Sexual Education in Schools in Portugal: Evaluation of a 3 Years Period

Abstract

Sexual education is crucial for reducing sexual risk behaviors (or at least not to enable their increase). The goal of this study was to evaluate the implementation of sexual education in schools. For the quantitative study, all schools (clustered in Schools Organic Units—SOUs) in mainland Portugal were invited to participate. Study 1—A total of 428 school principals, 424 coordinating teachers of health education, belonging to 428 Organic Units (OU), which correspond to 53% of the Portuguese public SOU, corresponding to 617,701 students and 60,595 teachers participated in the quantitative study. Study 2—For the qualitative study, interviews were conducted.