It’s alarming that it should be subcontracted on a school-by-school basis to questionably qualified experts in organisations with no clear structure of accreditation and wide latitude in what they teach. And it’s positively grotesque that parents can be denied the right to know what their children are being taught about sex and love on the grounds of commercial confidentiality.