(I first published a version of this for Delvvy’s 100 Days of Sex Ed.)

Before we delve in – I want to invite you to reflect on the following question: what was your ‘relationships education’ like? Don’t scroll down, just take a minute or ten and reflect back on what you were taught about relationships at school. This could be the explicit things you were taught, or the implicit things you took away.

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Our own experiences of Relationships Education

When I ask fellow practitioners this question on my training courses I often see shrugs and blank faces. For many people, their experience of relationship education was limited to when and in what circumstances they should have sex. Messaging often included that ‘sex should only happen in committed, loving, married relationships’ or ‘marriage is between men and women’. It also often peddled the fairy-tale narrative that finding the ‘one’ is the key to living happily ever after. 

These messages are continually reinforced by society, communities, government, media, and our own loved ones. They are framed as ‘common sense’ and often result in blame and shame when questioned. This ‘educational’ messaging does not help people navigate their relationships, in fact often it contributes to making them worse.

We’re not taking relationships education seriously enough

Sadly, relationships education has not progressed much. The R in RSE seems to be mostly silent, serving as a linguistic emollient to make “Sex Ed” seem more respectful or accepted. I rarely get to teach about relationships (I’m invited into schools, for a fee) and even when I do, it’s the odd single session here and there. When I do get requests to teach about relationships, it’s attached to other words. As if I can teach ‘healthy relationships, harmful behaviours and porn’ in one lesson.

If you do a literature search for ‘relationships education’ on Google Scholar, you’ll see the dire lack of academic research on the topic. Results are either about ‘relationships and sex education’ or relationships education for couples in therapy, so based on how to make an existing romantic relationship work. Look at this Good Practice Guide to RSE (pdf) from UCL and the School of Sexuality Education and the Sex Education Forum. The one mention of relationships education is in the ‘Consent and healthy relationships section’ and it simply says: “‘Healthy relationships’ encompasses all kinds of relationships”.

Why aren’t we taking relationships education seriously?

I think there are lot of things going on which means that we don’t take relationships education more seriously than we do.

Lack of time for relationships education

The first of these is, simply, time. There’s never enough time to do proper RSE. In the course which I wrote with Alice Hoyle DO… RSE for Schools we have just over 20% of the course time devoted to relationships: which is a lot more than most. If we don’t apportion enough time to relationships education then we will simply not generate enough interest in it. If we can’t see what relationships can do, then we don’t do it. It also won’t be fed into the evaluation feedback loop encouraging us to do more. ‘Relationships education’ has never been allowed to develop. It’s not ‘a thing.’

Relationships aren’t a ‘hot topic’

The second reason we don’t do more is that there is always a focus on the ‘hot topics’. So, just in the space of my career this has been: HIV / AIDS, teenage pregnancy, boys and young men, chlamydia, porn, consent, toxic masculinity (‘bym rebranded’). RSE has the tendency to follow the hot topic, or the spectacle, because this is how the attention economy works. We also tend to follow what is current because we can raise funding off the back of it. Relationships just hasn’t had it’s turn yet.

Relationships education doesn’t count as ‘harm minimisation’ (for some reason)

Related to this, the third reason that we don’t take relationships education seriously, related to the above points, is that it’s not seen as a ‘harm minimisation’ topic*. Why not? Do you know someone in your life, past or present, who has been in a relationship which was harmful: miserable, reduced their capacity to act, abusive, violent? Perhaps this has been you? Relationships can cause very real and very serious harm to the mind and body (which are the same thing). We should be offering people tools to help keep each other safe, as well as to find loving, thriving and nurturing relationships. Relationships education should also have a commitment to address the oppressive structures that are part of the production of unhappy / sad / destructive relationships.

*Though I have never been interested in RSE as harm minimisation myself. I think RSE should be about increasing our capacity to act.

It’s never gone beyond a ‘key message’

As I’ve said above, ‘relationships’ is just a modifier to make ‘sex’ sound more socially safe. To put sex within Gayle Rubin’s ‘charmed circle’ of sexualities that are ‘okay’ (from Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory for the Politics of Sexuality). Where we do see relationships it’s in the entirely discursive form of the term ‘healthy relationships’. It’s a phrase as a ‘discourse’ forming part of a broader ‘common sense’ of relationships.

We pick it up, we might say ‘is this a healthy relationship’ or ‘what are the signs of a healthy relationship’ but we don’t take it much further. It tells ‘others’ with less social capital than ‘us’ that their relationships ‘should’ be healthy (and that of course our relationships always are, nothing to see here). It becomes the ‘key message’. Did you deliver the ‘healthy relationships key message’, was the ‘healthy relationships key message’ received? Tick the box. We saw the same thing happen with consent (as I rant about in my article about the godawful Tea and Consent video).

The job of RSE is not to take one discourse and replace it with another ‘better’ discourse. My job, our job, should be to help us all find our relationship resources, not discourses. This is why instead of spending our time defining it, we should instead make two questions our main focus: what (else) can a relationships education do and how (else) do we do relationships education? I’ll explain the ‘else’ later.

What (else) could relationships education do?

Good RSE is participatory, experiential and conversational. It invites us to understand, critique, explore, and feel. So as I’ve said before it’s not about talks and lectures, but about workshops. For me I use the social pedagogic, or youth work approach I was trained in. This is informal, counter-hegemonic, helping people to build on their own resources.

Good relationships education can help us to understand and critique the ‘should stories’, the ‘common sense’ of relationships. The romantic relationship imperative. Hierarchies. The One and the ‘Happy Ever After’. That story about how your romantic relationship should be like your best friend, your confidant, your cheerleader, your caregiver, your lover all rolled into one. There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of these, just the imperative that this is how we should be organising our intimate lives. The should story.

Relationships education should beyond romantic relationships and includes all of the relationships we encounter throughout our lifetime – be it with ourselves, or with friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, etc. It should also look at relationships as they exist in culture, communities, society and how they are produced and reproduced politically. It should also give us an opportunity to explore more intentional ways of doing relationships, what good might look like for us, how we can do them, and how this will feel: how will we know? 

What can relationships education cover?

