Free Schools and Academies are to be forced to sign up to strict new rules by Education guru Michael Gove as to what can be taught about relationships and sex.

Head teachers will be told that children must be ”protected from inappropriate teaching materials and learn the nature of marriage and its importance for family life and for bringing up children”.

Including the teaching of marriage in funding agreements imposes a legal requirement on Head Teachers to comply. English, maths, science and RE are the only other curriculum subjects guaranteed in the model document.

This stone-age attitude is a return to the ‘back to basics’ values which sunk the Tories under John Major. It is an outright attack on single parents, homosexual partners and unmarried couples, and has no place within our education.

Single-parent families have always been a favourite scapegoat for the Tories. This policy is saying the way they live isn’t compliant with a stable relationship and therefore you can’t be happy or bringing up your children correctly.

Although it won’t explicitly say ‘if your husband beats you, you should still remain married,’ if you’re teaching children that the only means for a stable relationship is to be married and this creates happiness, social cohesion, to create a family and for good health then this is what they’ll remember if they become a victim of domestic violence, that the right thing to do is remain married.

These new rules won’t include lessons on domestic violence, the retreats and services there are for women and what to do if they’re in such a situation. If you teach children marriage is brilliant they will take from it, just that.

The new outrageous rules on marriage are set out in clause 28 of the funding agreement. It is surely no coincidence that it echos Thatcher’s infamous clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Bill which banned schools from ‘promoting’ and teaching about homosexuality.

The new rules will be doing the same as well as alienating children who may have been brought up by single parents and will then be told that the only way forward in life is by getting married.

The idea behind the Tories’ fetishisation of the nuclear family is that it puts the cost of raising children onto the family and not onto the state.

It also ties women into traditional roles, who when she gets home from work takes on her second job of cleaning the house, cooking the meals and looking after the children. It makes the man who is powerless within his job, a king within his own home, he has no real power but his word is law within his own home.

This is what lies behind the logic of tax breaks for married couples, and the stigmatisation of single parents and gay and lesbian couples.

The nuclear family is integral to the capitalist system because it reinforces the double burden of women, elevates men’s power over women and children, and puts the responsibility and cost of raising the next generation onto women, rather than society as a whole.

Yet at the same time capitalism also places intolerable pressure on the nuclear family. As men’s wages are cut, women are forced into part-time work to make ends meet. So women entering the workplace challenges the male’s traditional role as breadwinner, yet the fact that women disproportionately bear the brunt of job losses puts a massive financial strain on the family. Combined, these factors lead to divorce, domestic violence and the growth of cohabitation.

It will also allow religious schools to promote an incredibly narrow definition of what constitutes an acceptable relationship. When forced marriages are on the rise within some communities, and the Church of England refuses to perform same-sex marriages, we need to be defending people’s right to decide the form of their relationships, not dictating it.

The funding agreement clause also bans the use of “inappropriate materials” in schools.

It is likely to be seized on by campaigners who last week attacked the use of “explicit” sex education material in primary schools and called for a ban on Channel 4′s “Living and Growing” DVD used in thousands of primary schools which shows cartoon characters having sex in a variety of different positions.

It is only theUnited Kingdomthat there is a complex about sex and at what age to teach it. In Holland nearly all primary and secondary schools provide sex education which focuses on biological aspects of reproduction as well as on values, attitudes, communication and negotiation skills. With one of the lowest teenage pregnancy in the world, Holland is held up as an example of why sex education works.

Whenever this topic is brought up, people say ‘I don’t want my four year old knowing about sex’ or ‘why wreck their innocent minds.’ No-one is forcing toddlers to simulate sex, but engaging them in conversations about different relationships and how we should behave in them is necessary to combat the prejudices which millions of people have to confront every day about their personal choices.

What we need is coherent, sensible sex education lessons in schools, teaching that all types of relationship are equally valid.

The whole situation is yet another reason to condemn the Tories efforts to take education out of accountable hands and put it under the control of any religious nutjob who can afford a depost.

Teaching trade unions, women’s organisations and student groups should unite in the condemnation of this latest move, and plan the necessary action to ensure it is not carried out.

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