A teacher survey in Flanders: laying the groundwork for sexual education campaigns

To answer these questions, Sensoa conducted ‘de grote lerarenbevraging’ (The Great Teach­er Survey; Magits, 2023), a research project in 2 phases:

(1) An online survey of teachers to obtain an overall picture (started in October 2022).

(2) Focus groups with teachers to explore the survey results in depth (January 2023).

The study focused on four educational levels: spe­cial primary education (SPE), special secondary education (SSE), ordinary primary education (OPE) and ordinary secondary education (OSE), the latter including part­time vocational secondary educa­tion. Special education focuses on pupils who have difficulties learning in ordinary education, or who have a (physical, cognitive, temporary or perman­ent) disability that requires an adapted learning environment. Special education uses individualized programmes, adapted to the needs and learning tempo of each pupil.

767 teachers started the survey, 583 completed the first question and 432 completed the survey in full. The sample is not representative of the Flemish  teacher population. Moreover, the teachers who participated in the survey are probably more en­gaged in the topic than the broader teacher popula­tion due to the self­selection bias. Nevertheless, the study has revealed some clear trends, from which we can draw conclusions that will help us provide teachers with even better support.

Setting up the survey

The questions for the online survey were selected based on Sensoa’s most pressing information re­quirements. SurveyMonkey was chosen as the sur­vey programme. We tested the survey on 31 teach­ers from different educational levels. The intention of this test was to ensure that the phrasing and re­sponse options were relevant to all 4 educational levels. We subsequently decided to keep the phras­ing of the questions exactly the same for all four lev­els. Importantly, we tried not to deter teachers with little or no experience of delivering relational and sexual education (RSE) from taking part in the survey.

The survey was disseminated through a magazine for teachers, support organizations for teachers, Sensoa’s newsletter, Facebook groups for teachers and advertisements on Facebook. We used the re­sults of the pretest to help us with the content of the advertisements. In primary education the most fre­quently taught subjects were ‘feelings’ and ‘bound­aries and resilience’, so we created advertisements that mentioned those subjects rather than men­tioning ‘relational and sexual education’. The latter might have deterred teachers who did not consider their lessons to be sexual education. This approach might have had an effect on the self­selection bias or even a priming effect once the respondents had started the survey.

For the secondary education levels we used the bar­riers to teaching RSE that had been mentioned most in the secondary education pretest as key words so as to increase the chance of recruiting teachers with little or no experience of teaching RSE. We chose three barriers for the advertisements: ‘no time’, ‘pu­pils aren’t ready’ and ‘can’t find lesson materials’.

Analysis

The data was filtered according to the four levels of education: special primary education (SPE), special secondary education (SSE), ordinary primary educa­tion (OPE) and ordinary secondary education (OSE).

Respondents who did not complete the survey were still included in the analysis because we were also curious about the opinions of teachers who have little experience of RSE or did not have time to an­swer all the questions. Before we started analysing the data, the respondents' personal data were sep­arated from their answers to ensure their anonymity. Very little demographic data was gathered in order to reduce survey completion time. Our intention was to look primarily at respondents as teachers, in­dependent of their other characteristics. Not every teacher was equally likely to see the recruitment message (selective sampling). Our findings can therefore not be extrapolated to the entire popula­tion of teachers. Most questions involved variables at the ordinal or nominal level. A chi­square test to compare groups was often not possible because the frequencies within some answer categories were too low.

There was no time to carry out an extra recruitment round, which may have led to improved representa­tiveness and more opportunities to perform a chi­square test, particularly in special education. The percentages can be understood more as an indica­tion of the order of magnitude of the results than as exact percentages. The error rates at a 95% confi­dence level at the beginning of the survey (n=583; SPE 14.7%, SSE 10.9%, OPE 7.4%, OSE 5.8%) in­crease towards the end of the survey (n=432; SPE 17.6%, SSE 11.9%, OPE 8.8%, OSE 6.7%).

Nevertheless, the results do provide an initial indi­cation of possible differences between educational levels, for example. These differences were explored further in the focus groups during the later stages of the study. Thanks to the Arteveldehogeschool, we were also able to submit some of the questions from our survey to Teacher Tapp (Education Intelli­gence Limited, 2017), an app that polls education professionals' opinions on various topics on a daily basis. This confirmed that our sample contained a relatively high percentage of teachers who already had some experience of RSE.

Majority of teachers feel capable and motivated

The survey shows that a large majority (81%) of the surveyed teachers feel able to discuss relationships and sexuality with their students. Respondents feel it is important to discuss the topic: they feel that young people are entitled to good information. They want to protect pupils from risks and ensure that they can enjoy relationships and their sexual­ity. Teachers also find these fun lessons to teach. Themes such as 'feelings' and 'boundaries and re­silience' are addressed in lessons relatively often across all four levels of education. About a third of the teachers indicated that they did not experience any barriers to teaching RSE, although this group seems smaller in special primary education (SPE).

Finding appropriate teaching materials is the most important barrier

Some barriers remain in the way of teaching rela­tional and sexual education (RSE). The most import­ant is the need for appropriate teaching materials (Table 1). Among respondents from SPE and OPE, the idea that ‘pupils do not need it (yet)’ is a notice­able barrier. At all four levels of education, the ‘fear of the reaction of (some) parents’ was a frequently mentioned barrier. In OSE, lack of time is most often cited as a barrier, while in SPE, SSE and OPE about 1 in 10 teachers also mention lack of time as being one of their top three most important barriers. In OSE respondents were particularly wary of meeting with negative reactions from pupils and being asked questions about their own sexual experiences. Lack of support from colleagues or management, or con­cern about their reactions seem to be less important barriers to respondents.

