Never mind sex education. Schools should cut to the chase and teach teenagers about changing nappies and burping babies, says a small but vocal teaching union.
Lynn Edwards, the outgoing national chairwoman of the UK's smallest teaching union, the Professional Association of Teachers, is this week using her organisation's annual conference to call for schools to run compulsory parenting classes for 14 to 16-year-olds.
Ms Edwards, who teaches the very traditional subject of geography at Saltley secondary in Birmingham, told the BBC: "When I came out of the maternity hospital with a little boy on one arm and a little girl on the other, I had no idea how to put on a nappy."
"I found it unacceptable that no one had shown me."
Mrs Edwards said she was lucky because her mother lived nearby and could teach her all the ins and outs of being a first-time mother. Not all girls are quite so lucky, she said, and with teenage pregnancies rates rising, it made sense to include baby classes at school.
"Few people now are that fortunate - the extended family no longer occupies a village or urban neighbourhood," she said.
She wants teenagers to learn such things as how to change nappies as well as recognise childhood diseases such as measles and meningitis.
Mrs Edwards' idea has the support of the UK Youth Parliament, which went as far as saying this week that leaving it until girls were 16 could be too late because teenagers were increasingly getting regnant in Years 8 or 9.
However, the Family Planning Association were not quite as supportive of the plan. A spokesman for the association, Melissa Dear, says baby classes could be time better spent.
"If you don't have children for another 10 or 15 years, it is a lesson you are likely to forget," Ms Dear said.
Surely a good point, considering the average age of first-time motherhood is now 30?