I’ve got some ideas for how you might get started doing this kind of critical relationships education below. Moving from a passive, or docile, way of relating to one which is much more active, consensual, and intentional. You can also just have a look at the wealth of advice, guidance, and educational articles I’ve written at BISH about relationships. It’s a huge topic: from how to get a girlfriend / boyfriend / themfriend, dealing with break ups, how to make sex and relationships chats easier, and how to use venn diagrams to work out how much to share with someone. There are nearly 50 articles about many different aspects of relationships. That’s about 50,000 words of guidance and advice. So you could easily spend a lesson a week on relationships education if we were taking it really seriously.

Intentional Relationships

When facilitating workshops with adults and young people about relationships I often use the following exercises. So hopefully they will help you to get started. (For many more of these you may want to buy my Relationships Teaching Pack called Love Innit, or buy it from the BISH Patreon Shop). These activities help people to critique the common sense ideas of relationships and invite them to reflect on how we might make them more intentional. It also gives people an opportunity to assess their own resources. So I will invite you to reflect on the following questions for yourself or with your loved ones. Pens and paper at the ready please!

1. Why might people have romantic relationships?

Think of all the reasons why people might have romantic relationships. For this exercise we are thinking about consensual relationships. Think of as many as you can and write them down. Don’t judge your answers, there are no right or wrong answers, and it’s not what you want from a romantic relationship, but people generally. Give yourself 10 minutes and see how many you come up with. 

This image below is from the BISH Activity Book

Now, looking at your list, what strikes you? If you replaced the title with ‘what do people need in life’, would your list be any different? Which of these can only be met by being in a romantic relationship?

2. Different kinds of love and relationships

Looking at this list, what are the different kinds of love and relationships that might meet these needs? List as many as you can think of. Side note, the Ancient Greeks had at least 7 different words for different kinds of love. 

This image below is also from the BISH Activity Book

Before we jump on to the next bit, you may wish to reflect on these. Which are given the most status in our / your culture? What if they were all treated more equitably? 

3. Relationship qualities

Looking at your list of different kinds of relationships (eg, romantic, friendships etc), are there any qualities, or values, which are necessary for all of them? What is necessary for any kind of relationship to work? Can you come up with 6 – 12 qualities which would be necessary for all relationships?

4. Relationship graph

Now that you have your qualities I’d like you to put them on a graph. Like this one. Put each word on a spoke of your wheel.

Once you’ve done that I’d like you to think of a famous fictional relationship. It could be any kind of relationship at all in any fiction you can think of (and yet most groups will pick Rachel and Ross, le sigh). Then once you have a fictional relationship, plot it on your graph. What goes well and what could need some work? How do all the qualities relate to each other? (It’s really much more fun to do this with loved ones). 

Relationships as ‘a becoming …’ 

By thinking about different kinds of relationships, the qualities in those relationships, and how we might use a technology like a graph to understand them, it invites us to think about ourselves.

By flattening the hierarchies in our relationships, and understanding that they all need the same (if not pretty similar) qualities to be good for us, then we can take the learning from one and apply it to another. From the moment we are born we are developing relationships skills and intelligence and, crucially, we can feel it in our bodies. How do we know we enjoy being with someone? What are the signs that we are in a trusting relationship? How do we know when we are feeling truly supported?

Abundant ways of doing relationships

It also implicates all of our loved ones in our relationships, we all need ‘more than one’ even if we are monogamous. Have you ever had the ‘if you treated me, like they are treating you, that wouldn’t be good’ conversation with a friend? Or reflected on how some relationships allow us to be both free and gently held, and others less so? 

So, by applying a more intentional and critical way of relating, our relationships might evade the capture of the common sense stories of ‘the one’ and the ‘happily ever after’ and instead we might find a way for our relationships to ‘become’ in ways that feel right for us and our loved ones. This is where our relationships unfold over time with us, as we also unfold and ‘become’. Think of the difference would it make for us being in a relationship that was great for us? What would that do, what else?

I’ve found this approach has really helped my relationships, so I hope that you find this useful too!

More Resources

I’ve got lots of other resources for relationship education. At my website ‘BISH – a guide to sex, love and you for everyone over 14’, I’ve got a whole section on relationships. The website is free and ad free, and paid for by wonderful people like us who just want to see this kind of resource in the world, so please do check out the support BISH page while you’re there. 

If you’re an educator you might want to check out my RSE workshop resources at bishtraining.com/shop, where you can find my relationships education teaching pack called ‘Love, Innit’. There’s also a free curriculum at my website called DO… RSE for Schools which features a lesson plan on relationships (but the whole thing is great). I would also recommend the book Great RSE, which has some really great ideas for teaching about relationships. As I mentioned in the article I also run training courses, all of which can be done online or in person.

The post Taking Relationships Education Seriously appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

These are interactive, experiential and might generate some really great ideas from the students. Much better than just reading out an article from a website.

Also notice throughout that I refer to our / we. This is to include us, the facilitators and teachers who could also use our phones better at times.

Before we start

If you want some advice about how to do group agreements / vibe checks at the beginning and how to do RSE generally, check out the DO…RSE for Schools resource that Alice Hoyle and I wrote. It’s free. For all of these prompts I would put students in small groups with large pieces of paper and lots of pens. 

Not everyone will have a bad relationship with their phone, and some young people might not have access to one at all. This is why we are talking about how we could make our relationships better (things can always be better, even if they are pretty good). You can make this broader to talk about tech generally. I’ve also tried to make these prompts inclusive of everyone, whether they have a phone or not.

For each group you could give someone the option to be the facilitator, the person who carefully listens to the conversation, fields what the group is saying and writes down their responses. This could be someone who doesn’t have a smartphone. You may need to refer back to the group agreement to make sure that there isn’t bullying around this.

Why do people use phones?

Ask everyone to list all of the different reasons for what people might use their phones for and why they might want to use them. So this covers not just the many things we use phones for, but also the reason why we pick our phones up in the first place. 

Then you could ask the following prompts for discussion (in their small groups or in the large group if you like). 

