Guidance for schools

Children and young people are growing up in an increasingly complex world and may be living their lives seamlessly on and offline. This presents many positive and exciting opportunities, but also challenges and risks. In this environment, children and young people need to know how to be safe and healthy. They need to develop the skills to enable them to make healthy, safer choices online and offline. Also, they need to be supported in developing attitudes to towards themselves and others which enable them to make positive choices from a basis of knowledge and self-awareness. The challenges which many children and young people face, especially relating to mental health, friendship skills and physical wellbeing are immense but through high quality Relationships Education, schools can support their pupils to navigate some of these challenges positively.

High quality RSE helps create safe school communities in which pupils can grow, learn, and develop positive, healthy behaviour for life.  Children and young people want to be prepared for the physical and emotional changes they undergo at puberty, and young people want and need to learn about safe, healthy relationships. Older pupils frequently say that sex and relationships education was ‘too little, too late and too biological’. Ofsted reinforced this in their 2013 Not Yet Good Enough report. It is also essential in meeting schools’ safeguarding obligations – again, Ofsted states that schools must have a preventative programme helping pupils to learn about safety and risks in relationships and RSE can help you to achieve this.