My Career in Sex Ed

There are material reasons for what has held RSE back in the last few years. I’ll address this part as autoethnography. That is I’ll tell the story of my career as a relationships and sexuality educator. 

My way into relationships and sexuality education was via youth work. This was in 1998 / 1999. My local council provided ‘in work’ training to complete the JNC national qualification in part time youth work. As part of this I was doing work with young men around ‘tackling macho values’. This is what we called toxic masculinity back then. Working with young men in one to ones and small group work in youth projects, hostels, colleges etc. 

My first job specifically in sexual health work was in 1999 when I took over a project trying to increase condom use among young men. This meant taking an old ice cream tub filled with condoms and rudimentary leaflets around with me and trying to engage young men and convince them of the benefits of ‘taking responsibility’. I had joined the small specialist youth work team. This was was an outreach project of the broader city council youth service. That youth service had 30 or so full and part time youth projects around the city. In addition to a one stop shop information centre for young people had just opened up in the city centre. 

Teenage Pregnancy Strategy

Then the teenage pregnancy strategy of the New Labour government started in 2000. Councils were given hundreds of thousands of pounds to commission sexual health outreach services, RSE, and support to teenage mums. As part of this my work expanded to deliver more outreach work across the youth service. I also set up small satellite services for young men to access a wide range of condoms and information about sex and relationships. I also had funding to deliver more RSE in schools and to promote these services in schools. 

After a couple of years the work grew. I had a colleague, and a few people helcomcompcoming us to run sessions. We even had a team of volunteer men who really wanted to do this work. The specialist youth work team had a number of projects who were supporting young people of all genders, runaways, street sex workers, young people with disabilities.

In addition to the training I received as part of my youth work course I was also receiving lots of in service training. I also attended additional training at the UK’s leading RSE training and resource centre. 

Outreach teams and local authorities

In 2002 I moved down to London to work for a leading sexual health charity. I worked in a couple of boroughs in London for this charity from 2002 to 2014 doing similar work to what I was doing up north. Outreach work, RSE sessions, specialist drop in sessions for young people to access condoms, ask questions, and engage in informal RSE sessions. 

This was part of a team of 15 – 20 other outreach workers. Working in boroughs with specialist teams of around 5 people, also delivering as part of the teenage pregnancy strategy and now the national chlamydia screening programme and the provision of young people’s sexual health services generally. We were able to offer a significant amount of support to secondary schools. Enhancing their own RSE. Helping them with policy. Supplementing it with outreach sessions on, for example, using condoms, contraceptive methods, how to access local services. 

This would have been a great time to fully introduce RSE to the curriculum. To have training for specialists and a set of quality standards in addition to the RSE guidelines. Resources for schools and a higher level of pay for PSHE co-ordinators. PSHE being part of the standard timetable and regular parents PSHE sessions with co-ordinated resources. 

Then this happened

Then after 2010 the cuts to local authorities meant that contracts for sexual health services were also being cut. In order to keep a project going I sacrificed half of my hours. A year or two later I was being asked to take a 19% pay cut. A year after that my charity were undercut for the contract that I was working on. An incredibly successful project. At this point I went fully freelance (I’d been a freelance trainer and consultant since 2003). 

Eventually all the work I mentioned above disappeared. The specialist youth work team where I got my first job in RSE, gone. The youth service in which that team was based, gone. The training course where I trained, gone (and the centre’s work dramatically scaled back). The outreach team I joined, pretty much gone. The clinics which they served, pretty much gone.

Some local authorities have managed to keep some of the work going, but not as comprehensively as before. Other local authority teams outsourced themselves to become social enterprises. They then offered their services to the schools they were working in for free, for a fee. The RSE policy and parliamentary advisory organisation lost its quango status as part of the coalition government’s ‘bonfire of the quangos’. Charities started to lose funding and their status.

So a lot of people who had years and years of expertise left. Those that are left don’t have the resources to be able to offer the free comprehensive service for schools they could offer previously. So there has never been a worse time for RSE to become mandatory in my view. Colleagues who campaigned for it said that funding and resources would follow, but I’m afraid this has not happened.

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Culture war is part of it but it’s not the main bit

Of course RSE is always part of ‘culture war’. I first experienced this in 2003 being on the front page of the Uxbridge Gazette with the headline ‘Sex Tips for 7 Year Olds’. I’ve experienced more of this since then of course, and so have some of my colleagues. There’s more of it at the moment than there has been in previous years. Particularly for those of us who are pro-trans rights.

It’s upsetting, and difficult to deal with, because much of the criticism we face is not really in good faith. Another difficulty is that because of funding cuts it’s hard for us RSE folk to maintain solidarity. It doesn’t directly lead to a loss of funding, but it does contribute to an environment that feels risky for funders. I’ve certainly had these conversations with the company that used to fund a lot of my work.

We still have the Sex Education Forum, who are now a small charity and do great work. I’d encourage you to join. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health, but generally speaking we just have to keep our heads down.

Furthermore, the usual dialectic of culture war doesn’t apply to us. Culture war headlines in a paper is usually met by uproar from liberal, left, and centre, possibly also even corporations. This can lead to fundraising opportunities and a greater profile. But I’m afraid very few people stick up for relationships and sex education or educators. As Cindy Gallop was saying (in her talk at the event), sex remains in the shadows, the private, the not talked about. 

This is a shame, because young people want it, parents want it. Whenever there is a societal issue around things like #MeToo or #EveryonesInvited or conversations which shows like I May Destroy You or Normal People bring up, people say ‘well what we need is comprehensive RSE’.

Why don’t people stick up for RSE?

Well, many of us have experienced relationships and sex education and that experience was usually not good! Awkward teachers, unhelpful lectures, uncomfortable silences, traumatising videos, anxiety and shame. The content was often too basic to be helpful, being reduced down to key messages that turn out not to be true. Such as ‘if you have sex there’s a high risk of pregnancy’, ‘STDs are very infectious and nasty’, ‘your first time will hurt and that’s okay’. In more recent years we’ve had a few more: ‘yes means yes and no means no’, or ‘porn isn’t like real life sex’. More about this in a moment.

Our experience of actually existing RSE means it’s not something that many people want to advocate for. If we haven’t experienced good, then we don’t know what is possible. This also creates a vacuum into which the fantasy of the ogre of RSE can flourish. 

So this is where the discursive and the material meet, and it has produced an anxiety about what RSE is doing, and RSE doesn’t have enough clout or resources at a policy level to fight back, and we have very few (if any) vocal supporters. It also means that because we have lost a lot of expertise, and experience, then it means that RSE that is being delivered is still sometimes not really good enough. 

Bad Sex Ed

This is a resource for young people I made for my website BISH called Bad Sex Ed Bingo. It’s so that they can critically evaluate their RSE but also provides resources and ideas for how teachers might be able to do it better. 

A lot of the kinds of Bad Sex Ed out there is either just the Sex Ed we got which we uncritically pass on, or it relies on some ‘common sense’ or ‘received wisdom’ around these topics which are just unhelpful, or oversimplified, or in some cases counter-productive.

A good example of this is the ‘if you have sex you will get pregnant’ which is a message which we are still too keen to give to young people. Research has shown that young people will think ‘well, I’ve had sex a few times without protection and haven’t got pregnant, so I must be infertile (maybe I’ve had chlamydia or something) so I’ll just not bother using contraception.’ You can guess what happens next.

