Given their number and proximity

Given their number and proximity to students, teachers are best placed to deliver sex, relationships and HIV education.
Pre-service training provides an opportunity to familiarise all teachers with the basic concepts and elements
of a sex, relationships and HIV education curriculum and to ‘mainstream’ its delivery across the curricula. In addition,
targeting trainee teachers (in pre-service teacher training) is likely to be more successful, not only in terms
of scaling-up, but also because young teachers are probably more likely to be open to teaching sex, relationships
and HIV education, with older more experienced teachers being more resistant. The same applies for introducing
some of the participatory teaching methodologies that are expected of many sex education programmes. However,
teachers will not be equally interested or adept at teaching the subject. Their interest and aptitude may only emerge
after some time spent in the classroom, making the provision of in-service training a likely necessity.
Teacher training should be supported by national ministries, local school management and communities.34 Curricula
should include content on sexual and reproductive health and HIV, teaching methodologies and teacher skills, personal
attitudes, and teachers’ own HIV-risk behaviours. Attention should also be paid in such curricula to policies,
administrative practices and cultural norms that can affect teaching. Those involved in teaching sex, relationships
and HIV curricula should include both men and women who are motivated and willing and perceived as trustworthy
by students. Finally, they argue that there should be a policy of zero tolerance of exploitation of students.
Experience in Tanzania35 suggests that problematic teacher–pupil relationships create one of the most signifi cant
barriers to potential programme success. In many settings in sub-Saharan Africa, established teaching culture and
practice are authoritarian and didactic and hardly conducive to the trusting relations and participatory approach
required by many sex and HIV education programmes.