Something bad happened last week. A report indicated that Britain, for the second decade in a row, has scored the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe. There was widespread quacking about it, from breakfast TV to The Times. It was concluded that “something” had to “be done”. In recent years, Britain has perfected a “moral fire drill” in the event of something bad happening. After a mere two days of headlines on the subject, it is invariably concluded that the most effective way to tackle the issue is to have a quick emergency meeting with the Education Secretary, then introduce nationwide lessons on the subject in schools.

At this point, the national curriculum gets a new bit tacked on - a “don't eat KFC for breakfast” module, a “don't stab people in the face” essay - and Britain's obesity/knife-crime epidemic is deemed case closed. This template has been so closely followed that, when the UK crashed out of the Eurovision Song Contest last month, I fully expected government reassurances that, as of 2010, the national syllabus would include lessons on novelty pop and how to insert thinly veiled political rhetoric about the sovereignty of Cyprus into a song called Hoki Poki. The British educational system is now viewed as a pivotal, transformative combination of personal trainer, boot-camp commander and the Doctor in Doctor Who. There is no social ill that schools cannot sort out between 9am and 3.30pm. If we ever do get invaded by the Shadow Proclamation, it will be the nursery teachers and school counsellors who are sent to sort it out.

So it can have been no surprise that the immediate conclusion to the “teen pregnancy crisis” was “mandatory sex education in schools”. If those teenage kids are going to shag around, the sentiment seems to be, they can get an A level out of it first; that way, everyone's arse is covered - maybe literally, depending on sexual orientation and/or method of prophylactic.

Personally, this is not how I will be rolling, vis à vis my children. While I may have left several things to the British educational system - any times table above 3; how to catch a beanbag; why you should bother catching a beanbag in the first place - when it comes to sex education I'd rather I blocked my kids through the key curriculum myself. This is for a variety of reasons. First, sex is, essentially, quite funny, and if you can't get a few laughs out of explaining it to a five-year-old, you're missing out on one of the big perks of parenthood. Especially if you razz it up a bit. Who knows at what point my seven-year-old will realise that women's ovaries do not, in fact, make a “hatching” sound when they ovulate. Or that the umbilical cord isn't a kind of “skin seatbelt” to stop the baby “falling out”. The terminology of the Sex Talk is, obviously, a more vexed issue. I can't say the word “penis”, ever. I find it both hilarious and awful and would prefer not to have it in my life. The medically correct terminology for female genitalia fills me with a similar horror. “Vagina” is the name of a disapproving Georgian aunt. I certainly don't have one, and I'm sure my daughters don't, either. I have history with the word “vagina” anyway. At the age of 6, I misheard it as “China”, then passed on this error to my younger brothers and sisters. They all adopted the word. You can imagine our combination of disbelief and hysteria when T'Pau's hit single China In Your Hand spent five weeks at No 1.

However, the main reason I want to 101 my kids on the Facts of Life is that I believe pretty much the entire world has got it wrong about children, teenagers and sex, and I want to be the one to put them all straight. I would like to be the world's dirty auntie - the one who lives in a caravan at the bottom of their parents' garden, smoking roll-ups and starting the conversation with: “Oh dearie, the men I've known ...” By and large, sex education seems to be seen as a set of facts that we can either give to, or withhold from, young people. It's then presumed that their subsequent sexual activity will be dictated primarily by the presence of, or lack of, those facts at their disposal. But sex - or sexual desire, which is what this is all about ultimately - is not, of course, just about facts, which we may or may not know. It is an emotion, an emotion that we all have. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful, universal and irresistible forces on Earth - up there with running away from bad things, and eating cheese. It has to be. If it wasn't, the world would be empty.

When the hormones finally kick in, zygotes and oestrogen will not be uppermost in the teenagers' mind. Instead, they will be wondering why none of their sex education involved sentences such as “Your body starts burning a hole in space and time”; “Her hair-smell is like opium”; or “If I don't kiss him, I'm going to punch someone in the face.” Really, you need poets, priestesses and troubadours to instruct on matters of desire, not reluctant PE teachers. Similarly, reluctant PE teachers won't really be able to deliver on the sheer amusingness of sex. Pretty much every aspect of sex is random, bewildering and ROFL. We need to tell kids that, too. I can't wait to tell my children: “You know what, kids? Once, for six inexplicable months, Mummy fancied Ian Beale.” It will illuminate so much.

The problem with formal sex education, delivered by the educational system, is that it must be sober, sensible and moral, lest it get accused by the Daily Mail of delivering pornography to minors. It is obliged to say such things as, “Sex is something that happens in a loving relationship”, when, of course, the simple fact is that in your life - and particularly in your younger life - a great deal of sex will be something that happens in a hedge.

I'm going to tell my kids about the hedge. School will not.

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