For some reason we think it’s okay to tell adults trying to get pregnant ‘if you have regular penis in vagina sex over the course of a year then there’s an 85% chance it will lead to a pregnancy’ but if they are under 18 we have to say ‘if you have sex you will get pregnant’. I’ve written an article on the importance of getting pregnancy risks right in RSE.

We don’t take RSE seriously enough

We just don’t take this subject seriously enough. I would also argue that porn and sexually explicit media is one of these topics which we oversimplify but also where policy is based on shaky evidence. Some of the more, let’s say, scholarly and robust evidence around porn paints a much more nuanced and helpful picture. I’ve written this article which has an overview of the evidence of whether porn harms young people.

Not all young people watch porn

For example, the assumption that young people will watch porn and they are harmed by it has become so common sense that to critique it sounds silly. But first of all, not all young people watch porn. In fact, most young people under 16, even 15/16 year olds, won’t be looking at or watching porn.

Where young people do see sexual images around 50% will be on the internet, which means that 50% of the images they see aren’t (or can’t be, in UK law) hardcore porn, ie people having sex. It seems that young people’s interest in actively looking for sexual imagery online roughly correlates with their interest in sex. And that makes sense when we understand that the average age of sexual debut is still just over 16. 

‘Effects’ are small and not necessarily causative

Studies looking at trying to find an effect of porn are difficult to do because of ethical issues, but also when they do the studies with adults they are in laboratory conditions, rather than at home as part of the rituals and sexual practices that the participants might usually take part in. Even when these studies find effects they aren’t causal, but correlations.

The kinds of effects being researched are ‘more interest in casual sex, or anal sex’ or other forms of ‘non-normative sex’ as if they are problems. They could also be more interested in porn because they are more interested in non normative sex.

Also the effects that they do find are very small, accounting for 1 – 2% on values or behaviour. This means that there’s very little evidence of the ‘it was porn that made someone do something’ argument, which even if it were evidenced would be problematic. 

Media isn’t viewed passively

Crucially, young people, just like non-young people, are critical and literate of what they are watching. Everyone brings themselves, their experiences, values, understandings, knowledges, discourses, to what they are watching. This is where RSE should come in. If someone has had really great RSE on topics such as self esteem, gender, sexuality, relationships, consent, the sex we see, the body, sex (including how to make sex safer, more consensual, and pleasurable), and fantasy, then they will be much better prepared for any sexual imagery they see. It’s not just about teaching young people about porn, and remember most under 16s won’t know what you’re talking about. 

How RSE is taught has put us off talking about it

The way that RSE is taught is also often pretty similar to how we were taught it. The awkward teacher at the front of the room, trying to get through a lesson plan (that they perhaps got given the night before), very little interaction, embarrassment, and awkward vibes. Because of the anxiety of ‘saying the wrong thing’ and a lack of training, time, and good quality resources, a teacher might be tempted just to repeat very narrow discourses (or stories) about what kinds of sex and relationships are okay and which are not.

Just repeating discourses, without giving young people resources, is not going to adequately equip students with the tools to work out how they relate to all of this, how they can explore their values, the kinds of skills they might need to acquire, how to manage their feelings, how to access accurate information. Also the feeling that they will take away with them is one similar to that which many of us took away from our own RSE. Fear, shame, worry, stigma, embarrassment. 

Here’s another article on why I prefer workshops to talks.

It’s not a popular opinion but my opinion is that Bad RSE is worse than no RSE.

So we do need resources and ideally we need a kinder press, and some allies.

Good news

But there is some good news in all this and it can be summed up in one sentence. Good RSE is much easier to deliver than bad RSE. 

But what is good, and what do young people, and adults, get out of good RSE?

When I teach RSE I usually only get one lesson. I just work with over 14s, often sixth formers. Some of the class may have had some sexual experience, others may want to soon, others might not be interested until they are in an intimate loving relationship, others might not be interested at all. There might be trans or queer kids in the same lesson as boys who say they are fans of ‘masculinity influencers’. They all like the lesson and often ask for me to come back. So what am I doing? What’s my secret?

It’s about the vibe

It’s all about the vibe. It’s just as much about the process as it is the content. I move the room around, put groups of tables together, I let people sit in their friend groups as they come in.

I set a group agreement or ‘do a vibe check’ at the beginning. You can read more about this in my article about making talking about sex and relationships easier.

Then once I’ve got them on task I pass around lots of pens, paper, playdough. I go round once to make sure that they know what they’re doing and say ‘just let me know if you have any questions’. 

That’s usually the most I will talk in a lesson. If the students have a specific question that I can answer then I might give a response. But often I might just open it up and say ‘oh I don’t know what do you think?’ or ‘yeah some might agree with you but others won’t’ or ‘is this a useful idea for you? What might be even more useful?’ or ‘how might you begin a conversation with someone about this?’ I just leave them to it as much as possible, because the more I get involved the less the students are talking. When I’ve seen other teachers get involved in group discussions like this I can see the students cringing up and wishing they hadn’t. 

What made your conversations easier?

At the end of these kinds of lessons I’ll bring everyone together at the end. I’ll say ‘okay, you’ve been talking about sex and relationships for 45 minutes, or an hour, that’s a long time! Remember at the beginning we were saying that it can be a bit awkward, but you’ve managed it. Tell me, what were you doing that made it easier?’

Here’s one I did recently with some teachers. 

As a ‘learning outcome’ knowing how, and experiencing, and embodying, what we need to make talking about sex and relationships easier is a pretty extraordinary. Imagine if we learnt that at school!

Make RSE as easy as possible to take part in

In terms of delivering other topics in RSE this is also really useful because it’s what the students and the teacher needs to make it easier. All of this is something you can do. All of it. When teachers are keen to ‘see me in action’ I’m always worried that they might be a bit underwhelmed. It doesn’t look like I’m doing much! But the key is that I’m not a sexpert, but an expert facilitator. And that’s all you have to be.

Ultimately it’s about being a good teacher. Pick a good resource, such as one of mine, or even this free DO… RSE one. Build the vibe with your students, pay attention to it, make them as comfortable as possible, make it as consensual as possible, use a good resource, and reflect on what worked and what else you can do next time. 

The post The state of RSE in the UK appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

As part of the DO…RSE for Schools project, we asked young people about their RSE. We were struck by how little they were taught about the emotional aspects of sex and relationships. Where they were taught it was reduced to overly simple key messages.

Overly simple ‘key messages’

Students were given talks on consent, sexuality or self-esteem which amounted to a key ‘take home’ message. Messages such as: ‘just say no’, ‘it’s okay to be gay’, or ‘love yourself before you love someone else’. They dismissed such lessons as having no relevance to them. When you think about it, it’s not a surprise. 

Take a moment to think about this for yourself in private. Think about how you feel about yourself. What affects how you feel about yourself? Are there expectations placed on you around gender and sexuality? What did you learn growing up about relationships. Are some kinds of relationships more valuable to you than others? Why?

If it doesn’t work for you, why should it work for your students?

Think about all your relationships – how do you make them work? How do you meet the needs of other people in your life without neglecting your own? How easy is it for you to say ‘no’ to a partner, friend, colleague, family member? The students we are teaching are often going through much of the same stuff that we are dealing with. Why should it be any simpler for them than it is for us?

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

Teaching Holistic RSE

Sex and relationships is also an extremely complicated topic because one aspect can’t be taught in isolation from another. For example we can’t teach ‘just say no’ without also addressing that this relates to how we feel about ourselves. That if we feel bad about ourselves compared to other people we may feel that we aren’t allowed to say no.