• Looking at your lists, what strikes you?
• Do you have any ideas about whether any of these things might increase our capacity to think or act or decrease our capacity to think or act. Which of these might make us feel joyful or sad?
• Which of the things on your list can only be achieved from picking your phone up?
• Where else can we get some of these things from?
• ‘Instead of picking our phones up, what else could we do?’ Ask everyone to list as many as they can.

“We demand a lot from our phones and they can do a lot for us. But just as with any relationship, if we ask one thing to do so much for us, then we might find after a while that it gives us less and less back. (Which means we spend more time with it trying to get more and more out of it.)”

Active and passive phone use

We can often feel compelled to pick up our phones, without us even realising. Anyone picked up a phone and then spent ages being on it without really noticing? Perhaps we might have a better relationship with our phones if we are using them more actively? Picking them up intentionally, putting them down when we don’t need them. A start, middle, and end. 

In your groups, can you come up with some examples lately when you had this kind of relationship with your phone? Have you noticed a time when someone else did this? What difference did that make? What were you pleased to notice? See if each of you can come up with one example, even if it sounds really small and daft? If you don’t have a phone it could be any technology you might use generally.

How can we all help?

We’re not just individuals, we are all entangled up in our relationships with each other, our communities and society and culture generally. So they are all involved in us having a better time with our phones too. 

What difference could the following make in us having a better relationship with our phones?

• Society (law, government, media, products, services)
• Communities (schools, workplaces, youth centres, places of worship, organisations)
• People around us (friends, family, peers, loved ones / haters)
• Ourselves, the kinds of things that we could do. 

As you come up with these answers, notice the flows between each one. For example, if social media apps were run in a different way, how might that make it easier for us to change our behaviour? Or if we notice one small improvement we could make, what difference would that make with the people around us, or at school? 

Scales

Have a think about your relationship with your phone (if you don’t have a phone, technology generally). Where are you on a scale of 0 – 10, with 10 being the best relationship you could ever have with your phone, and 0 being the opposite. Where are you on that scale now? Then on the count of 3, everyone blurt out your answer at the same time. 1, 2, 3. 

Now I want you to imagine that your relationship with your phone (or technology generally) was just one point higher on that scale. This will kick in as soon as you get home today. As soon as you walk through the door: 

• What will you start to notice that told you that your relationship with your phone was just that tiny bit better. 
• What will other people notice? 
• What difference will that make?
• What will you be pleased to notice?
• What else? 
• What else?

If you don’t have a phone, you could do this for a computer, or a TV, or other device you might use. Or you could imagine that a loved one had a better relationship with their phone, what will you notice about them?

More resources

I hope you found that useful. If you would like a leaflet to download and print, you can buy a summarised version of my article here for £3 from my Patreon. Or you could become a member of the Patreon and get it for free. 

If you would like more of these kinds of lesson ideas, which are participatory, experiential, and more about the how than the what, check out the rest of my RSE resources in my shop here (or at my Patreon shop). 

The post How to use our phones better – RSE / CSE lesson ideas appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

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.

Andrew Tate and other toxic masculinity influencers cause a lot of harm. In person (as we are seeing) and also via the messages they articulate. Their hateful, misinformed, sexist, and violent discourses (stories) are harmful. If they are repeated, in school, in RSE, in exercise books, in corridors, in the playground etc  this is also harmful. It’s also hard to deal with, because often it’s harming our students, or us, or our loved ones. But we have to address this topic with the complexity it deserves. 

(If you don’t know about Andrew Tate, here’s a useful podcast from Sky News)

‘Entanglements’ not ‘Effects’

I think we have to be careful when we talk about the influence that people have on people, or the effect that celebrities, influencers, or media have on people. Toxic masculinity influencers aren’t making young men think in a particular way. Influencers, celebrities, and media don’t cause ‘effects’ on us in this way, it’s much more complicated.

There’s a huge amount of work on critiquing ‘media effects’ models. We’ve known for many years that young people, even children from an early age, are able to bring a high degree of critique and media literacy to media.  

We bring with us our own values, experiences, understandings and bodies whenever we encounter celebrity discourse, influence, media, or porn. So rather than being passive sponges soaking up ‘an effect’ and unconsciously reproducing an ‘influence’ we encounter these discourses in a complex entanglement. 

So, for example, a young man who is a fan of [insert toxic masculinity influencer here] is an entanglement. This might include the following relationships:

school — phone  — dad  — height  — clothing  —  own experiences of violence  — anger  — dating  —  fear — where they live   — muscles  — puberty  — penis size anxiety  — football  — their pet  — RSE  — tiktok  — dad  — queerness and feminism as ‘Other’ — online spaces  — their future  — disconnection  — the word ‘gay’  — history — unrequited enamorations — shyness 

Here’s a really interesting article about young men’s entanglements / assemblages.

It might sound like I’m nitpicking. I think it’s important to be more precise about how we talk about the ‘effect’ of toxic masculinity influencers. This is because:

The influence isn’t the outcome

Any influence of misogyny is reproduced by young men because they, in some way, want to. It’s important not to lose the intentionality of this because this lets men off the hook. Just like the argument about video nasties, violent video games, rap/grime/drill, or pornography making someone more violent. We don’t accept this argument for these forms of media and we shouldn’t accept this for influencers either. It’s inaccurate and leads to bad outcomes. Their motivations for doing it might be very different, but that’s something else I’ll come onto later.

There isn’t just once influence

There are influencers, but there are also lots of potential toxic masculinity influences. Society produces and makes use of the kinds of masculinities that they espouse. The kinds of common sense arguments they make about the roles of men and women and heterosexuality are also made by, conservative politicians, hegemonic sex education, (some) TV and film. We are often implicated in supporting this as individuals and collectives. Our lives are organised around outdated modes of work. This (for example) rewards labour coded as masculine (hard, tough, logical) more than labour coded as feminine (soft, caring, feelings). More on this later when we get to how this plays out in schools.

Outsourcing responsibility

It lets us off the hook as a society from tackling this topic by externalising this as a ‘bad outside effect’ we want to get rid of. {I’m all in favour of never hearing from these men ever again. Mostly I hear from them via people that want to critique them.] Outsourcing responsibility to these Others means we obscure the real problems. It also means that we are obscuring the best solutions. 

