LGBT studies for kindergartners included in Wales' revamped curriculum

Educators in Wales will soon be teaching children as young as 5 years old from an updated curriculum featuring LGBT issues.

Long-awaited changes to the education system in Wales were announced this week with an emphasis on imparting “a much broader understanding of sexuality” upon children ages 5 to 16. It was prohibited for decades to promote such issues in sex education (SRE) classes.

“The world has moved on and our curriculum must move with it,” education secretary Kirsty Williams said, the U.K. Guardian reported on May 21. “Sex should never be taught in isolation for the simple reason that it is about so much more than just sex; it’s also about relationships, rights and respect and that must go hand in hand with a much broader understanding of sexuality. Anything less does a disservice to our learners and teachers.”

Members of an education panel noted that LGBT lessons would not be relegated solely to biology classes.

“[These changes] will broaden it out so you can cover the issues in humanities and expressive arts as well as science for example,” the panel’s chairwoman, Emma Renold, a professor of childhood studies at Cardiff University, said. “We identified what constitutes high-quality SRE provision and provided the Welsh government a blueprint because we were calling for a major overhaul.”

Specifics will be released in April 2019 with a complete rollout by 2022, the newspaper reported.