If there is a power difference in the relationship, where there is more at stake for us than the other person, we might feel we really can’t say no. If we have little decision making power over our bodies, we might not have experienced what saying no feels like. And that much of the wider societal messages we receive encourage us not to say no, particularly to someone who says they love us. 

A young person in our research summed this up perfectly “They just say ‘just say no’ but sometimes people don’t feel confident to do that.” They were saying to us that ‘emotional’ or ‘relationships’ side of SRE was best delivered when young people were asked to think about things themselves. Simply being told what to think in a lecture isn’t real or relevant for them. 

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The use of facts

However the same is also true for the more factual elements of SRE. Information about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), conception, contraception and the law can be taught much more simply. Information can be conveyed simply and effectively through powerpoint presentations, demonstrations and worksheets. So often the temptation is to stick to these topics – with clear learning outcomes and clear messages. But even here young people say that they learn too much about the ‘what’ and not enough about the ‘how’. 

“It separated it from people and just put it in scientific terms … ”

They might learn what STIs are, the different types, transmission routes, long term effects and treatments. However, they don’t learn as much about how to ask for help, or how to talk to a partner about risks, how to deal with the stigma surrounding STIs or how to negotiate safer sex. They might learn what the law is around sexting a sexual image. But how about how to deal with a partner pestering them for an image. Getting support if an image is shared without consent. How gender and power might result in status for some and stigma for others, or how to reduce the risks of sexting. 

The information is there but students aren’t given the opportunity to explore real life situations, how they can get help, how they can support others or how they can change culture of stigma. If students feel that they are simply being told what to think, or being scared off sex altogether, they will simply switch off. Young people may remember names of STIs, or the legal age for sexting, but how useful is this kind of sex education if they can’t put it into practice?

How Can We Change This?

When we were writing the DO… resources we wanted to address this challenge. RSE is a complicated topic but trying to simplify everything into something that would work for every young person won’t work and never has. 

This approach is also really hard to teach. How do we decide on the key message that will work for most students? How do we get to that point without excluding some people? The challenge of making all this engaging enough. How can we appear confident when we are teaching these key messages when we might be struggling with this stuff ourselves? Reducing SRE to simple messages implies that we find all this simple and have it all sorted and that students don’t. The Tea and Consent video is a perfect example of this. We wanted to get away from teachers feeling they have to be experts in sex and relationships, pretending to know all the answers. It makes teachers feel under confident and students can tell when a teacher doesn’t feel confident talking about SRE. 

How to do engaging RSE

So with DO … we shifted the focus from just imparting information and simple key messages to something more engaging and challenging. However as well as embracing the complexity of sex and relationships, we made it easier to teach. We created a set of lesson plans and supporting resources that don’t require specialist knowledge of sex and relationships but instead rely on the skills that teachers already have. These resources are about facilitating really engaging conversations rather than just talking and not listening.

We made it easier for teachers to make it easier for students to talk to each other about the issues that really matter. They are encouraged to reflect on their own values and the messages they have received about sex, gender, sexuality, themselves, consent, love and safer sex. In order to ask them to think, rather than telling them what to think, we wrote truly engaging lesson plans. All the activities are participatory: students getting involved in pairs or small groups whilst allowing them to get as involved as they want to.

You might also find my Bad Sex Ed Bingo resource useful over at BISH.

Making it about them not us

They get to explore these topics for themselves facilitated by creative and innovative learning methods: creating fictional characters to explore gender, using wordstorms to explore how they feel about themselves, practice handshakes to understand how consent feels, learning about love through diagrams and graphs, card sorts to figure out safer sex, asking some big questions about why people have sex or relationships. The course ends with a unique problem solving lesson. Where students to take part in independent learning exercise where they respond to several ‘problem page’ questions.

It’s a complex topic, but easier to deliver than you think

These activities allow for students to really understand how complex RSE can be. However the lesson plans are not complex. They are clearly laid out and structured so that each lesson builds on the next. Throughout there are detailed instructions on how to run the activities. As well as lots of great questions you can ask – if you really want to open the discussion up with students. There’s nothing quite like facilitating a really engaging lesson on RSE. It can be truly fascinating to hear the insights of young people. The key is to remember that your expertise here is not that of a sex education expert (sexpert). You’re a great teacher delivering really engaging, exciting and challenging lessons. So crack the lessons plans out, pin your ears back and start some really great conversations about sex and relationships.

For resources and support to make great RSE happen in your school download the resources, for free, from here.

The post It’s Simple, Sex and Relationships are Complex appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

Sadly, in that time, relationships and sex education has remained a low status subject in most secondary schools with most young people saying that their RSE wasn’t good enough. Rather than examining the content of the guidance; or being curious about how teachers (as workers) might be supported to deliver this; or what good RSE might look like: left twitter (which I count myself as belonging to) decided that the most offensive section of the guidance was this. 

This frustrated me so much that I thought I’d ruin my Sunday and write a blog about why, although it causes me a little concern, there are plenty more things to be worried about. Here I’ll talk through some of my concerns about this ‘apolitical’ RSE, but will go on to explain what a good RSE resource / organisation should be doing, why it is that teachers need this kind of guidance, and the current state of RSE. 

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

Note, I’m talking about RSE here because I’m referring to secondary schools, which is the age group I specialise in, and it’s secondary schools who will have to do relationships, sex, and health education. Primary schools will just have to do relationships and health education. 

Also schools, yes I am a leftist but I don’t talk about party politics in my lessons and for the reasons I explain below I don’t call for the end of capitalism. Please still book me and buy my resources, thanks.

“Extreme political stance”

Firstly, I’ll cover where I agree with the discourse, before going into where I diverge from it. An essential aspect of RSE is that it is grounded in anti-oppressive practice. In order to understand so many topics relating to relationships, sex, sexuality, and gender there has to be a broader socio/political element to the lesson. 

For instance, when we talk about consent, we can’t simply imagine that there exists a level playing field where everyone is equally able to ask for and have their needs, wants, and desires met by another person. If we did, that would not be apolitical, that would be neoliberalism, where we are all individuals who have the same amount of agency as each other. You don’t have to look too far for consent education materials that do just this right now. On the other hand it also wouldn’t be accurate or helpful to suggest that agency can only be collective and that it wouldn’t be possible to negotiate different wants and needs where a power imbalance or agency exists between two or more people in a relationship. 

Just offering neoliberalism or communism, would not be good or helpful relationships and sex education. Really good RSE would be asking students to talk to each other about individual and collective agency with with each other. To navigate the complexities of power dynamics, shame, sexist double standards, our experiences of oppression, privilege, solidarity and understanding interlocking oppressions. Crucially, it would be real and relevant to their lives and would be meaningful and useful outside of the classroom in their relationships with each other. 

Interlocking oppressions, also known as intersectionality, is obliquely referred to in the guidance and all school policies have to refer to the Equalities Act 2010. And yes, intersectionality shouldn’t have the underlying class oppressions stripped out of the analysis. My point here is that I would not be delivering effective RSE if I simply read out the Combahee River Collective statement in class and insisted that everyone agreed with it (however much I hoped that they might). It would also be wrong for a school to ban me from referring to black radical feminists calling for an end to, or a dramatic restructuring of, capitalism.

But rather than this oblique and intellectual take, I think we should be focussing on the reality for RSE and the challenges it faces.

What does good RSE look like

If you’re reading this in the UK or US it’s likely that you will have no idea what good RSE looks like or feels like. Sadly, for most young people, most RSE consists of someone standing at the front of the class showing you how to put a condom on a demonstrator, what the IUD looks like, gory pictures of tertiary syphilis, and (in the last few years) a scary film about child sexual exploitation, and a line drawing animation about tea and consent. If you only experienced this kind of RSE, without any room for discussion, critique, or real life examples for you to chew over, you had bad RSE. 

