Spain’s Future Teachers Get Almost No Sex Education in Their University Training, Massive Study Finds

A sweeping analysis of nearly 1,700 university course documents has revealed that Spain’s teacher training programmes are failing, to a striking degree, to prepare future educators for one of the most consequential parts of their job: delivering affective-sexual education to young children. The study, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, examined the teaching guides for the bachelor’s degrees in Early Childhood Education and Primary Education at Spanish public universities for the 2024/2025 academic year, and found that explicit content on sexuality is largely absent, fragmentary and inconsistently distributed across the curriculum. The finding matters because Spain’s own legislation, Organic Law 10/2022 on the comprehensive guarantee of sexual freedom, obliges the educational system to integrate co-educational content on sexual education, gender equality and affective-sexual education at all levels of schooling, from nursery classrooms to teacher training faculties.

The research team, led by Virginia Villegas-José, Manuel Delgado-García and Antonio Daniel García-Rojas of the University of Huelva, built their analysis on a documentary design supplemented by a quantitative approach. The researchers used stratified sampling in which the various regional and national quality assurance agencies served as strata, selecting one or two institutions per agency from among Spain’s 50 public universities. In total, 1,673 teaching guides, the official planning documents that define each subject’s objectives, contents, competences, activities and assessment methods, were collected and examined. The aim was to determine to what extent the university curricula that train future infant and primary school teachers actually incorporate knowledge about sexuality, and to characterise how such content, when present, is integrated into course planning.

To analyse this vast corpus of documents, the team constructed an ad hoc instrument called the Analysis and Evaluation of Affective-Sexual Education, or AVEAS, comprising 20 variables that capture qualitative information about each guide: the quality agency, university, degree, subject, responsible academic area, course year, the nature of the subject, mentions of related content, specific sections of the guide and key concepts. Two university teaching professionals evaluated the clarity and relevance of each item using a five-point Likert scale, and Aiken’s V statistic confirmed strong internal validity, with coefficient values above .83 and concordance indices above .78. Each guide that mentioned sexuality-related terms was then assessed with a rubric classifying the level of involvement as low, moderate or high, depending on whether sexuality appeared tangentially, in limited detail, or as a key element across several sections of the document.

The search strategy itself combined traditional and emerging methods. Descriptors drawn from earlier research were organised into three levels. The specific level included terms that directly signal sexuality education, such as sex, sexuality, sex education and affective-sexual. The transversal level included concepts that may appear connected but do not guarantee explicit treatment, including affectivity, equality, equity, sexism and feminism. The global level captured broad notions such as health, citizenship, values and developmental psychology. Researchers conducted manual searches using Adobe Acrobat Reader and also employed NotebookLM, an artificial intelligence tool, as an auxiliary retrieval engine to scan the guides automatically with the same descriptors, a procedure designed to ensure comprehensiveness and reduce human error. Only guides containing at least one specific-level term were read in full and scored with the AVEAS instrument.

The results, processed with descriptive, comparative and correlational procedures using SPSS and JASP software, show a consistently low presence of explicit affective-sexual education content. Within the guides that did mention such content, the terms clustered heavily in the subject description, the contents section and the bibliography, appearing in roughly 68 to 76 percent of cases, while mentions in the sections that drive actual classroom practice were far rarer: 47.1 percent in objectives, 25.7 percent in learning outcomes, 18.6 percent in activities, 5.7 percent in methodology and 8.6 percent in assessment. In other words, sexuality appears in the paperwork of the course but rarely in the pedagogy, a pattern the authors interpret as evidence of superficial, non-systematic integration. Most subjects containing these concepts were basic, compulsory core courses concentrated in the first year of study, with the third year standing out as the point of least training across both degrees.

The disciplinary geography of the findings is equally revealing. Developmental and Educational Psychology accounted for 29 percent of the subjects addressing sexuality and contained the most guides judged to be at a high level of integration, followed by Didactics and School Organisation at 27.5 percent and Sociology at 21.7 percent. Areas such as Theory and History of Education, Research and Diagnostic Methods, Didactics of Experimental Sciences and Music contributed only marginal, mostly low-level, treatments. A content analysis based on a word cloud of the most frequent specific-level terms found that gender, sexuality, gender equality, coeducation and affective-sexual diversity dominated the vocabulary, with sexual abuse and child abuse also appearing, indicating that the guides that do address the topic tend to frame it through a socio-educational lens of equality, diversity and violence prevention rather than through the comprehensive, biopsychosocial model recommended by the World Health Organization and UNESCO.

