Frequently but naturally: William Michael Duane, Kenneth Charles Barnes and teachers as innovators in sex(uality) education in English adolescent schooling: c. 1945–1965

Abstract

This piece considers a pivotal period in British social, political, cultural and educational history, the decades from 1945 to 1965. It reviews key policy documents (issued by the Board of Education in 1943 and 1944 and the Department of Education and Science in 1968) which can be said to ‘frame’ the period and proceeds to examine the practices advocated and employed by two progressive teachers, Michael Duane and Kenneth Barnes. It implicates both Duane and Barnes in the development of sex(uality) education in the period but locates their motives in modernist and conformist, not radical, psychological and political/moral discourses.

(Teaching about the) physiology of sex … (should occur) frequent(ly), but … naturally.

(Board of Education, 1943, p. 3)