Quite frankly, if these men, these men*, are such a huge threat to this generation of men, what does that say about us? I can understand why teachers are alarmed about this, I’m always in solidarity with teachers. But these basic ‘common sense’ ideas of effect and influence are not helpful. Instead maybe we should accept our own failings, or omissions, as educators. 

Our job is to be part of the entanglements of young men. To be resourcing them with tools, technologies, influences, modes of being, the possibilities for joy, embodiment, care, learning. This is what education is supposed to do. So the call from educators should be more ‘we need resources and training and support to do our jobs’ and less ‘what are the authorities going to do about violent misogyny online’ (though that would also be beneficial clearly). 

*Neil Kinnock voice

It’s saying men have no agency

It is going to be counter-productive to any work of liberation around young masculinities to say that young men are so easily influenced by these men. It’s basically saying they have no agency. The work is to convince young men of the benefits of feminism for them. It’s not that hard: honestly. The same forces which violently oppress the Other are those which violently coerce young men into masculinity. Again, what’s your school doing about this? I’ve written here about how to do RSE with young men.

It others young people

Young people are no more subject to influence than adults. To suggest they are is disempowering and infantilising. We run the risk of reifying the problem that is [current toxic masculinity influencer] by talking up his influence (and the common sense idea that his influence is causing uncritically bad effects in young men). When we should be paying attention to what it might be doing and what else we could be doing as a society. 

Researchers consistently find that when we talk about someone being an influence, people will pass on their influences to others. This ‘third person effect’ means that people will think that they won’t be influenced by the influence but other people will. Particularly young people, or people with less social capital (which is one of the big problems with the tea and consent video), or people who are read as being less intelligent and critical than them. It’s infuriatingly patronising. So we can accept that we are critical thinkers in an entanglement of different relations, but that others aren’t. Fuck that.

Be aware of the spectacle

I’ve been a relationships and sexuality educator since 1999. I first got into youth work and RSE in order to work with young men around what we called back then ‘macho values’. So I’ve had first hand experience with misogynistic and violent views and behaviour. Sometimes I’ve been on the receiving end. Overall I think I’m encountering a lot less of this. So we also need to be wary of the spectacle of one person’s infamy. Because if [current toxic masculinity influencer] is forgotten, so will the whole subject of what do we need to do about masculinities. What kinds of resources do young people and teachers need? Consider the possibilities for a society not territorialising certain traits / jobs / roles as masculine and then reifying these in a neoliberal context. 

The last 25 years have been spent palming off the responsibility for toxic young masculinities onto influences such as: violent films, Grand Theft Auto, drill, gonzo porn, and now influencers. At no point do we hear about how young masculinities are produced in and around our school systems. This is what we should be talking about. 

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

What produces toxic masculinites being brought up

So the question for how to deal with this in RSE is to consider what might produce toxic masculinity influencers being brought up by young men. When his name, or the views of the manosphere generally, are brought up with me there is another entanglement going on. I wrote about this recently in this article 

mobile phones — Andrew Tate — hormones — fragments of sexual knowledge — trans/queerness — football shirts — nail varnish — chairs — my absence-presence — commitments to marriage — spacious classroom — covid — presence-absence of teaching staff — school rules signs — play-dough — previous sexual experiences — unique cultures — concerns about pregnancy — music — the resources

Added to this in my conversations with young men specifically bringing him or ideas from the manosphere up the assemblage of factors producing this might be:

checking my credentials — my age — the extent of my commitments to feminism and anti-oppression — that they don’t know me — will I (over)react — how interested I am in what they have to say — opening up a conversation — ‘expert’ facilitator — ‘naughty boys’ — queerness — bonding with mates — things they can’t ask but want to — testing my ability to listen  — tea and consent video (or other dreadful ‘consent campaigns’)

It’s important to go a lot further than just thinking about the effect that influencers have on individuals. Thinking of what might produce the effect in class (or wherever else) can give us really important clues as to how we might deal with it. It also provides us with some room to think about the kinds of technologies of care we might use to educate and protect them, others, and ourselves.

Motivations and solutions

When we see toxic masculinity being brought up, it’s very easy to just assume that the only motivations for this are because they want to cause harm. This might be true of course. And if someone is doing harm, it needs to be dealt with like any other harm, either via safeguarding protocols or bullying policies, or how you deal with violence in schools or colleges. 

However, it is worth thinking about some of the motivations for why someone might be doing toxic masculinities. This also gives us some space to think about how we might un/produce them, to think about solutions, and to provide lines of flight for their masculinities to become other.

Discomfort and disconnection

Perhaps in the process of saying something out loud they want to see how long these ideas can survive in the offline world, with people, relations, reputations, and the risk of disconnection. The manosphere have spaces for men to produce and reproduce an armour which seeks to contain the fragile and disconnected masculinities of its participants. Maybe they want to test this in the ‘real’ world.

They might also be revealing a sense of their own discomfort with their unconscious, or what makes them vulnerable. I talk about how hegemonic masculinity forms the dough of a jam doughnut. When the jam (feelings) are at risk of being revealed they create more hegemonic masculinities to cover it up. Consider the young man who isn’t popular, isn’t sporty or athletic, isn’t wealthy, isn’t considered attractive, what kinds of masculinities are left available for them to produce? Violent, misogynist, and oppressive ones. 

RSE and Recognition

It might be in response to the curriculum. They are saying ‘I want to talk about gender, particularly my gender.’ How does your curriculum or school present masculinities? Do you have a great deal of RSE? If you only have a bit, how else does your school produce young masculinities? If your curriculum is simply producing a discourse of young masculinities as being perennially the problem, then you’re part of the problem. See also if your RSE uncritically produces a heteropessimism. Again, I’ve got plenty more on this here.

They might be seeking recognition. As Jacob Johanssen writes in Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: “It needs to be stressed that the very creation of their toxic identities undermines recognition by the other. However, this does not mean that they would not deeply desire a sense of recognition which goes beyond the immediate one of their male communities.” 

