Sex education in Spain: teachers' views of obstacles

This paper offers an overview of the current state, difficulties, limitations and future possibilities for sex education in Spain. On the basis of a study involving 3760 teachers from all provinces in Spain, a detailed analysis of the obstacles at legislative, school and teacher levels was developed. Significant weaknesses were found at each of these levels. The main obstacles were the fact that sex education is a cross-curricular subject and contains content that should be incorporated throughout the curriculum rather than in one specific course; lack of monitoring of the practice of sex education; lack of interest in the topic in many schools; and finally lack of appropriate teacher training. A variety of different actions at legislative, school and teacher levels are proposed to overcome those difficulties.