The leader of the Scottish Family Party has been thrust back into the national spotlight after a video of him challenging Scottish education officials over explicit sex education materials — including school lessons on masturbation, anal sex and oral sex — went viral days before Thursday’s Scottish Parliament election.
Richard Lucas confronted then-Education Secretary John Swinney at a National Parent Forum event in 2019, questioning him directly about the content of Scotland’s Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood programme, known as RSHP, which is delivered in Scottish schools. The footage, available on the Scottish Family Party’s YouTube channel, has been shared widely on social media in the days leading up to the 7 May vote, reaching audiences who had never seen it when it was first recorded.
Lucas’s confrontation focused on materials within the RSHP programme’s senior phase curriculum — typically aimed at pupils aged 15 to 18 — which includes specific lessons titled “Sex: Masturbation, Oral and Anal Sex.” The resources include slides, activity plans and animations designed to cover what the programme describes as the facts, myths, risks and consent considerations around those practices. One resource that Lucas highlighted uses a banana and Nutella analogy to explain anal sex — a detail that has attracted widespread criticism and which polls commissioned by the Scottish Family Party suggest has very low support among the general public.
Leader of Scottish Family Party
Lucas has argued consistently that these materials go far beyond what is appropriate for school settings and amount to the normalisation of explicit sexual practices among young people. He has described specific resources as vulgar and has used the word “grooming” to characterise elements of what is being presented to children in state schools. His challenge to Swinney at the 2019 event was a direct attempt to force an elected official to publicly defend content that Lucas believes most Scottish parents would find deeply objectionable.
The RSHP programme is Scotland’s national sex and relationships education resource, developed with the support of the Scottish Government and Education Scotland and delivered across all age groups from nursery through to senior phase. Alongside the more explicit senior content, it covers consent, contraception, puberty, gender, LGB equality and pornography. Parental withdrawal rights exist for non-statutory elements of the programme, though Lucas and his party have consistently argued that implementation is inconsistent and that many parents remain unaware of what their children are being taught.
The Scottish Family Party has long argued that RSHP represents a fundamental overreach by the state into territory that should belong to parents, and that the programme reflects an ideological agenda rather than a genuine public health response. Supporters of RSHP counter that the materials are evidence-based and designed to address real risks faced by young people who encounter explicit sexual content online long before they receive any formal education on the subject.
The resurfacing of the footage ahead of Thursday’s election has placed Lucas and the issue of school sex education firmly back at the centre of Scottish political debate, with many parents sharing the clip and expressing shock at the content he describes. Withdrawal rates from RSHP lessons have reportedly risen in recent months, and the statutory guidance underpinning the programme was updated in early 2026.