Good RSE involves using different teaching techniques, employing a term I have come to know as ‘critical pedagogy’, but which I understood over 20 years ago as just ‘bloody good youth work’. It has to be about the students, not us. Pretending to be an expert in a subject where no-one is an expert does no-one any good. Doing this with the awkwardness and anxieties of the average classroom teacher who was given a lesson plan and a couple of hours training (max) at the beginning of term isn’t good. 

Students need to be able to leave an RSE class a bit informed, but mostly more skilled, and to have thought about and considered their values. In a really expertly facilitated lesson, within clear group agreements and the sympathetic use of different experiential learning methods, everyone will also leave the lesson having felt empathy, compassion, cooperation, and an experience of what consent feels like. 

Some schools and teachers are really good at doing this, but many are not. Many schools will be delivering the same kind of stuff that you found so unhelpful. In a minority of schools the RSE will be downright unhelpful, traumatising, partial, and contravening the Equalities Act. There’s not much in the guidance, in and of itself, that is going to improve RSE I’m afraid. It’s more of a set of bullet points to aim for rather than giving a great deal of useful advice on how to get there.

So what is the issue?

Lack of money, staffing, infrastructure, and support services. You know, the kinds of things that your average leftist should care about. When I began doing relationships and sex education work in 1999 I did so in a local authority youth service, where I received high quality free training. I joined the specialist youth work team where I took the reins of a sexual health project for care leavers and unhoused, before starting up some projects myself, supporting schools, delivering RSE all over the city, creating specialist outreach services etc. I was managed, had supervision, had wonderful colleagues, received even more training, there was a library of the top resources. Now there is not only not a specialist youth work team there, there is no youth service there.

This has been replicated in many parts of England (in particular, Wales and Scotland have done a better job of prioritising this kind of work). The bloody good youth workers who were doing some of this work in schools (even with the limited resources that youth workers had then) are mostly not around anymore (shout out to you if you have managed to stay in the sector all these years). 

On top of this, once the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy money started drying up a lot of the public health and PCTs who were doing specialist sexual health work in the 2000s had to stop or switch priorities. Post 2008 cuts to local authority budgets meant that projects had to be scaled back. One successful project I was working on in an inner London borough, for a leading sexual health charity, had our funding cut in half so I lost half my hours. When this was happening across the board, the charity I was working for had to restructure and so asked me to take a 20% pay cut, before I lost my hours altogether.

Back in the day there were charities and organisations with innovative outreach workers who also developed fantastic resources and training for teachers. Many of these no longer exist or, where they do exist no longer have the funds to do much of the innovative pioneering work that helped me so much when I was starting out.

I’m now completely freelance and my website for young people sponsored entirely by Patreon.

Teachers and schools

So it’s teachers and schools who are having to bear the responsibility for delivering RSE. Where they can’t deliver it themselves they will get people in, however the financial reality for schools is that they have to find organisations who are free or very low cost. Some of these are great, but many of them will be relying on unpaid volunteers, given the parlous state of the voluntary sector I’ve mentioned above. Much of the wealth of expertise and experience has been decimated due to politics over the years (don’t get me started on young people’s sexual health services). All of these organisations will need to be vetted.

Check out the Sex Education Forum who can help with this.

Even then this won’t be enough, teachers will need to be delivering more comprehensive RSE from this year, more topics and more lessons, in an increasingly busy timetable. It’s a low status subject and even though being a PSHE co-ordinator sounds prestigious, it’s actually just a lot more work, in a tricky area, for not a lot of pay and not a lot of status. Until PSHE co-ordinator has the same prestige as head of modern languages, the subject isn’t going to improve a great deal. 

Sadly many if not most English schools don’t send their teachers to training. They either can’t afford the (modest) fees (many local authorities now have to charge schools for training via their own social enterprises) or they can’t afford the cover. Even then a teacher attending the training might only get one day, and they might be expected to use their training to train up 6 or 7 other teachers after school. 

Sometimes (though increasingly rarely) I get to run a training course with teachers at a school (usually fee paying). The teachers are lovely, and keen, and really want to do a great job. I admire that they are stoically taking this on, amidst their ever increasing workloads and responsibilities. The first activity we do asks them to reflect on their own relationships and sex education and yes, you’ve guessed it, it was as shitty and unhelpful as yours probably was. So teachers are being asked to deliver a subject where they have not only not received adequate training but also have not even received good RSE themselves.

Back to the beginning

We’re in an era where there aren’t the support services, charities are stretched to the limit, and schools don’t have money for RSE. In this climate teachers are often wading through free resources they find on the internet. And yes I think that it’s too much to say that resources shouldn’t be anti-capitalist, but if it was a good RSE resource it wouldn’t be explicitly anti-capitalist anyway. I also think that this is relatively small potatoes when we think of what’s at stake. This is about young people’s learning about consent, healthy relationships, safety, care, cooperation, compassion, solidarity, inclusion – the big topics that should matter to all of us quite frankly. So far it’s a shame that the left don’t seem that interested in talking about this. 

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The individual within culture

These concentric circles represent ourselves at the centre. Accordingly, we (the individual) are surrounded by our friends and family, then our communities (schools, areas, workplaces), then society. 

(this is taken from my BISH Activity Book, available for £20)

As you can see our relationship with ourselves is going to be affected by how society tells us to feel about ourselves, which can percolate throughout all the circles. You might want to try this activity for yourselves. 

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

We also have a lesson about this in DO… RSE for Schools lesson on our relationship with ourselves (which Alice and I wrote). This is available for free from dosreforschools.com 

Agency is unfairly distributed

So our ability to have a good relationship with ourselves is clearly impacted by the messages we receive about ourselves. Unfair policing, Covid-19 over-affecting BAME communities, and transphobia in the UK are some very powerful current examples of this. Black, asian, and minority ethnic young people’s experience of racism may mean that they feel less valuable than others. See also, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, disablism. These oppressions can interlock of course, with many experiencing more than one oppression at the same time. These affect people on an individual level but also they affect people materially. It’s hard to feel good about ourselves if we are poor. Or denied access to government help, or are restricted from certain spaces, jobs, or support services.

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Class underlies this too of course. Think of what in the circles makes you feel bad about yourself. The answer probably lies in this individualising form of capitalism we are living under (certainly in the UK). This is known as neoliberalism. For example we might: compare ourselves to others, feel undermined or bullied at work, or feel devalued in our profession, or compete with others for scarce resources. We are all struggling. So pretty much all of our well-being is outside of our control and it’s happening all the time.

So individualising well-being isn’t helpful

This means that wellbeing needs to be a topic we address to and for all the circles and all of the time. Which means we need to talk about self-care, but also how we care for others. How we can create more consensual practices in all of our relationships with people. What schools can do to create truly inclusive and anti-oppressive communities where the ability to thrive and feel good about ourselves is evenly distributed. Fostering and promoting ideas of solidarity, community building, mutual aid and being there for everyone.

I think about these circles a lot in my work and I find it very helpful. It gets us away from just placing the emphasis on the individual to ‘overcome’ or ‘be strong in the face of…’ or ‘rise above it’ and pushes it outwards through the circles.  

