Latest teenage pregnancy figures
They’re continuing to fall, despite what the newspapers would have us believe.
Between 2003 and 2004, the under 18 conception rate fell by 1.4%. The total fall in teenage pregnancies between 1998 and 2004 is now 11.1%, and the total fall in conceptions for under 16s since 1998 is 15.2%.
Unlike ministers, I don’t believe that becoming a teenage mum makes you a failure, but reducing unwanted teenage conceptions is a really good thing, and I’m pleased that the strategy of increasing sex and relationships education, access to contraceptive services and advertising about safer sex are having an effect.
Update: The Telegraph misses the point entirely, hanging its entire doom and gloom piece on seven - SEVEN - more pregnancies amongst under 14s in 2004 than 2003.
Have you seen Catherine Lafferty’s piece in the latest Tribune on sex education and teenage pregnancy? She’s claiming that “According to the last available figures, released in May, the number of pregnant under-16s increased by 2.5% to 8,076 in 2003. The rest of the article seems to attack the ‘domination’ by the ‘birth control lobby’(aka the ‘contraceptives-for-children’ crowd) of sex education. She also wants the Teenage Pregnancy Unit scrapped with immediate effect. Perhaps someone should be ringing up the new Trib editor demanding a right-to-reply?
Oh, and the weekly poll on http://www.tribuneweb.co.uk is “Should primary school children be given sex education?”
Hello Paul,
Tribune is almost completely unavailable in Oxford - do you have the article electronically? I’m up for writing a response if it’s that bad…
It’s right that under-18 conception rates have fallen in five of the last six years but the figures must be seen in the context of the Government’s target to reduce them by 50% between 1998 and 2010, which now seems insanely ambitious and its “interim” target of a 15% fall between 1998 and 2004, which has been missed by some distance.
I don’t have the figures to hand, but I believe that the cumulative fall between 1998-2001 was greater than that betweeb 2001-04 which might suggest that the Government’s teenage pegnancy strategy isn’t having that much effect
One of the reasons for focussing on teenage pregnancy in the first place was the discovery that UK rates were twice those of France, three times those of Germany and six times thoose of the Netherlands.
Does anyone know of any post-1998 figures for these countries, are rates converging or are theirs falling more quickly than ours?
It’s right that under-18 conception rates have fallen in five of the last six years but the figures must be seen in the context of the Government’s target to reduce them by 50% between 1998 and 2010, which now seems insanely ambitious and its “interim” target of a 15% fall between 1998 and 2004, which has been missed by some distance.
I agree - the 2010 teenage pregnancy target was crazily ambitious, and the one to get 60% of teenage mums into education, employment or training by 2010 is even more so. I don’t think that it helps with planning to get the figures two years in arrears either. But there is an established downward trend, even with the imperfections of the current TPS, and I get infuriated when people suggest that we stop it now: after all, it’s only really been in operation for six years, which isn’t long when you’re talking about changing the behaviour of young people. There are still pilot programmes to report, such as the young people’s development programme, which took young women at risk of teenage pregnancy and worked intensively with them to raise their aspirations and self-esteem. And it’s not like we’ve actually tried the “let’s make sure all our kids have adequate high-quality sex and relationships education” route, is it, given that we have no way of knowing how many young people actually get decent SRE as it’s not in the national curriculum!
Of course we have a way of knowing how many young people get “decent SRE” - OfSTED inspectors could review those lessons when they do periodic school inspections. The national curriculum is an attempt to ensure that standards are similar from school to school and that pupils can transfer from school A to school B in a sensible fashion. You don’t need a national curriculum to make an assessment of the quality of maths teaching, and you don’t need one to make an assessment of the quality of SRE teaching. If you decide that what exists now is not approporiate, a national curriculum for SRE may well be part of the solution.
Hi Sam - don’t you mean Of course we COULD have a way of knowing how many young people get “decent SRE” - OfSTED inspectors COULD review those lessons when they do periodic school inspections. - the point being that they don’t?
There have been some recent reviews of SRE and broader PSHE provision by Ofsted, recommending best practice, but I for one am not at all convinced that it’s happening everywhere consistently, and reckon that making it a requirement, with a set syllabus, might mean that our young people get information that they need while they’re growing up.
Antonia:
Yes, that’s what I mean - I meant that we have the ability to make an assessment of the quality and scope of SRE now, with a little extra effort from OfSTED. I thought one “could” was sufficient, but I’m not going to argue if you want to put another one in.
If you decide that SRE is something that schools “should” teach, rather than leaving it to parents (an opinion that I have a lot of sympathy for - we don’t let parents decide whether we teach their children maths or not, and if they’d rather not have the state-provided SRE, they always have the option of not enrolling their children in the state school system) then there’s a reasonable argument to place it on the national curriculum.
None of that is required to make an assessment of where we are at the moment though - to do that, all you actually need to do is look. (I’m sure you don’t believe that the mere act of placing SRE on the national curriculum is sufficient to ensure that “young people get decent SRE”.)
Antonia
“I don’t think that it helps with planning to get the figures two years in arrears either.”
I don’t think this can be helped. The conception figures come from ONS data on births and abortions. So a conception in December 2004 might not result in a birth until September 2005 and be registered even later. So publishing the 2004 figures in February 2006 isn’t that tardy.
hi think that th eteabage pregnancy rates are slowly falling but it is too slow :):):(