Knowledge and Opinions of Secondary School Teachers on Teaching the Subject of Sex Education.

purposeThe study aims to investigate the knowledge and opinions of secondary school teachers regarding the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents and the teaching of the sex education course.  Methods: The research was carried out with a structured questionnaire. Samples were first pilot tested, and the value of the Cronbach alpha index was calculated, which highlights its reliability since it was equal to 0.72. The statistical analysis was carried out using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 26.0 (Released 2019; IBM Corp., Armonk, New York, United States), where, for the questions with a Likert-type scale, the frequency, percentage, median, and interquartile range were calculated, while, for the categorical variables, the frequency and percentage were calculated. To investigate whether a quantitative variable differed between two levels, a t-test was used, and to investigate correlations between quantitative variables, the value of the Pearson linear correlation coefficient was calculated. The statistical significance level for all tests was 5%.  Results: The study included 192 secondary school teachers with an average age of 48.04 years, and 124 (64.4%) were women. The average time in service was 15.14 years, and 39.6% (n=76) worked in schools in the Attica region. One hundred and sixty (83.2%) need additional training and want both appropriate educational material (93.6%) and training seminars (90.8%). One hundred and sixty-five (85.7%) believe that sex education should be taught by qualified teachers, and 39.3% (n=75) of teachers consider that high school is the most appropriate level of education, while 37.7% (n=72) consider primary school. The majority of the sample believes that sex education should be taught as a subject integrated into the curriculum of other subjects (65.7%), as a chapter of health education (63.5%), or as an independent subject (57.8%). Comparatively, the level of knowledge between teachers in the health sector and those in other specialties, having taken into account the 156 teachers who had answered the specific questions, appears to differ (t(156)=-3.61; p<0.001), with the former having a higher level of knowledge. Finally, the level of knowledge in the psychosexual development of children differs between teachers who have attended a training program related to sex education and those who have not (t(156)=- 2.35; p=0.020), with the former again having a higher level of knowledge.  Conclusion: The study highlights that, while educators recognize the importance of sex education (ideally delivered by qualified staff), there is a significant lack of adequate training and educational resources. The finding that teachers with a health background or previous training demonstrated a statistically higher knowledge level (p<0.001 and p=0.020, respectively) emphasizes the critical need for organized seminars and certified materials to ensure the effective implementation of the curriculum in schools.