• ‘How can you make it easier for your friends to …’,
• ‘why it’s important for you to challenge others around …’
• ‘how do you help others to choose rather than choosing for them.’
• What responsibility does school have here.
• What is being taught.
• Where are the support mechanisms.
• How are people held accountable.
• What is a school doing to listen to victims / survivors? 
• How do we change policy.
• What protest does to make change and how to do that.
• How do we ask our elected representatives to hear us.
• What changes do we demand of media. Etc

Working in the circles also just makes RSE a much more interesting, dense, and challenging topic, with clear opportunities for working across curriculums.

What can the individual do

Which is not to say that the individual can’t do anything. It would be equally unhelpful to fix the individual by suggesting that it’s not possible for individuals to become other (happy, contented, loved, caring, successful, strong, resilient etc). Individualising well-being says ‘it’s all down to you’. The better way to be is ‘what (else) can you do with what you have and the relationships you have to become?’

There are a couple of really important ideas that are very useful here. One is to think about the individual more as an ever moving flow of different relations which can grow and change. That instead of a separate discrete entity, the ‘individual’ is produced from an interconnected set of relationships with the human and non-human. This idea of the assemblage, or the rhizome, is from the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and I find it really useful (as do young people I work with).

The other really important idea is from solution focused brief therapy. This is about asking a lot of questions to ascertain what someone’s best hopes are, or when they were at their sparkling best. By doing this the individual can learn about what resources they already have and how, in collaboration with others, they can build on them. I’ve written a resource at BISH about this which you might find useful.

I’ve also written about how we as individuals can deal with stress, stress and the world around us, and stress and the people around us. You might find this reading list helpful for learning about racism. I also wrote about solidarity which covers some of this too.

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The consultation link is here and you have till 11.45 tonight apparently (Wednesday 7th November 2018). Brook also have done this for the whole consultation, which you can read here. End Violence Against Women Coalition have shared their thoughts too.

There’s one big section asking about the content and I pasted all of this into it. Sorry/not sorry DfE. The numbers refer to the numbers in their guidance which are right there for you to look at in the consultation, just click the link. Apart from the bits in navy blue, everything below is what I said. Sorry, wordpress is being a dick today.

65. I’m very pleased to see this less hierarchical approach to relationships. There are many potential valuable relationships and relationship models. Learning about how to do different kinds of relationships, and how we shouldn’t just be asking one relationship to give us everything, is an extremely important learning outcome. We should also not be creating a hierarchy of romantic relationships being more important than other kinds. I would caution against the idea that marriage relationships are any better or more ethical than other kinds of relationships.

66. I would like to see something in here about the importance of consent and for the possibility that sex can be enjoyable and what RSE can do to address the fact that often sex is not enjoyable or consensual for too many people.

67. Teachers often don’t feel able and are often just not equipped to answer young people’s questions about safer sex. It’s important for teachers to have up to date knowledge and to be able to answer students questions in a confident and matter of fact manner. I think these kinds of lessons are best dealt with by outside experts, for example from local sexual health services, or specialist sex educators.

68. I think ‘intimate relationships’ is a term which needs to be unpacked here. A lot of young people will have intimate relationships that are not necessarily sexual. I think it would be more helpful to talk about intimate or sexual relationships in order for that to be clear.

69. This seems to put the emphasis on the individual for being in a relationship which might not be good for their mental health — this is victim blaming. Instead, the guidance should be emphasising: self-care; looking out for others; about addressing our own relationship ethics; and being critical of the messages we receive about how being in a romantic relationship is always better than being single.

70. Seems to be very muddled. It seems to suggest that young people should cultivate resilience in order to overcome barriers. This is an extremely unhelpful neo-liberal message to be including in a resource about RSE. Many of the barriers to good outcomes for people around relationships, sex, sexuality and how they feel about themselves are down to structural inequality: this is something that needs to be addressed within the guidance rather than simply telling students that if they work hard they will succeed. However this section also talks about some virtues, such as kindness, generosity and sense of justice, which are certainly important.

I think that this section needs to be rewritten to talk about:

– why it is that some people have more power and privilege than others,

– why some people receive status for their sexuality whilst others receive stigma,

– how our relationship to this oppression can affect our relationship with ourselves and others,

– how we can embody kindness and generosity in ourselves, but also towards others and in our communities and society in general.

71. RSE should be inclusive throughout the life cycle, which means that we need to be making sure that LGBTQIA folk are included in all RSE. This can be done by having a broader working definition of what we mean by sex (that sex is not just procreative, that it doesn’t always have to happen with someone, and that sex isn’t always necessary for a relationship), referring to partners, using gender neutral terminology, etc. All RSE needs to be inclusive and not just for straight and cis students.

So I’m assuming that when you are talking about “Sexual orientation and gender identity should be explored at a timely point and in a clear, sensitive and respectful manner” that you are talking about more in-depth teaching about different labels, people’s relationships to their labels, the stigma and discrimination that many people face, how we can advocate for the rights of minority genders and sexualities etc. Which I agree would need to be timely (in order that young people get it), but inclusive RSE needs to be all the way through the school.

We have to move away from what we have now, which is RSE which completely leaves out any students that are not straight, whilst simultaneously failing straight kids with the one-size-fits-all approach to sexuality.

74. This is extremely muddled. Is it meant to be about ethics or the law? Certainly secondary RSE needs to have clear teaching about the law, but it also needs to go way beyond this in order to give students the opportunity to explore what constitutes sexual ethics. Allow for students to build on their own values so that they get to talk about what a responsible sexual subject might do, but also about what makes it more difficult to behave in an ethical way. All the way through the guidance there is too much about the what and not enough about the how. We can tell young people what the law is, but what young people are interested in talking about is ethics and real life situations.

75. Abusive relationships are about power imbalances and this doesn’t really come across in this section or in the rest of the guidance. In this section in particular we need to reframe how young people are vulnerable to exploitation by adults. I would also be wary about using classroom based RSE to deal with safeguarding issues, particularly around FGM.

77. I would like to see a more affirmative framing of young people’s digital worlds. The EU Kids Online projects highlights that the risks of young people’s online lives are often overstated when compared with the many opportunities that young people can encounter.  http://www.lse.ac.uk/media%40lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EU%20Kids%20Online%20reports.aspx I would also welcome some links to online resources for young people of secondary age here, such as bishuk.com  brook.org.uk themix.org.uk scarleteen.com

(these blue paragraphs are quotes from the guidance)

• what marriage and civil partnerships are, including their legal status e.g. e.g. that marriage and civil partnerships carry legal rights and protections not available to couples who are cohabiting or who have married, for example, in an unregistered religious ceremony.

This seems to conflict with the messages that there are different types of committed stable relationships.

• the characteristics of positive and healthy friendships (both on and offline) including: trust, respect, honesty, boundaries, privacy, consent and the management of conflict, reconciliation and ending relationships. This includes different (non-sexual) types of relationship.

The importance of consent in relationships and how we might go about navigating it. We also need to bring in power here or all of this is a bit meaningless.

• how stereotypes, in particular stereotypes based on sex, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or disability, can cause damage (e.g. how they might normalise non-consensual behaviour or encourage prejudice).

This needs to be expanded on to make it clear that our experiences of status or stigma because of our identity and experiences can mean that it’s harder for some people to have the kinds of sex and relationships they might actually want, rather than what they should have. For example There is a lot at stake for many people when trying to negotiate using condoms in relationships: “I mean the sex is great, but he won’t use condoms. I keep insisting on it but sometimes we go bareback. I feel like he could just turn around and find someone else if I keep nagging him, but I’m in love with him and don’t think I’ll find anyone else like him.”

• the facts about reproductive health, including fertility and the potential impact of lifestyle on fertility for men and women.