You might be thinking, I wish I could get men in my school / community who would be up for doing this work. IKR? That would be very helpful. However a) hegemonic masculinities disallows this in men even if they are teachers, and b) women can be very good at doing this work too. (Shout out here to the brilliant women who trained me to do this work.) What we need is a structural change where the status of RSE is boosted. For example: there’s more time in the timetable for RSE, there’s more money for training and resources, the PSHE co-ordinator being on the same pay as head of department or year. Make a bigger pie and then see how we slice it up. 

Can we show a different way?

Perhaps they might be testing us and our response. What if the hateful things they were saying about the other (women, queer folk, anyone who is a ‘phallic’ threat to a fragile masculinity) mirrored, or in some way replicated, the hatred they might feel for themselves. Jacob Johanssen talks about this as ‘dis/inhibition’ (I’ve massively oversimplified it though).

Maybe also they want you to experience some of the fear and sadness that permeates their gendered identity (which the manosphere thrives on). Perhaps they are just asking for the smallest glimmer that you can offer them a different kind of masculinity to hold on to? What are the possibilities for our responses to create a new line of flight where they might become a different kind of masculinity. 

As Laura U Marks says in her chapter in Spectres of Fascism (I got this from Jacob’s book) “There are lots of cultures and subcultures of men who don’t cultivate or reject the armoured ideal [of the Freikorps soldiers, or alpha masculi­nity]. In North American societies, there are slackers, dropouts, ‘sensitive men’ (sometimes). Bears and puppies who push back against the gay hard body-cult. Born males who reject the gender and try out a third path. ‘Lesbian boys’. Stylish men. Men who grow old gracefully. Men at ease with their sexuality. Gentle fathers. Gamers who manage to balance the imaginary body adventuring in virtual space and the soft, flabby, physical body at the console. There are so many kinds of lovely men.” 

Small interventions can make a huge difference

Certainly over my career (having worked with thousands of young men in person and millions online) I’ve had the most successful interventions with young men when I can pause, breathe, and ask questions that might help them do this. “What does that do for you?” “What else?” “What difference would it make to you if …?” “I’m noticing that you’re het up, is everything okay?” 

I do this with young men who don’t know me at all (which has its advantages and disadvantages). If I don’t co-produce this toxicity, (locking horns, giving them a bollocking, backing them into a corner) but gently challenge them and open up a space for them to be better, the outcomes can be staggering. Young men are so desperate for nourishment and care. They will ask for it even if you show the slightest signs that you are willing to offer it. 

It’s not easy to do this, but be encouraged by the idea that all these young men want from you is a glimmer of hope that they can become other. How can you respond to someone that will show them that different kinds of masculinities are possible?

Keep paying attention to what’s better

We might need to be creative in how we tackle it. Making sure we make and stick to group agreements. Only having discussions with young men in their small groups. Quiet words after class. Keeping a pastoral eye out in the rest of the school. But if you can, what might be the smallest sign that a young man has become non-toxic? What might you notice? Is there anything he might notice in your response? This kind of ‘what’s better’ way of thinking is from solution focused therapy and is a way of seeing the resources not deficits. 

Showing this kind of compassion for young men doing toxic masculinities is not going to land well with everyone. But if we see it as a form of safeguarding and harm minimisation for everyone else, as well as the young men themselves, then we might start to see things from a different perspective. It’s not like everything else has been working.

(Keep scrolling for tips after this ad for my resources – please also consider supporting BISH on Patreon)

(A few more) Tips on how to deal with toxic masculinities in RSE

The discourses about all of this can really zap our confidence and it makes it all sounds very scary. Doing this work is a bit easier than it sounds and I would be doing a bad job if I were to say that it was too hard for you to do. Here are a few more things that I’ve found very helpful, but it might be a better idea for you to reflect on what has worked for you and to talk about this with colleagues. 

Safety via group agreements

The first thing to do is to keep the class safe. If young men are choosing to repeat harmful discourses, we need to make sure that we reduce the possibility of this harming others in the room. This can, of course, include us. This is why having a group agreement is really important. Group agreements means that any discussion we have has to be had in good faith, where we really try to use language that is appropriate, and is not harmful. It’s about recognising that relationships, sexuality, gender, the self, are really tricky topics and we need a lot of care to make sure it will go okay.

It’s also really important when we create a group agreement, which may be about vibe or scene setting, that we make explicit that this kindness and care to everyone in the room, including young men. If, when we frame a group agreement, or introduce a class, we fix young men in the social location of ‘likely abuser’ then this is going to form part of an assemblage which might produce someone bringing up someone from the manosphere. 

Just do small group work

Small groups really helps with this. I very rarely work with a whole class at once. It’s much better to put people in small friendship groups and give them a really interesting and challenging activity to do, rather than just work in one big group. This way we can reduce risks but also have opportunities to have interesting micro-facilitations responding to the specific needs of the groups. 

So I could be answering questions about pregnancy risks, be asked for nail polish tips, having a conversation about transitioning, and be asked provocative questions like ‘how many genders are there’ all in the same class whilst keeping the risks of harm low, taking part in each discussion as I find them, and everyone having an interesting lesson. I very rarely ask the whole class to take part in the same discussion with me standing at the front of the class. 

Pay attention to what you’re bringing

RSE or any education for that matter doesn’t happen outside of you. I think it’s useful to think about you as being part of an intra-active flow of education rather than an ‘expert’ teacher interacting with ‘inexpert’ students. I really like this definition of this. 

“Intra-action is a Baradian term used to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces (Barad, 2007, p. 141) in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably. Intra-action also acknowledges the impossibility of an absolute separation or classically understood objectivity, in which an apparatus (a technology or medium used to measure a property) or a person using an apparatus are not considered to be part of the process that allows for specifically located ‘outcomes’ or measurement.”

This means how you respond, what mood you’re in, and what you’re seeing (or what you think you’re seeing) is as much a part of the lesson as your students. Honestly, the best lessons I facilitate are those when I am really believing in this. It means that I can stay calm, curious, and kind. This helps the students to do the same and the outcomes can be amazing. 

Don’t debate

Debates in class are just the worst. I also always have to remind myself not to lock horns with people either. A few stock responses I always have are: 

“I don’t know, what do you think?”

