SEXUALITY, By Carey Jewitt.Pounds 14.99 plus Pounds 2.50 pp Healthwise (FPA Bookshop), 27-35 Mortimer Street, London W1N 7RJ. Taking Sex Seriously: Practical Sex Education Activities for Young People By Julian Cohen and Pam Wilson, Pounds 55 plus pp from Healthwise, 9 Slater Street, Liverpool L1 4BW. Sex Education - a Quick Guide for Teachers By Michael Kirby. Pounds 5 inc, from Daniels Publishing, 38 Cambridge Place, Cambridge CB2 1NS. Sexual Health, Assertiveness and HIV By Carol Painter. Pounds 38 plus Pounds 1.90 pp also from Daniels Publishing.

A yawning gap in the health education field has been filled. Liz Swinden reports. Youth workers have often expressed an understandable exasperation at being marginalised whenever health education resources are mentioned. Carey Jewitt, the author of Sexuality, has now heard their plea and written an excellent resource for anyone working with 14 to 24-year-olds.

Those who are just starting to develop work in this area will find it a great help, as will the more experienced. The manual contains a range of exercises on body image, assertion and communication, decision making, sexuality, relationships, STDs, safer sex and contraception - all developed from work with young people.

Each activity takes at most an hour. There are factually-based ones and ones looking at attitudes and values. Some of the activities have pages that can be photocopied and made into situation or role cards. The cartoon characters in these are fun, although almost all have stick-like Twiggy bodies which I didn’t find very representative of average human beings.

All in all, though, there are some very good things in the book. I particularly liked the recognition throughout of young gay men and lesbians and their needs, also the activities which help young people look at their friendships and types of relationships.

Healthwise is possibly best known for its two excellent packs on drugs education and responding to drug use. Now it has a similar manual for sex education. Like the other two, it is attractively packaged, very well written and researched and has the same hallmarks of realism and clarity.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that, instead of stipulating an age group, Taking Sex Seriously puts the onus on the teachereducator for deciding this, bearing in mind their knowledge of the young people. Suffice to say that this pack will appeal mainly to those teaching young people of around 12-13 years old and upwards.

Activities in the section “Let’s Talk about Sex” cover such topics as what is sex, sexual language, expectations about sex, and the law and sex. Other sections are “Avoiding and Dealing with Pregnancy”, “Avoiding and Dealing with STDs including HIV”, “Getting HelpGiving Help” and “Dealing with Parents and Guardians”. Each activity is set out clearly and there is lots of photocopiable material for class use. An early section addresses the teachereducator and includes a self-evaluation exercise to help clarify their views on sex education. This pack is well worth considering if your school is looking for good up-to-date materials, although it’s not cheap. I would advise previewing it first at your local authority resource centre or health promotion unit. Youth leaders will find it useful, too.

Now schools are having to grapple with the Department for Education’s Circular 594, Sex Education in Schools, which informs them of changes made to the subject by the 1993 Education Act, resources are starting to appear which offer help.

Michael Kirby’s Quick Guide is just that a little booklet giving checklists of things which schools need to do to comply with the law. So under the aim of “Involving Parents”, targets or tasks cover things like “Make sure that parents are aware of their right to withdraw their children from all or part of the sex education provided” and “Include information about the sex education policy in the school’s prospectus”. Other sections include things like reviewing existing provision, formulating a policy, writing a policy document and dealing with sensitive issues.

This booklet tells you what you should be doing but it will not tell you how to do all the tasks. For that you will need either some personal support from your local authority adviser or your local health promotion unit, or maybe one of the other more comprehensive publications on the subject which are now starting to appear.

One of the latest offerings from Daniels Publishing is Sexual Health, Assertiveness and HIV. It is aimed at a wide range of people with a personal or professional interest in HIV prevention and sexual health, so this could include health workers, teachers, youth workers, HIV, health promotion, social and community workers and voluntary and self-help groups. Starting from the premise that assertiveness is at the heart of all work on sexual health, author Carol Painter draws on her experience as a trainer in both fields to devise exercises which link the two areas.

If you are looking for material which focuses specifically on areas like gender, sexual orientation, young people, ethnic minorities, learning disability, physical disability and people with HIV, you should find this an interesting read. There are activities, handouts and overhead transparencies in each chapter. These packs are expensive given that they are rather basic in their production, but the topics they cover are good.