Statistical tests added weight to these patterns. Spearman’s correlation revealed a statistically significant positive association between the level of integration of sexuality content and the number of curricular elements containing it, meaning that the more sections of a guide that address the topic, the deeper the treatment tends to be. A chi-square test showed a significant relationship between the academic year and the level of inclusion, with first-year subjects split between moderate and low levels, second-year subjects skewing toward moderate and high, and fourth-year subjects mostly classified as low. A k-means clustering analysis with three clusters, explaining 61.3 percent of the variance, further distinguished three subject profiles: a first group with high integration across many sections located in intermediate course years, a second group with sporadic, low-level content in the early years, and a third group with very low integration confined to isolated mentions in the final year, a distribution the authors describe as evidence of fragmentation and the absence of a strategic, sequential pedagogical trajectory.

Perhaps the most politically charged finding concerns the role of Spain’s quality assurance agencies, the regional and national bodies that mediate between state regulation and university autonomy by evaluating degree programmes. The frequency of sexuality-related mentions varied enormously by agency: guides under ACCUA registered the most mentions at 540, followed by ACSUG with 470, Madri+D with 438, QACUEE with 428 and AVAP with 425, while UNIBASQ, ANECA and especially AQUIB trailed far behind. When the analysis focused only on specific-level concepts, AVAP led with 19.51 percent, but AQU Catalunya managed only 0.26 percent, and ACPUA, the agency responsible for the University of Zaragoza, recorded not a single guide with explicit affective-sexual education content in either degree. No guides evaluated by AQUIB, AQU Catalunya, QACUEE, ACPUA, UNIBASQ or Madri+D reached the high integration level at all. This heterogeneity, the researchers argue, exposes a lack of common criteria in quality assessment that directly undermines national compliance with the law.

The authors situate their results within a longer institutional history. Unlike countries where sexuality education emerged earlier, Spain’s programmes date largely to the 1980s and were framed as affective-sexual education with a co-educational approach, partly reflecting the historical influence of the Catholic Church on the school system. Scholars have repeatedly called for comprehensive sexuality education to be made compulsory in Spain, and the United Kingdom’s regulation of such content as mandatory curriculum material offers a pointed international contrast. Compared with previous studies from the 2018/2019 academic year, which found universities such as the University of Huelva and the University of La Rioja with no sexuality-related concepts in their guides at all, the new data do show evolution and growing, if uneven, sensitivity. Yet the researchers conclude that the current picture is one of partial, superficial inclusion that fails to guarantee structured training and leaves Spanish universities short of the international standards set out by the WHO and UNESCO for comprehensive sexuality education.

The consequences of this curricular gap are concrete. Future professionals enter classrooms without formal, high-quality preparation to educate infants and primary pupils about healthy sexuality, in direct tension with the LOMLOE education law and its implementing royal decrees for pre-school and primary education, and with the Sustainable Development Goals on quality education, gender equality and reduced inequalities. The study proposes three lines of action: establishing common criteria among quality agencies so that affective-sexual education becomes an assessable requirement within the evaluation of teaching degrees, training university teachers in sexuality to ensure the quality of what is delivered, and reviewing and updating the curricula of Early Childhood and Primary Education degrees to guarantee the explicit inclusion of comprehensive sexuality education. The authors acknowledge that their documentary approach captures official planning rather than lived classroom experience, and they call for future research incorporating the perceptions of students and teachers. For now, the message to policymakers is unambiguous: the law requires sexuality education, the science supports it, and the curriculum, as written, does not yet deliver it.

Subject of Research: Curricular analysis of affective-sexual education content in Spanish university teacher training programmes

Article Title: Affective-sexual education in teacher training: a curricular analysis of the bachelor’s degree in primary and early childhood education in Spain

Article References: Villegas-José, V., Delgado-García, M., & García-Rojas, A. D. (2026). Affective-sexual education in teacher training: a curricular analysis of the bachelor’s degree in primary and early childhood education in Spain. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00053-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00053-4

Keywords: affective-sexual education, comprehensive sexuality education, teacher training, teaching guides, curricular analysis, Early Childhood Education, Primary Education, quality assurance agencies, gender equality, coeducation, Spanish public universities, LOMLOE