“Some people think that, but other people think different things”

“Oh that’s interesting, what makes you think that?”

“How is that useful idea for you?”

“Of course not everyone is going to agree with that, but you do you.”

“A better word for that is ___________ but yeah I understand what you’re saying.”

Trying to intellectually defeat people’s arguments makes for incredibly dull RSE and has some possible backfire effects. If we spend a lesson arguing with someone who is a fan of men are essentially this and women are essentially this, then we’ve taken up a huge amount of space. We’ve given our interlocutor space and time for their arguments, which reifies the arguments. This can have a backfire effect of making their arguments seem like they have something to them. It also prevents us from looking at a subject from lots of different perspectives.

Preventative work

Clearly the best thing to do is preventative work. Reactive RSE is usually a sign that you’ve not been doing a good enough job in your school for some time. It’s also likely to be crap. Ticking a box in order to say that you’ve covered a topic where really it’s just providing cover. Young people can see right through it. I know this because often they tell me this when I come into schools. There are tons of activities in my resources that you can use with all students to explore gender and sexuality.  

Support my work on this

If you join the BISH Patreon at the £10 a month tier you’ll find this article, with a resource you can use in class, and loads of other self-reflexive resources. BISH is my website for young people, which is very popular with young men. Thousands of young people are getting their sex ed from BISH. It’s an important corrective to right wing discourses about sex and relationships, particularly those from the manosphere.

For example, late last October / early November, we (I) had an influx of thousands of young men wanting advice on how to survive No Nut November. Find out more about this by becoming a Patron today. I just need 2000 £1 a month subscribers and I’ll stop asking. 4000 and it’s a full time job. That’s at patreon.com/bishuk

The post The ‘effect’ of toxic masculinity influencers 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. 

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

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.

Introductions

I began by introducing myself, using my first name (though making a joke about my surname) and the idea of the sessions and what we are aiming to achieve. Then I verbally talked through some of the expectations for the session. I might normally call a group agreement but in this case it was about setting the scene and the tone. It went something like: 

“Talking about sex, relationships, sexuality, and gender can be a bit awkward and tricky. We are going to discover how we can make this easier as part of our discussions but at the beginning it might feel a little bit awkward. If you find yourself feeling a bit awkward [at this point I gestured to my diaphragm as if this might be a spot where awkwardness might first be felt for me] it’s okay, just acknowledge it to yourself, or say it out loud. Take a long breath out, blink and refocus, and see what happens to the awkwardness after that. 

I’m not going to make anyone get involved, and you’ll see that the way the game is structured is to give people as much choice as possible about whether they get involved or not. It’s also okay, if you’re finding this a bit much, just to sit out of discussions and look at your phone for a bit. I’m not going to think any less of you or think that you are not taking part at all. All I will think is ‘this is someone who has accepted my offer of just sitting out for a bit and that’s totally fine.’ Please also don’t make each other get involved. 

I’ll be roaming around when you’re working in small groups. I’m not deliberately listening to your conversations and, as I’m deaf in one ear, I probably can’t hear you anyway. If you have any questions, or anything you want to chat with me about in small groups let me know. 

I can’t offer 100% confidentiality. If I think you’re at serious risk of harm I’ll need to speak to the head of year or the safeguarding lead for the school. I can also help you to speak to someone about this if that’s something you want. Also please be mindful of how much you want to share about your own life when you’re chatting in small or large groups. If you overshare something we can all agree to keep that in the group. 

We also need to talk about prejudice and discrimination, because there is a lot of potential for this when we talk about sex and relationships. For example, in your heads, bring to mind the kinds of words or phrases used to describe ‘men who enjoy sex’ [pause] now think of the phrases used to describe ‘women who enjoy sex’ [pause]. As you can probably see, one group receives status and another group receives stigma, and this is just one example of sexism.

Similar things also happen around race, for example there’s a lot of racism in porn. There’s also the possibility for homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and also classism, xenophobia, and disablism. Try and bring to mind words or phrases used to describe people with disabilities and sex [pause], you’ll probably find that there aren’t very many and those that exist are pretty negative. So as you can see, prejudice and discrimination can pop up when we talk about sex but also sex and relationships are also weaponised in doing prejudice and discrimination. We should try where possible not to add to that. 

However, I also want this to be a space where we can all learn about this stuff because it’s important. So if we can all agree that we don’t say anything deliberately harmful or offensive. And in turn we look on each other with kind eyes and assume that everyone’s contributions are in good faith. It’s my job to help facilitate this, so get me involved if there are any problems and I can help.

Does anyone have any questions about this? Or anything that they would need in order to feel like they could take part more?”

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Introducing the game

All of this was received extremely quietly. I made note of this and said that this would probably be the most I would speak in the whole session. 

Then I asked everyone to get into small groups of between 4 and 6, saying that these group numbers seem to work best but if they are a bit below or above that’s fine. There were clusters of bunched up tables with chairs sitting around, spread out over a double classroom with the dividing doors closed. So lots of space in between different groups. 

I explained the Talking Sex Ed game as per the instructions in the resource and gave them some tips and options on how they might play it. Particularly the part about choosing their own cards and the importance of bringing more consent (choice and freedom) into how they might do that. I then distributed the 100 cards around the 5 or 6 groups which emerged, along with a tub of play-dough each and access to paper and pens. 

I said “now, you’re going to be playing this for about an hour or so (if you want to). I’m just going to float around and you can ask me questions if you like. It’s going to look like I’m not working, but I promise you I am!” This made people smile. 

The cards are designed as a jumping off point for conversations and for relationships and sexuality education generally. It’s a resource I designed specifically for this purpose as a way for me to get participants to participate in their RSE. They collect a range of discourses, dilemmas, and technologies of the self which are intended to deterritorialise RSE with a new line of flight towards a becoming RSE. What (else) can RSE do? 

‘Becoming’ RSE

As we will see, the game itself, how it’s played and how players are invited to work with the resource, also opens up the possibilities for learning how to facilitate and co-create. This deterritorialised way of working allows for a greater deal of indeterminacy. The cards might remain the same, but the language games are different each time because they come into contact with the mico-politics of the small groups that are working with them at that time. Any learning outcomes are not an over-determined, inter-active, process of sexuality educator – students, but are a becoming which stems from the intra-active and indeterminate flow of the assemblages of the session (and beyond). 