In OSE (55%) and OPE (42%) teachers seem to find it easier to teach a lesson on a new relational or sex­ual topic than in SPE (26%) or SSE (31%).

What do teachers think could help?

There is broad agreement among teachers on what might help them teach (more) RSE. Teaching ma­terials tailored to students would help most at all 4 educational levels. Teachers would also like to be provided with an overview of lesson content appro­priate for each (developmental) age (Table 2). Fur­thermore, they would like to be given teaching tips on how to tailor RSE to their target group or pupils from diverse backgrounds, and on other specific hemes (e.g. gender and sexual diversity). Training, including online, would also be a help.

Need for better organisation and clearer school policies

Half of the surveyed teachers (50%) have a clear un­derstanding of how RSE is organised at their school. Teachers in SSE (66%) and OPE (62%) seem to have a better understanding than teachers in SPE (43%) and OSE (44%). School policy on sexual health is not always clear to teachers: between 28% and 31% do not have a clear understanding of their school’s current policies. Teachers give the quality of RSE at their school an average rating of 6.4 out of 10.

Just over half (55%) of respondents discuss RSE at school with colleagues. In SPE (77%) and SSE (70%) this seems to happen more often than in OPE and OSE (50% each). Agreements on the division of les­son content are certainly not common in all schools. Only 36% indicate that their school has such agree­ments, compared with 40% who indicate that their school has no such agreements. The surveyed teach­ers in special education seem slightly more likely to work in schools where there are such agreements.

Learning objectives and evaluation

About half of the surveyed teachers (55%) say they write down the learning objectives for each RSE les­son. Formulating learning objectives is clearly more common in special education. This is probably be­cause they are used to adapting their lessons to the socio­emotional development of their class group, or even of individual pupils. 31% of all respondents indicated that their school has a plan to achieve the educational goals set out by the government.

The majority (72%) of teachers evaluate the know­ledge acquired by pupils during or after their les­sons on relationships and sexuality. Only 24% indi­cate that their school has an agreement on how to evaluate the goals set out by the government.

It could be that teachers use short on­the­spot tech­niques to evaluate the knowledge of their students, without having written down learning objectives be­forehand.

There is still a lack of policies and visions with respect to sexual (transgressive) behaviour

As far as policies are concerned, progress still needs to be made with respect to sexual health. A minority of schools (ranging from 23% to 34%) have a policy with respect to sexual (transgressive) behaviour, a vi­sion with respect to sexual health, a plan to promote sexual health, or guidelines about how to respond in incidents of sexually transgressive behaviour. Only a few of the teachers who have such a policy at their schools say they also use these interventions regularly (ranging from 14% to 20%).

A large proportion of respondents say that their schools do not have any such policies (ranging from 35% to 49%), some of whom say they would like to implement these policies in the future (ranging from 11% to 15%). In general, schools in special education seem to have policies in place more often than schools in ordinary education. Especially in OPE, few policies are in place.

Few teachers are prepared during their teacher training

Only 7% of the surveyed teachers indicated that they were properly or excellently prepared to teach RSE during their pre­service teacher training. Well­prepared teachers find it easier to teach RSE and are more likely to work in schools where there are stronger policies with respect to sexual health. We cross­checked this question with Teacher Tapp and noticed that this lack of preparation is also pres­ent among teachers who have recently graduated.

Teachers who have not (yet) planned a lesson this school year

Teachers who have already taught or scheduled a lesson on RSE this school year have similar motiv­ations for teaching RSE to teachers who have not (yet) scheduled a lesson. The motivation for both groups are grounded in principles: the rights of and benefits to students are their major motivation.

Respondents who had not (yet) scheduled a lesson seem slightly more likely to say that they themselves had not been given enough information in the past and wanted to ensure that this did not happen to their pupils. These respondents expect the reactions of '(some) parents' or '(some) pupils' to be more negative and feel less comfortable talking about sexual health with their pupils. They are equally like­ly to say that they do not have enough time to take on this task.

Of the surveyed teachers who had not (yet) planned or taught a lesson, a higher proportion (38%) indi­cated that they would find it rather or very difficult to teach a lesson on a new relational or sexual topic than among the group that had already taught or scheduled such a lesson (20%). Nevertheless, 40% of them indicated that they would find it relative­ly or very easy. Among teachers who had already planned or taught a lesson this year this percentage was 46%.

These results, and the input we received from the fo­cus groups, gave direction and a clear focus to our work with schools. It helped us determine the top­ics for our Spring Fever Week, an annual campaign aimed at teachers. Prior to the survey we typically focused on a different topic every year (e.g. sexting, contraception, boundaries) and concentrated main­ly on ordinary secondary education. We decided to shift our focus from yearly themes to addressing specific barriers to teaching RSE, since many of the barriers are present at all four education levels. In 2024 we focused on school­parent communication.  In 2025 we intend to focus on teaching groups with a mix of cultural/religious backgrounds, sexual orien tations and gender identities. We had already addressed most of the barriers to teaching RSE  experienced by teachers in our existing support  resources prior to the survey. We have now expand­ed the support we offer on school­parent communi­cation and present the support we already offer more often throughout the year.

We identified the most common communication channels at all four education levels to determine how best we should communicate with teachers. Some of the barriers to teaching RSE were more rele vant at some education levels (e.g. ‘lack of knowledge on sexual development’ in SPE) and we identified specific communication channels that are used more frequently at those education levels, adding a targeted approach to our more general approach.

Although we had already started planning an online course for teachers on RSE, the results indicating in­adequacies in RSE in pre­service training caused us to direct our focus more towards pre­service teach­ers in the development of our course.