This week Ofsted gave a critical report on the state of sex education. No surprise there. I remember our lessons consisting of a teacher, throbbing with embarrassment, leaving us to puzzle over textbook diagrams that appeared to explain the locking system on a patio door. Classrooms are just not the place for this sort of stuff — or to learn any of the important stuff. What is needed is to get out and do more fieldwork.

No — you at the back — not that kind of fieldwork. I’m talking about refashioning school trips to make them fit for the 21st century. On so called “study days”, kids are currently released from a coach fuggy with Monster Munch and hormones to terrorise museums, archaeology sites and Shakespearean-themed “experiences”. Such places can wait until the visitor is so old they won’t even notice they are bored. They are about the past; we need to show children British life as it is now — and what may be their future.

How have I devised my itinerary? By directing the bus driver to go anywhere we shield from prying, younger eyes. We keep these things hidden not out of concern for their innocence, but because most adults are too morally weak to face up to the truth. Will you feel more nervous signing my release form than if your darling was heading off to another brass rubbing? Yes. Will it do more to make them a better human being? Definitely.

1 The Labour Ward

Since we began with the failings of sex education, our first stop is at a busy maternity hospital, to show the consequences of sex. Many grown women, let alone teenagers, have little idea of these: my ignorance at the realities of caring for a newborn was, in retrospect, astounding.

Some enlightened schools give girls little plastic dollies to look after for a weekend to give them an idea of maternal responsibilities. I suggest we start with something a little more real, not to mention raw.

It would not even be necessary to have Year 8 crowded around the expectant mother — although she might find their company in our understaffed wards a comfort. Standing in some kind of roped-off area in the labour ward corridor will suffice, especially if pupils are lucky to be treated to an audio experience similar to mine.

While I was trying to “breathe” out my baby and involuntarily lowing like condemned cattle (of which more later), I was distracted by the sounds from next door. There was such terrified screaming that the woman can only have been slaughtered by a psycho who was coming for me next.

With an expressive “moo” and a knowing look, I communicated to my boyfriend something along the lines of: “Honey, am I, in my big moment, being upstaged?” He reassured me that my noisy neighbour was “only showboating”. But at that point an anaesthetist entered our room with a pained expression (not easy for an anaesthetist), complaining that the midwives had barred him from giving the poor wretch any relief because it was “too late”.

After a few hours of this, the second stop of our tour would be the abortion clinic. Abortion, often cited by authorities like the Daily Mail as the decadent “easy option”, is far, far, from it, as teenagers would know if they were ever told — as they should be — its grisly mechanics.

Then let’s break for a packed lunch in the hospital garden. I guarantee there will be less groping in the back of the bus on the journey home.

2 Factory Farming

I am a nonpractising vegetarian, meaning I had a formative attachment to Morrissey’s Meat is Murder album, but also an overridingly strong attachment to sausages. So I don’t preach from any high ground, only wonder why, when Blue Peter visits a factory, it is always one that assembles bottles and never those vast hangars where animals are caged and fatted for our plate. This, children, is our next destination.

During the foot-and-mouth outbreak I reported on a farm supplying a big supermarket, where, owing to the disease, all 4,000 piglets had to be slaughtered in one day. It was like the snuff version of the cute pig film Babe. The quality of their death was fine, it was the quantity that was eye-opening. The fuss about organics has left the comforting impression that all animals have somehow benefited from Jacuzzi baths and a rub-down from a personal trainer.

In fact the majority of the 8 billion eggs produced in the UK each year are from pitiful hens in cages smaller than an A4 piece of paper. When these are banned in 2012 they may be replaced by “enriched” cages offering just a postcard-size of extra space. British children are now a long way from the bucolic farms of old, when they learnt about the birds and bees from animals frolicking in the fields. But most of British farming is also now a long way from the bucolic farms of old.

I know, I’m like you, I don’t like to think about the meat industry too much either. But I hope that the next generation at least will be a little bit more honest about their food. A trip to the vast “broiler houses” producing 800 million chickens a year will reduce a child’s appetite for chicken nuggets faster than any number of Jamie Oliver shows.

3 Court and prison It’s easy to act the big man out on the streets. But in court, when they hear their sentence, that the prime of their life is to be wasted behind bars, I have seen wannabe gangsters visibly shrink into little boys. Their mothers, sobbing, see only the little boy in their child as they watch him, in handcuffs, go. Why aren’t teenagers taken routinely to the public gallery (or for that matter shown the unglamorous indignity of prison) to understand the consequences of their actions?

4 A Landfill site

Because I am running out of space, I will be brief. If only Britain was so lucky with its rubbish: we are overflowing with the stuff, running out of places to hide it. This trip will teach children — especially teens going through an acquisitive phase — the real meaning of our “trash” culture. Over to you, kids. If you sort this one out, we’ll let you off your messy bedroom.

5 Work

Finally, a plea. Do not, as is customary, send students on work experience. It does not matter which office they go to; they sit there, boggled at the dreariness of adult lives, commutes and joyless 20 days of annual leave. We don’t want to put them off. There is, after all, only so much reality a poor child can bear.

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