Quite quickly there was a hubbub of conversation around the rooms. Each of the participants were bringing their own understandings, perspectives, experiences, and discourses. They were facilitating the discussions themselves, sitting facing each other. These conversations consisted of an assemblage of (among many other things)

mobile phones — Andrew Tate — hormones — fragments of sexual knowledge — trans/queerness — football shirts — nail varnish — chairs — my absence-presence — commitments to marriage — spacious classroom — covid — presence-absence of teaching staff — school rules signs — play-dough — previous sexual experiences — unique cultures — concerns about pregnancy — music — the cards

My role was to provide an ‘absentpresentness’, where I was simultaneously giving and holding space in order that conversation could happen without me. Yet I was always making myself available by walking around the room, checking in non-verbally, looking for signs of discomfort, or stress, or boredom. I would switch the cards around and use that opportunity to ask verbal check-ins ‘how’s it going? / yeah it’s great’ or ‘what does this card mean?’ 

I could see that people were immediately making use of the play-dough, to make penises and vulvas (even without being invited to by the cards). There were other sculptures being made too, perhaps at the invitation of the cards ‘model what a healthy relationship / orgasm /safety  / trust might look or feel like’. I didn’t intervene but saw a lot of creativity on display.

Occasionally groups would call me over and ask for my advice. Sometimes I knew and gave long detailed answers. Other times I signposted to other resources or organisations. On other occasions I said I’d get back to them. Some groups wanted to chat with me about topics generally. ‘How many genders are there?’ was a question I was asked a few times from (people I read to be) young men. Sometimes these micro-political conversations with me allowed for a becoming other of masculinities for them, (and me).

Any interventions I was asked to give lasted no longer than 2 – 3 minutes. A lot of questions were met with more questions from me ‘what do you think?’ ‘maybe ‘what does _________ do?’ might be a more interesting question’. Asking good questions and walking away to allow them to make their own senses of questions of discourse. 

Making sense of the session

After 50 minutes to an hour of this I brought everyone together to face the whiteboard. “Okay I’m going to do some teaching now so it makes it look like I’m working. Remember I said that talking about sex and relationships can be awkward, well, you’ve been talking about it with each other about an hour or so. What I want to know is, what were you doing to make it easier to talk about sex and relationships?”

Here’s what they came up with

I summed this up for each group by saying: 

“what you’ve found in playing this game, and what I’ve just asked you to pay attention to, is all of the vital things we need in order to make conversations about sex and relationships easier. The most basic bit of advice that most sex educators tell you is that ‘everybody is different, so the key to successful sex and relationships is to communicate’. But they just stop there. What you’ve actually practised, and learnt today, is how to communicate. You’ve learnt this from other aspects of your life, your own experiences, your own understandings of what trust / openness / honesty feel like, and applied them here. Vibe isn’t just something that happens, it’s something that you create and, like you’ve done today, co-create. You make it with someone. So, if you are having a conversation about sex and relationships think about what kinds of things you can both do to create the vibe where the possibilities for the conversation are maximised. Think about the things you’ve come up with today: giving each other time, turn taking, music, rituals, privacy, choices, choosing own topics, the ability to be affirmative, listening and how we know we are being listened to, how we pay attention, making it interesting or lighthearted, learning knowledges together, having props and prompts, using a resource, how we increase comfort in our bodies, what we do without words etc”

What (else) does a becoming RSE do?

So in taking part in a becoming relationships and sexuality education the participants also learnt the kinds of things that need to be in place to allow for relationships and sexuality to become. This had an accumulative effect for the remainder of our time together, where participants, in the acknowledged space where things feel a bit easier to talk about. This resulted in greater enthusiasm for the subject and a greater confidence in taking ownership of the kinds of topics they would like to learn more about. I gave each group choices about what else they would like to explore in that space, which resulted in us learning about: 

• safer sex practices (how to use condoms, how to make and use dams)
• Fertility and pregnancy risks
• What we can learn about consent from our greetings (in a pre and post covid world)
• What thinking critically about relationship discourses might do to help us have better relationships
• The harmful discourses about ‘first time sex’ and the lines of flight we can draw to have better first time experiences (whatever they may be)

Feedback

The students are very keen for me to come again (as are the school).

He created a very open and nonjudgmental environment which was good. Recommend for next year.

please use Justin again. His teaching style was engaging and the information was presented in a comfortable way.

the instructor used creative ways to help us learn about sex and relationships, let us have our own space and overall created a good environment to discuss these issues

I enjoyed Justins method of teaching us about sex and relationships. Though this technically wasnt a direct teaching session, the activites he put together made sure everyone contributed and was involved. He discussed the topic in a very comfortable and relaxed manner which is very important too.

I think Justin was a good choice! It was not an awkward session and he was very clear about boundaries between student’s and teachers. It was useful to learn about the “societal script” for sex and how it results in violence and discomfort. It was also good to learn about how to ensure healthy/open communication and how important it is in all types of relationships.

He really helped me. I have been struggling with a certain relationship dilema and i talked to him about it. He helped me get a more clear answer and was there for me as a guide. He made sure all the activities we did were enjoyable and consentual

I believe that it was incredibly helpful, interactive, and generally fun.

The Talking Sex Ed Game is available to buy here. It’s ridiculously cheap. You have to print and cut them yourself (it took me about an hour). There is also the option to use the resource on a tablet or laptop too (just zooming in and around one big image with all the cards).

If you want to book me to come and teach some sessions for your organisation (school, college, uni, youth club), find out more here. It’s quite costly for a lot of schools sadly (my rates have not increased in years, but budgets have decreased).

The post How to make talking about sex and relationships easier – a workshop appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

When RSE talks are useful

Sometimes a talk might be the appropriate thing to deliver. There are times when young people need the information about the topic, before they can talk to each other about it. For example: an interesting and engaging talk about sex and the law (good luck with that). Or a talk about local sexual health services, what confidentiality is, and how people are supported around their reproductive choices. Or what the school are doing to stop bullying and (sexual) violence. What processes, resources, and support services you have in place.

