Discursive Silences: Critically Analysing the Presence/Absence of Sexual Diversity in the Sex and Relationships Education Guidance for England and Wales

Abstract

The content, role and place of sex and relationships education (SRE) are under scrutiny in England and Wales. SRE has been described by Ofsted (2012) as ‘weak’. Accounts of the current crisis in SRE provision ourish, with particular attention being paid to the focus on biological aspects of puberty, reproduction and sexually transmitted infections. Conversely, discursive silences persist around issues such as gender and sexual diversity and plurality (Sex Education Forum, 2013). The SRE guidance for England and Wales was updated in January 2014, but the new guidance does not profoundly address these issues. Fundamental issues around gender, sexuality and diversity remain invisible or only tokenistically addressed (sometimes inaccurately). This is despite robust evidence that young people’s expectations and experiences of intimate relationships are mediated by their gender and sexual identities (Holland et al., 1998). In light of recent work which advocates the use of applied linguistics within work on sexuality and education (Nelson, 2012), we use the systematic linguistic analytical framework of critical corpus analysis (Baker et al., 2013) to investigate these issues and to examine the linguistic practices which function to construct ideologies and discursive silences around gender and sexuality. While previous thematic analyses of SRE guidance (e.g. Alldred and David, 2007) have been helpful for revealing overarching discourses and prevalent themes, the advantage of using linguistic analysis is that it reveals systematic patterns (including absences) in language use which cannot always be identified through thematic analysis alone.