Consent Training Course

Together we will critique, learn, and experience consent with fun interactive activities. Lots of practical tools and ideas to take away.

Consent is absolutely vital and, thankfully, it’s now high on the agenda. However, we need to go much further than just teaching “No means no” and “Yes means yes”. We also need to go much further than ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘affirmative’ consent and that bloody awful Tea and Consent video.

Consent discourse makes consent harder to actually do. Narrow, legalistic, discourses about consent risk reinforcing some unhelpful norms about gender, sexuality, and sexual scripts. Such discourse is also susceptible to ignoring power relations, or fixing them in problematic ways. 

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

People often know the definition of consent, but too often they have very little idea about what consent looks, feels and sounds like. Young people especially have usually not had a great deal of experience of this and they don’t have many opportunities to learn. Some of this is often true for the adults that I work with when I deliver this course. Sadly many people who are being asked to deliver or receive consent education are very aware of what the absence of consent feels like.

This course brings together the work I’ve been doing over the last 20 or so years in classrooms, training rooms and in young people’s clinics. As well as the latest in academic work and theory on sex and consent. Together we will

  • Unpack consent discourse and common sense  ‘should stories’ about choices, power, and sex
  • Understand agency and the possibilities and limitations of self knowledge
  • How boundaries and pleasure might be communicated and co-created
  • Explore the different ways that we communicate in our everyday lives (verbally, non-verbally, affectively)
  • How we might bring in the body to help tune into needs, wants and desires
  • Learn how to bring power relations into consent and how consent practices can be transformative, disruptive, and radical.

If all of this sounds really serious, it is, but the course is actually fun. There’s a lot of interaction (even on zoom) and the learning is very much co-created. We will spend a lot of time reflecting on everyday examples of consent that don’t relate to sex (as well as how we might effectively and appropriately teach about sexual consent). Indeed the course aims to both do and model some of the caring practices of consent that we are learning about. 

It will suit anyone working with young people and adults: teachers, youth workers, health advisers, outreach workers, support workers, organisers. This is sex and relationships education but it would also be useful for any organisation who wants to bring more consent into their workplace. Consent is not just about sex and relationships. Many of the activities in this course can be adapted in order to foster a culture of consent. 

All participants will receive my Consent Teaching Pack (which contains my Handshakes Activity, which is now a very popular way of teaching about consent) and also a copy of Talking Sex Ed (which is a game where participants have to learn the skills of consent, facilitation, and co-creation in order to play it). 

I wrote ‘Can We Talk About Consent?’ which was published by Quarto Books in 2021. You can also read my articles  at BISH and I’ve done many podcasts about consent at Culture Sex Relationships. You can read more about my thoughts about consent in sex education at the Guardian (which I wrote many years ago…). 

I can do this online (via zoom) or in person.

This one day course costs £100 per person for a minimum of 5 people and a maximum of 16. Maximum cost of £1200 plus travel and accommodation.

If you wish to make a booking or have any questions about the content or fee please get in touch via the contact form.

© Justin Hancock, 2023

Justin Hancock has been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. In that time he’s taught and given advice about sex and relationships with thousands of young people and adults in person and millions online at his website for young people BISH. He’s a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. Find out more about Justin here and stay up to day by signing up for the newsletter.