NO PARENT wishes to hear their young teenagers have been having sex before they are legally, and indeed emotionally, mature enough.

And not many parents would be pleased to hear that sexual health nurses working at their child’s school had dispensed the morning-after pill without their knowledge.

So the report we carry today about nearly 200 morning-after pills being handed out in North Yorkshire schools over the past two years will disconcert many parents. Shockingly, some of the recipients were aged only 13 and 14.

The numbers will alarm those who believe young teens are just too immature to be having sex. Furthermore, some will argue that it is not the place of a school to be “encouraging” under-age sex by dispensing the morning-after pill as a sort of sexual get-out-of-jail-free card. It is certainly possible to see how such a view might be held.

Easy, too, to see that those who complain about soap operas, such as the especially teen-friendly Hollyoaks, may have a point. Such television programmes could well be accused of sexualising teens at too young an age.

Doesn’t television have a responsibility to act in a more moral manner? Well, yes it perhaps does – but many such soaps are acutely aware of the power they possess, and often use their storylines about teenage sexuality in a cautionary sense.

In an ideal world, teenagers would not think of having sex until they were of a legal age – and, preferably, only then within a loving relationship. But the world does not always work like that, and it is right that teenagers should be able to seek sound advice from sexual health professionals at school.

Teen pregnancy rates have been unusually high in North Yorkshire, so measures had to be taken. And as the deputy head of Huntington School points out, since its sexual clinic opened there have been no teenage pregnancies.

So there is good sense at work behind the alarming figures, and it is better to be realistic than to continue with rising teenage pregnancies.