I think this is important to address because we aren’t teaching young people properly about fertility. Young people think that their chances of getting pregnant are much higher than they actually are. This has two unintended effects a) that they panic about sexual activity that have very low risks of pregnancy or b) the belief that, because they haven’t got pregnant immediately from contraceptionless sex, they are infertile and so won’t use contraception.

• that there are a range of strategies for identifying and managing sexual pressure, including understanding peer pressure, resisting pressure and not pressurising others.

We also need to address the pressure at a societal and community level. We need to get away from individualising RSE and making it about the interpersonal, where our relationships take place, and the broader messages we are receiving. Just teaching ‘resilience’ is not good enough and it’s not going to work.

• that they have a choice to delay sex or to enjoy intimacy without sex

Can we specifically talk about asexuality here. Also the working assumption of this document seems to be that sex is about reproduction, and thus is very specifically about penis in vagina sex. This excludes anyone who doesn’t have a penis or vagina but it also creates an expectation that sex is this one particular act that many people just don’t enjoy. If the message that sex education sends out is that the only kind of sex that counts is penis in vagina then a lot of people will feel pressured into doing it if they don’t want to. So to bring in more possibilities for consent we also need to be talking about the many different kinds of sexual activity which we may or may not want to have. https://www.bishuk.com/sex/omg-yes-not-for-me-hmmm-working-out-what-sex-you-want-to-have-2/

• how the different sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV/AIDs, are transmitted, how risk can be reduced through safer sex (including through condom use) and the importance of and facts about testing.

I would welcome specific guidance about not using images of STIs here. They seek to stigmatise those people who have experienced STIs and are also inaccurate, as most STIs are symptomless or have very mild symptoms.

• how to get further advice, including how and where to access confidential sexual and reproductive health advice and treatment.

I would like to see a stronger emphasis on how schools and services can work together more.

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Masturbation Month (it started as a day, 28th May but now is a month) was started by sex toy and sex education pioneers Good Vibrations in 1995. This was in response to Dr Joycelyn Elders being sacked from her post as Surgeon General in the US for suggesting that masturbation should be taught in sex education classes in schools.

This was over two decades ago and I’m not sure how much has changed really. Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) is pretty patchy. I know of some great schools and teachers that can teach about masturbation but I’m sure that there are a great deal more that would just not feel able to. I think it’s super important that we teach that masturbation can be one of the many different kinds of sex that we might enjoy and here’s why.

Pleasure

A lot of what is delivered in schools is about the prevention of unplanned pregnancies and Sexually Transmitted Infections — both extremely important outcomes. These narrow outcomes, added to the messages we get in society about ‘what is sex,’ means that often what is taught is that sex means penis in vagina sex. However, penis in vagina sex is usually more enjoyable for the penis than it is for the vagina, as I explain in this post https://www.bishuk.com/bodies/why-penis-in-vagina-sex-can-be-meh/

So by teaching that there other kinds of sex that can be more enjoyable, such as masturbation, we are offering a counter-balance to the messages that we all get about what counts as sex. However by talking about masturbation we can say that it’s actually okay to have sex that is pleasurable and that penetrative sex isn’t just something that is done to us, or something we have to put ourselves through.

Sex isn’t just partnered

It’s also important to point out that not all sex happens with a sexual partner. If we include fantasy, masturbation, self touch we might go as far as to say that most sex is not actually with a partner. Solo sex (if people want to do it) can be just as, if not more, enjoyable and valuable than partnered sex. There are many reasons for that, but it’s not necessarily a problem for people to prefer solo sex to partnered sex.

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

Agency

From a rights based perspective it’s important that students learn that sexual experiences can be enjoyable, if this is something they want. Maybe the World Health Organisation put it better than me in their definition of sexual health “… the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences… ” Perhaps it sounds obvious to some of us that sex can be enjoyable, but to many people it isn’t and because of power differences this is something that can be difficult for people to comprehend.

Teaching people that they can masturbate by themselves or with another person/s teaches them that they can have agency. That is, that they get to choose how they want to touch themselves and how they might want someone else to touch them. In addition, as Good Vibrations point out, solo masturbation is a great way of learning how your body feels and what kind of touch feels nice.

It’s okay not to masturbate too

Of course, we should be very careful not to suggest that everyone should masturbate. Not everybody masturbates and some people just don’t want to, feel the need to, or experience sexual desire. So switching from the ‘sex negativity’ of reproductive sex to the ‘sex positivity’ of compulsory masturbation is just replacing one set of rules for another. In sex it’s the normative rules, and their cruel enforcement by shame and stigma, that is the problem.

So in teaching about masturbation we really need to adopt a very matter of fact approach and say ‘some or most people do it, it’s completely fine to do it if you want to.’ Not, ‘it’s normal to do it.’ Agency is about giving people choices and maximising freedoms.

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Inclusion

When we frame partnered sex as penis in vagina (PiV), and that everything else is ‘just foreplay’ or ‘not normal’ then we are saying to many people that they don’t get to have sex. Masturbation, or any other kinds of sex, counts just as much as PiV. If we don’t say this then we are also saying to many lesbian, gay and bi folk that they are not having sex, or that they aren’t having ‘real’ or ‘normal’ sex. We are also saying to many physically disabled people that they are not capable of having sex, because some disabilities mean that this kind of sex is too difficult or uncomfortable to try or to enjoy.

So if we’re not talking about masturbation in RSE (yet talking about PiV sex) then we run the risk of contributing to the ongoing desexualisation, discrimination, and disabling of disabled folk whilst also excluding and discriminating against many queer folk. But also, my favourite topic …

Consent

Another important reason for talking about masturbation is that unless we disrupt and rewrite the heteronormative script, then relationships and sex education is not going to open up the possibility for people to have consensual sex.

If the only thing that counts as ‘sex’ is penis in vagina (or penetrative sex generally) and everything else is foreplay then we are just reinforcing the idea that one thing leads to another. Where, in that game of sex rounders (rounders is like baseball but better), masturbation is assumed to be a 2nd or a 3rd base activity that we need to navigate in order to get to 4th base, and that 4th base is where we have to get to to say we’ve done ‘it’ and to have ‘lost our virginity.’ The sexual script: kissing, clothes off, stroking, masturbation, oral, penetration, orgasm. An escalator that people can’t get off until the end.

So if we’re not saying that masturbation can be an enjoyable sexual activity in and of itself and you don’t have to do anything else (either by yourself or with another person/s), we’re not really giving people the opportunity to think about what sex they may or may not want. And consent is a hell of a lot more than one person getting to choose whether they want penis in vagina sex or not.

So how to do this

Teaching about masturbation doesn’t have to involve teaching people how to do it, but the first step is just to make sure that whenever we are talking about ‘sex’ that we make it clear that this can include masturbation.

There’s a great example of how to do this in lesson 5 of the DO… RSE for Schools curriculum (brought to you by the leading organisations and experts in RSE). There are also some self-reflection activities for teachers to think about what we mean by sex and the importance of thinking about this.

And if you want to direct young people to advice, there is plenty of stuff at my website for over 14s about masturbation but also about lots of other sexual activities people might enjoy.

