Boys of 13 are to be issued with cards allowing them to pick up free condoms at football grounds and scout huts without the embarrassment of asking.
Even younger boys could be given the cards at councils’ discretion.
The scheme has already been adopted in some places but will soon go nationwide.
As part of the scheme, commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, boys will have to attend a lesson on safe sex before receiving the card.
If they attend extra classes they will receive stamps on the card, which organisers hope will become a status symbol.
Simon Blake, Chief Executive of Brook, the sexual health advisory service which drew up the plans, said it would make condom use “an everyday reality”.
However, Josephine Quintavalle of campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: “We are just facilitating and encouraging sexuality without any deeper understanding of the emotional side of relationships.
“We used to talk about recreational sex among 18-year-olds – now it is 13-year-olds.”
Last year a columnist at The Times newspaper reacted to news that Scout leaders had been instructed to hand out condoms to boys in their troops.
Ross Clark asked: “Can there be a youth left in Britain who doesn’t know how to roll on a condom, or that having sex without contraception is liable to result in babies?”
He added: “What, of course, has never occurred to the sex education lobby is that children might be being fed too much information on sex – to the point at which material designed to dissuade them from engaging in early sexual activity has the opposite effect.”