“Every little bit of our bodies is given to us by God our father, to be used for the work he made it for, and for nothing else.”

That was the line on sex education suggested in 1880 by Miss Agnes Cotton, founder of the first Moral Welfare Home for Children. As a guide to action, the advice seems a bit vague. But how, and what, to tell the children about sex has long been a problem.

In a lecture called “Birds, Bees and General Embarrassment”, Lesley Hall, of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, described the history of sex education as one of “long periods of silence and neglect, punctuated by occasional moments of crisis and flurries of moral panic”.

Its development owed more to public fears over venereal disease than to the desire to combat public ignorance, Dr Hall said in a lecture delivered in London yesterday. And it had been bedevilled by the continuing ambivalence of British attitudes to children and sexuality.

The idea that children should receive some enlightenment about sex dates back at least to the 1870s, as part of the reaction to the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s.

These Acts, seen as an attempt to make vice “safe” by locking up prostitutes infected with venereal disease, outraged women and civil liberties champions. They urged instead a programme of moral regeneration. This was to include giving children healthy and moral information about sex rather than the wrong ideas and behaviour they might pick up from untrustworthy servants or companions.

The birds-and-the-bees approach developed with The Evolution of Sex (1889) by Patrick Geddes and J Arthur Thomson. This tackled the subject in a non-emotionally-charged way via forms of life remote from the human, starting with the amoeba and working via plants, invertebrates, insects and mammals to man.

In the 1890s, birds and bees gave way to the “stamens and pistils” school. The Human Flower appeared in 1894. A year later the sequel Baby Buds was published.

By the early 20th century a few progressive educational establishments incorporated some form of sex education into their curriculum. Both the National Council of Public Morals and the feminist National Federation of Women Teachers advocated an approach described as “a mixture of homily, religion, science, botany and soap-and-water cleanliness”.

In 1914, the London County Council’s Commission of Inquiry on the Teaching of Sex Hygiene found most teachers “averse” to discussing the subject - and concluded that it should not be taught in class.

Local and institutional initiatives carried on, but without central co-ordination. Then the outbreak of the Second World War - and accompanying concerns about venereal disease - led to a renewed preoccupation with the need for sex education.

Responsibility for social hygiene education was given in 1942 to the Central Council on Health Education, a quasi-official body with widespread support from central and local government. In 1943, the Board of Education issued its pamphlet Sex Education in Schools and Youth Organisations - but felt it “not possible to lay down specific principles, or to recommend specific methods”. And in 1944, the Education Act paid only lip-service to sex education.

Even in the 1960s, which saw the invention of the contraceptive pill, the legalisation of abortion and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, “many still floundered in confusion and ignorance”.

In the 1970s there was more sex education at school, though still with major local variations. Today, in the era of Aids, it remains “a battle field”, concludes Dr Hall.

Devolution of powers to schools meant many local authority programmes bit the dust, while heads were nervous of upsetting governors. It remains “a soft target for anxieties generated by wider and far less easy to influence factors in society at large”.

Email: lesleyah@primex.co.uk