The post Why it’s Vital That We Talk About Masturbation in RSE appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

Printer, photocopier, paper trimmer

Sadly, for those of us who produce RSE resources, it’s no longer financially viable to create hard copy sets of resources. So often our resources require you to print them out yourself (same with DO…).  I’ve printed a lot of resources in my time and my printer and I have a very difficult relationship. Over the years I have learnt the following:

• Get the paper suitable for my printer otherwise the ink smudges
• I don’t bother laminating, I just print onto thick card
• I use a paper trimmer/guillotine
• If I’m cutting out lots of squares for a card sort I start lengthways and don’t cut all the way to the end of the page. Then I rotate the page and cut across and voila, all the cards are cut

Whiteboards, large paper and pens

Whenever I’m in a classroom it makes me sad how much space the projector screen takes up. As I say in this piece (yes I am quoting myself)

“young people are tired of being told what the problem is without being given the chance to think for themselves. Thankfully, teaching really great SRE goes hand-in-hand with interactive learning methods and facilitating discussions.”

I think that the way a classroom is setup and the teaching materials we use can have a big effect on whether the students will feel that the lesson is about them, or us.

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

Make it feel more like art class

So for cracking RSE you need lots of paper and also or lots of whiteboard, Magic Whiteboard, and for students to be able to use the smart board. At times your lessons can look a bit more like an art class (in fact, why can’t we have RSE in art classes?) and our lesson about gender expectations in the second lesson of DO… involves students drawing portraits and creating real life characters. So lots of different colour marker pens, or even paints, would be great.

Flipchart paper or poster paper are also crucial for being able to collect the thoughts and views of students in small groups. Paper can get expensive and it’s just another thing to lug around (also the blu-tac in case you need to stick them up). So you could take a leaf out of the book of this history teacher who uses dry wipe markers on desks for her silent debates https://twitter.com/HistoryMissW/status/827198689718448128

#silentdebate with Year 12s on Peter the Great and his reforms. #historyteacher #afl #higherorderthinking pic.twitter.com/Lm8Jp2gmOJ

— Katie Wilson (@HistoryMissW) February 2, 2017

I would definitely like to write my thoughts about why people have romantic relationships on a desk.

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Small bits of paper

Post it notes are a really great way of getting ideas from students. Maybe some advice on how to take care of ourselves and each other for example. They can be stuck on walls and used as a semi-permanent display which can be added to and moved around. They can help people to express themselves if they are too shy to talk about the subject matter in a group.

However I’m also a huge fan of memo blocks. These are blocks of paper that you keep by your landline so you can take a message if someone calls. Like magazines and newspapers, maybe these are a bit old school too, but they are really useful and only cost about £1 from stationers and from big supermarkets. I use these to get lots of ideas down (for example, sexual activities that people may enjoy) that can then be moved around on the floor.

Smart phone

If you are generating all these brilliant thoughts, ideas, characters, and arguments from students then it’s good to capture them. With the permission of the students I work with I like to take pictures of what they’ve done. This gives evidence for the work I’ve done but also it helps me when I’m doing evaluation and developing new resources. If you use our DO… resources it would be great if you could share some pictures with us!

However smartphones are also super valuable as they contain the answer to pretty much everything and they are in our pockets. When we were designing the DO… resources we wanted to shift the learning style from just learning information because students can get that from their phones. What is more important is to point them in the direction of good websites and where they might be able to access services in real life. This then means that the school teacher can focus on facilitating lessons about skills and values. We rely on the fact that many students will have smartphones with the final lesson in DO… which is an independent learning activity (putting into practice everything they have learnt from the previous sessions).

Modelling clay

Like Plasticine or Play Doh can be great for if you are doing any work about bodies. Students could use lumps of clay to create different bodies and use those to think about the kinds of bodies that are seen as being ‘beautiful’. They could be used to explore ableism, but also to explore how the differences between different bodies are often not related to sex or gender. You could also ask students to create genital sculptures (without showing them pictures of what they ‘should’ look like). You could use these to create a gallery demonstrating the many differences that exist between people’s genitals. For more on this you might be interested in my Genitals resource.

 

My hipster clitoris is well insta. #clitoris #hipster #succulents

A post shared by Justin (@bishsexed) on Apr 23, 2018 at 7:09am PDT

Magazines/Online Images

Cutting out images from magazines and newspapers is something that us sex educators have been advocating for years. It can be a really useful way of exploring some of the social messages that we receive about bodies, sexuality and gender. However I can’t remember the last magazine I bought. Instead you might be able to create a slideshow of images of adverts, featured images for articles, or the top images from google search. Students could be asked to take screenshots of adverts on their instagram feed for instance. Or they could take pictures of images they see out in the wild. You could perhaps curate the images into a slideshow and use this to start a classroom discussion in tutor time at the beginning of the day.

YouTube

Depending on your filter settings and your classroom internet connection you could find video online to show to get a conversation going about sex and relationships. I’ll write another post about my thoughts about videos (summary, be very very careful about showing CSE videos) but I think they should be used sparingly to generate conversation.

Students could take it in turns to find clips from YouTube and use these to address the class in tutor time to give their thoughts about what it says about a topic. You would need to trust that your students will show something appropriate or that your filter settings are set quite tightly.

I avoid showing videos really but some students recommended that I show them this 2 minute video from the Inbetweeners in order that we could have a discussion about gender, sexual scripts and consent. This would work absolutely brilliantly after the handshakes activity in DO… (or in my new Consent Teaching Pack).

(Note how they are a combination of first and second handshake but not third handshake at all. Notice the body language and non-verbal communication.)

Students could also bring in clips of storylines from soap operas to highlight healthy or unhealthy relationships. Or, for a primer in self-care, they could show examples of a clip that made them feel really good about themselves or videos that just made them feel relaxed, or happy, or content. For me it’s

Fruit and vegetables

Lastly we come to the condom on the banana. I’ve always used plastic condom demonstrators but they are a bit harder to get hold of than they used to be. Also I think for a condom lesson it’s better to have a few so that students can practise in small groups. If you can’t get hold of demonstrators you could use fruit and vegetables. Bananas might work okay but they need to be held by someone else. You could also use carrots, courgettes, baby aubergines (for that classic emoji reference). Try to get a range of different sizes (average erect penis size is 5.5 inches but the variation of penis size is huge, from over 1 inch to over 10 inches).

You could also use peaches, or peppers, or similar to show how condoms can be turned into barriers (known as dams) and used for safer oral sex (use your teeth to tear the condom lengthways so it forms a square).

Getting condoms

You’ll also need some condoms which, thanks to budget cuts and the commissioning of sexual health services, can be a bit harder to come by. If you get hold of your local sexual health service they might be able to provide you with a few. I think it’s important to use in date ones because they smell fresh. Even though we are sponsored by Durex feel free to use any brand you like.

If you do do a condom/dam lesson you will also need some tissues and maybe also some wet wipes. You might also want a separate bag to collect all the used items.

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As you can see there is something in each lesson which is relevant to these topics. So running the whole DO… programme would be a great example of feminist activism (whilst also being engaging and great RSE for all genders).

In lesson one students can explore how they feel about themselves and how we all feel about ourselves is in a large part shaped by the messages we receive from society, our communities, the people around us as well as our own self-perception. Of course, discrimination is one of the factors that can have a huge affect on how we feel about ourselves. Also the unrealistic beauty standards of how people are supposed to look can affect everyone, and particularly women. Given all this is can be quite difficult not to be critical of oneself, so we included an activity for students which is all about self care. The importance of self-care in tackling oppression (particularly racism) is an idea from Audre Lorde.

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

In lesson two we make the whole thing about gender expectations and the rigid rules that society has about how to be a woman. This lesson has a fun creative element allowing students to draw rich characters with different backgrounds, races, disabilities/abilities, classes, names, hobbies all of which can bring in different intersections. So this is a way for students to learn about intersectional feminism (shout out to Kimberlé Crenshaw). One of the things that this lesson raises is to think about is to what extent so-called ‘feminine’ traits such as being caring and sharing might valued less in society (and certainly paid less) than ‘masculine’ traits such as being dominant and independent.