When RSE workshops are better

However if we rely on talks for RSE then we run the risk of making lessons more about what we think. Any RSE we deliver should be giving students resources to help their own critical thinking. Talks also runs the risk of creating more ‘should stories’ or discourse.

When someone is able to stand in front of a group of people and tell them something then that person has a lot of power. Even if they are saying ‘the right thing’ just creating discourse is not the best way of teaching RSE. Good RSE is about understanding discourse and developing tools in order to understand what might be useful for us. Foucault called these ‘technologies of the self’.

Even if you were organising a talk which was based around what we might think of as ‘good discourse’, they might still go very wrong. Getting these kinds of talks right is very difficult. The speaker needs to really know their stuff and be confident and authoritative. But it also needs to be engaging. They need to be a good performer, take the topic seriously, and have a degree of levity. Finding good talkers is hard and good talkers (should) command a high fee for what they do.

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Being talked at is not great RSE

Crucially, young people are turned off from how RSE is delivered. They are bored of powerpoints, demonstrations and being talked at. It’s boring and unhelpful being told what the problem is without being given the chance to learn solutions. They are tired of being told what to think and are tired of the simplistic messages of ‘just say no’ or ‘always protect yourself’ or ‘it’s fine to be gay.’

Think back to your own RSE. Did you get talked at? Even if you had a good talk, did you also get any opportunity to discuss it? Or learn to practice any skills as a result? Did you get to talk about your values with others? How did it affect you?

My Talking Sex Ed resource is the ideal way to get started delivering your RSE.

As RSE is about skills, values, emotions and information, it is best taught using participatory and interactive learning methods. It’s not about the chalk and talk but asking great questions and facilitating fascinating discussions. This also means that we can make it about them and not us. You can only really get that from an RSE workshop.

My approach to RSE Workshops

So at best, a blend of talks and interactive workshops is the key here. Teachers are often best placed to deliver the latter, and can rely on people like me, and local outreach workers, to deliver the former. But even then I always veer towards delivering interactive workshops.

This might reassure people who think that I go into schools and give talks to kids about what is on my website. I don’t actually do that because BISH isn’t a teaching resource and (as I’ve said above) it’s boring to show people a website. The only time I use BISH is just to signpost in case there are any questions that I can’t answer in class (or would be inappropriate to answer in class) or if I’m finding an illustration to help answer a question. Other than that I am delivering workshops, where young people work together in small groups and co-create the learning. They are learning crucial skills about communication, co-operation and consent, whilst also being given opportunities to reflect on their values with others compassionately.

The post Talks vs Workshops in RSE appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

The resource was written by me, Justin Hancock, and Alice Hoyle. We are two of the leading RSE folk in the UK with over three decades of experience between us. In late 2021 Durex removed their support for the project and they took the website down entirely.

We thought that was a shame and so we decided to salvage the best of the resources available and put them altogether in this one document. At some point we might update this and make a website but we can’t promise anything as we also need to get paid for our work as we are both freelance. 

Download the DO… RSE for Schools resources

I’m also running a training course using DO… Check out my eventbrite page for more details.

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

About Alice and Justin

We both offer training, resources, project work and have both written books that you could also buy. Visit our websites to find out more. You are at my website of course, you can see all the resources I have here.

Alice also has some excellent resources, particularly her book Great Relationships and Sex Education. See her work at alicehoyle.co.uk

As part of the project I had to write a lot of copy for the agency promoting it. So here is a nice little intro about DO…

About DO… RSE for Schools

A lot of people imagine that sex education is about standing in front of a class and saying words “Penetration. Orgasm. Pornography.” Just imagine how difficult that would be, especially to a classroom full of young people convinced they knew more about this than you. 

Thankfully, doing really great sex and relationships education is not about that. We don’t believe that it should be about standing up and braving it out like that and it we won’t help you if we keep saying how tough it is to do. 

Teachers doing this deserve to have the training and support to be able to feel confident enough to deliver it. However in the meantime, by stripping SRE down to the core fundamental principles we want to help you see what you can deliver with the skills and experience you already have.

The problem with SRE teaching

Sex is a very big topic to teach. It is very personal, it’s about values, emotions, personal experience. Our own experience of sex and relationships education (and sex and relationships) means some people can talk about sex with a matter of fact confidence like any other topic whilst others feel inhibited and scared of saying the wrong thing.

Added to this, there isn’t enough SRE in the timetable for teachers to expand their knowledge and hone their skills. So not enough teachers who feel they can teach SRE get the opportunity to get better at it.

I’ve been working in SRE, teaching students and training educators, for over 15 years. I know how challenging but also how rewarding this area is. I feel like I’m learning how to be a better sex and relationships educator with every class and training course I deliver.

It’s great to have sexual health expertise in the classroom but it’s not always necessary. Delivering great SRE is not about being an expert, or even a sexpert. It’s about using really effective teaching skills, to listen not tell. 

What is great SRE

So what is great SRE? 

Well it’s open and honest. Sex, sexuality, relationships, gender and you (us) are complicated and we are all learning all the time. Even me.

It includes absolutely everyone, whoever they may want to have sex and relationships with (or not). 

It focusses on values and skills as well as information. 

We make it about them, not us. So we deliver what young people want.

It’s inspired by great teachers who know how to listen and encourage. 

But ultimately, great SRE does right by young people. 

DO teachers resource

We share a common goal of putting young people first. So to help us achieve it, DO have developed a range of resources designed specifically for you, the SRE teachers and champions. 

These resources will help young people to think about how they can look after themselves and each other. To challenge expectations placed on them by society around their identity and relationships. Give them the opportunity to think about what sex and relationships they might want rather than what they feel they should have. And how to make sure their sexual encounters are safer as well as nurturing and enjoyable. 

There are interactive and challenging lesson plans that will help your lessons really click. They are not about talks and powerpoint, but about real engagement designed to promote critical thinking and real change.

Anyway, if that sounds good, do download the resources below

Download the DO… RSE for Schools resources

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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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