Archive note: This post was published in 2013 and linked to a report about sexual-health outreach in Bedfordshire schools. The original news article may no longer be available, and approaches to relationships and sexuality education have changed since then. The post is retained as a record of contemporary advocacy for better HIV and safer-sex education in schools.

The message of safer sex is always an important one and to no group of society more so than to our young people. I was fortunate to go talk to the senior school assembly in Shimna Integrated College, in Newcastle just after World Aids Day last year about living with HIV. But the fifteen short minutes was not enough time to go into the whole safer sex information discussion.

Sometimes it seems that it is very difficult in Northern Ireland to get HIV mentioned in school. This is not the case all round the UK though. In Bedfordshire there is a sexual health clinic that is

getting into the county’s schools to educate kids on how to have safe sex and get tested.