Lesson three is about love and relationships which is all about critiquing why romantic relationships are all too often regarded as being the most important kind of relationships, usually at the expense of friendships. If we could treat our friendships as being as important (or even nearly as important) as romantic relationships then how might that help women to create more space, time and resources for other women?

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Lesson four is all about consent. The sobering statistic from the latest Natsal study shows how consent is an issue for all genders, with 1 in 10 women reporting having had sex against their will, compared with 1 in 71 men. There is also now a greater awareness of the violence that trans folk face on a daily basis, particularly thanks to the work of activists like Paris Lees.. Consent and power are at the heart of DO… and in the post #MeToo world there is a huge opportunity for all schools to centre these issues in their RSE — we have got you.

Safer sex is a subject that affects all genders but we try to tackle this differently in lesson five by specifically framing different sexual activities that people may choose to do or not. Getting away from the message that sex = intercourse, opens up many more possibilities for women to negotiate different kinds of sexual activity that they may find more enjoyable but also are more safe from unplanned pregnancy or STIs.

The final lesson features real life scenarios for students to answer. Armed with their 5 weeks of best in class RSE; their mobile phones; and links websites like Brook, FPA, The Mix, Bish and Scarleteen; the students get to answer questions that are likely to affect them or their friends at some point in their future. Questions about: unhealthy relationships, painful sex, access to services, coercive sexting, abortions, and contraceptive services are of course all relevant to all young people but will resonate with a lot of women especially.

And yes, there is an International Men’s Day and I will post a similar thing on 19th November.

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‘Common sense’ relationships discourses

“You just need to find the one.” “I just want to share my life with one special person.” “It’s all about those three little words.” “Find the right person and everything will be okay.” “Hard working families.”

At first they seem benevolent – but the underlying messages from many love stories are:

• You must have a romantic relationship
• Romantic relationships are the most important relationship
• Being in a romantic relationship is a sign of success, being single is a sign of failure
• We just need find ‘The One’, or let ‘The One’ find us (depending on our gender)
• ‘The One’ will meet all of our needs and we will live happily ever after

Just as porn is not great at teaching people about how to have sex, love stories are not a great way of teaching people about how to have relationships. These love stories create a huge pressure to have romantic relationships but little advice on how to actually have one. Relationships resources in RSE should be offering opportunities for us to critique these discourses.

Why RSE relationships resources should be critical

Many people in unhappy or unhealthy relationships can feel trapped by these love stories. Sometimes they can be retold by an abuser in an abusive relationship too: such as; “if you loved me you would do this” or “I’ve got all the love you need.” This is not to be cynical about love and relationships, but to understand the importance of being critical about them and that we can choose whether and how we might want to have them.

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

With a lack of good relationships education, young people and, let’s face it, not young people use these messages about relationships until they find that they don’t work for them. Just as with sex, we all learn by doing, but why suffer unnecessary heartache when we could learn some more helpful messages beforehand.

Putting the R in RSE

So there is a huge opportunity to put relationships first in RSE. However, all too often the R in RSE is reduced to simplistic messages like ‘it is better to have sex in a committed and trusting relationship’. This runs the risk of retelling unhelpful love stories they hear everywhere else, as well as making it about you rather than about them.

Article continues after this ad for my resources (why not buy some?!) They’re also available at the BISH Patreon Shop.

Young people said to us that relationships and the ‘emotional sides of SRE’ can’t just be told. They told us that it was best delivered when they were asked to think about things themselves, given scenarios and facilitated to have a debate. My own resources in Love Innit, and also in DO… RSE address these key critical questions.

• Why do people have romantic relationships?
• Which of these can only be achieved in a romantic relationship?
• What other relationships (including the relationship with ourselves) can give us these things?
• What makes for a healthy relationship?

Perhaps you could ask yourself these questions. What were you taught about relationships growing up? In retrospect, how useful or valuable was that for you? How about for others? (Teachers have told us that they find our self-reflection activities super useful).

Love innit, my own relationship resources

My own RSE relationships resources in Love Innit features a unique discussion game called talk for a minute, which is an opportunity for young people to get really deep into discussions about ‘the one’, friendships and relationship ethics.

There’s also the relationships graph activity, to help young people to explore what an unhealthy relationship might look like. There’s game of Family Fortunes where you people have to give what they think are the ‘top answers’ to “what’s the most important quality in a partner,” “something you wouldn’t do on a first date,” and “what’s the worst chat-up line you’ve ever heard?”

It’s just £12 for 9 great activities that I’ve used in the classroom, youth club and training room. All with comprehensive instructions: aims, learning points, discussion points and alternative activity ideas.

More RSE resources

For even better value for money the Bish Bish Download is a bundle of all my teaching resources with a 10% discount. This download also includes my new Activity Book which has loads of other quick ideas for you to use as worksheets in the classroom (including a How to Be a Good Mate Board Game).

Over at Bish, my sex and relationships advice website for young folk, you can see that I have a lot of stuff about relationships and love. You might also get some ideas if there’s a specific thing you would like to teach about. I also have videos that you could show in class if you like.

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With DO… we’ve tried to make delivering better RSE easier, but even then the burden of teaching RSE and training colleagues often rests on the shoulders of one teacher. That teacher may well not have had any training in RSE and may not know where to look for high quality resources — with teachers telling us that they often just create their own stuff.

So me and that Alice Hoyle have got together to create a facebook group called RSE in Schools. It’s for anyone teaching RSE in secondary schools in the UK though it’s also open to healthy school leads, local authority trainers and outside agencies working with schools (we may make side groups if there’s enough interest).

Alice and I are going to be the moderators and administrators of the group (to begin with) and we hope that by creating a community of educators we can offer:

• Somewhere to chat to other RSE educators
• A place to sense check ideas and thoughts
• Links to high quality resources
• Best practice advice about delivering RSE
• Pro-tips, hot takes and ideas from myself and Alice

Alice and I were the lead writers for the materials in the DO… resources (check them out, we think they are awesome as well as being free and available at the click of a button). So we’ll be flagging up some of the content in there and making suggestions for how they can be adapted. We’ll also be linking to other awesome resources (such as my stuff, ahem) from other folk and organisations doing really great RSE that are part of the DO… collaboration as well as the best resources from outside the collaboration too.

We’ll be on there most days, for a bit, to answer people’s ‘how tos’ and ‘where can I finds’ (though we can’t answer every question ourselves). We’ll also talk about what’s happening in the news related to relationships and sex and offer some thoughts about appropriate ways to create teachable moments in tutor or PSHE time. You’ll also hear from us around the various big RSE events of the year, for example Valentine’s Day and how to teach about love and relationships.

We’re going to start, like any with any good RSE lesson, with a group agreement to help us get the conversation going.

It’s a closed group so click here and we’ll add you. There are a couple of questions to make sure that you are doing RSE in the UK (though we are a bit flexible if you are from outside the UK). If you’re not a facebook person, don’t worry, I’ll be writing more blogs here and also tweeting about stuff via @bishtraining.

[We’re grateful to be sponsored by RB (parent company of Durex) to run this Facebook group — however we have full editorial control over our content. We’ll be talking about DO…  a bit (which is also sponsored by Durex) but only because we worked on it and think it’s really really great.]

© Justin Hancock, 2018

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