Talking Sex Ed is a discussion game for young people (14+) about sex and relationships. Over 100 challenging and fun cards for young people (and adults). A game to learn and practise key skills and vital information whilst also exploring key concepts and reflecting on their values and ethics. It’s a (mostly) self-facilitating game, with comprehensive instructions for players on how to use a group agreement to create the right vibe. Players also cooperate and negotiate with each other about how to play and how to score. Perfect for youth projects and tutor groups and a great way to get the conversation going.

“It’s bloody brilliant.”

About this resource

This is absolutely not meant to replace comprehensive sexuality education. However, this can be a complementary resource and it might also help conversations between you and the young people about what they might want from sex education.

Good quality sex and relationships education should encompass 4 different aspects. Good quality information; acquisition of skills; the opportunity to reflect on their values and ethics, and; to engage with how sex and relationships might affect people emotionally.

In addition to that, with this game participants will actually experience some really important concepts. By being given the responsibility to discuss the group agreement and facilitate each other they will experience what it feels like to have boundaries in place and the kinds of work that needs to happen. By cooperating in the scoring system and in agreeing ‘what the right answer is’ they are also co-creating the experience for themselves.

Of course, creating a safe enough space for co-creation are key factors in consensual sex and relationships. Here’s an opportunity for them to experience this in sex and relationships education.

Here’s an article on how I’ve used the resource recently.

Using Talking Sex Ed

I’ve been developing this game for a few years. I was doing small group work with young people and needed a resource to help get the conversation going. If you’re in a youth group, it’s the kind of thing that you could lay out on a coffee table. You could use it in tutor time to fill a few minutes, or use it over the course of a few lessons to build up a conversation about what sex education the young people actually want.

“They engaged really well with it”

As it’s a self-facilitating game your role is really just to help organise the groups. To provide a gentle overview to make sure everyone is cooperating, and to just to round off the lesson at the end. So what I do is to just make myself available to groups in case they have any issues and to keep an eye on how things seem to be going. If they ask you to take part in their game, feel free, but mostly your role is just to float around and make sure the vibe is good. Pay attention mostly to the group agreements as they are playing out in the room. You can read more about how I use the resource in this article.

If you do want to have a closing round at the end with the whole class / group then try to just draw out what they got out of the game itself. Ask them if they felt able to cooperate, where they able to stick to the group agreements, did they feel like they could take part? If you focus in on the process in this way you can draw out some really important learning about how we can practice things like consent, boundaries, and cooperation. You could also reflect on hierarchies and how it felt for them to be trying to work together on their own learning, rather than relying on you to be ‘the expert.’

What you get in Talking Sex Ed

This is a download and print your own resource, so you should receive an immediate download link. Inside are the pdfs for you to download and print out. You will need access to a printer. Scissors / guillotine (there are guidelines on the page to help you cut the cards up). There’s also an image file so that you can see all of the discussion cards on a screen, such as a tablet or phone. Perfect for if you want to play it first with friends, family or colleagues.

“We’ve had a proper laugh with it in the office as practice …”

Brought to you by BISH

The game is designed as complementary to my website BISH, a website about sex, love, and you, for over 14s. It’s one of the leading sex ed websites online. Visited by thousands of young people a day from around the world. I don’t like to blow my own trumpet, but if you want to see what other practitioners, academics, one celebrity doctor, and young people say about it, visit this page at my Patreon (and if you want to support the Patreon there from £1 a month, that would be wonderful!)

Train Yourself in RSE Self reflexive and self guided training in relationships and sex education. Blogs, audio, and monthly zoom meetings. Out now at the BISH Patreon on the £10 a month tier. Or get in touch if you can’t sign up to Patreon and I’ll sell you a yearly subscription.

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It’s about consent and negotiation and I cover the following topics.

• An introduction where I talk about bishuk.com and show a page about sexual health services
• That consent is about freedom and choices (not just saying, or waiting for, a yes or a no)
• Consent is important in all aspects of our lives, not just sex
• Self consent (how we might practice tuning into our own wants, needs, and desires by choosing a chocolate bar)
• The importance of agency (understanding our own decision making power and why it’s important)
• The impact of non-consensual behaviour on our own agency
• How to choose with another person (how to choose a Netflix show to watch with someone)
• What makes choosing with someone else tricky, but why it’s also fun
• Navigating and negotiating physical interactions with someone (I do this by explaining the handshakes activity from the Consent Teaching Pack, rather than asking the students to do it which (I’m guessing) at most schools you can’t do at the moment
• Sex and why we should treat it more like choosing something to watch on TV rather than a greeting
• What makes this tricky (the subject matter and stigma for talking about what we want from sex)
• Embracing awkwardness in sexual negotiations
• Power imbalances and how this might have an impact

The video itself is around 36 minutes long, but I have discussion points on slides throughout. I give you a cue to pause the video to allow for students to discuss the points I’m making.  There are five moments where you can pause the video to talk about

• How choosing a chocolate bar might be tricky
• What happened last time you tried to watch TV with someone
• How are you negotiating greetings now in Covid times
• What makes negotiating sex tricky
• Power imbalance scenarios

So you could do this in one double period lesson, or if you wanted to pad it out for a bit you could do it over a couple of lessons or even a week’s worth of tutor times. This would also work well with some of the activities I have in the Consent Teaching Pack. 

If this is popular I will make other talks!

Train Yourself in RSE Self reflexive and self guided training in relationships and sex education. Blogs, audio, and monthly zoom meetings. Out now at the BISH Patreon on the £10 a month tier. Or get in touch if you can’t sign up to Patreon and I’ll sell you a yearly subscription.

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A comprehensive teaching pack about Consent, from the author of Can We Talk About Consent

Like all my resources, this Consent Teaching Pack is a download and print your own pack. You’ll receive a download link when you place your order (you might need to check your spam folder for this email).

I’ve been developing some these consent activities for years and have delivered these resources with young people, adults, and professionals. My feedback from all of these folks is that the activities have enabled them to explore consent in much greater depth than many other teaching or workshop activities.

My lofty ambitions for this consent teaching pack are: for people to start to see consent as affecting all of us; that it is not just to do with sex; and how we can use our power to bring consent into all of our relationships, interactions, and cultures.

Don’t be put off by this though! I hope that you will find the activities easy and fun to use. These resources are designed to be used with ‘14s to adult’ audiences (though some are adaptable to a younger age group). There is increasing interest in consent workshops for all ages in schools, colleges, universities, workplaces, conferences and other events. There is plenty here for you to find the right activity and the right tone for your lesson plan and workshop.

***

This pack contains the following activities:

Choose Chocolate 

It’s not easy to meet our own needs whilst also meeting the needs of other people. It’s very hard to do this around anything, so this activity helps your workshop participants to do this by choosing and eating chocolate (chocolate not included).

Self Care 

It can be difficult to feel what it is we might need when we are also trying to meet the needs of another person. Following on from the chocolate activity this self care activity helps folk to think about how they can tune into their own needs more often.

Talk for a Minute

In my experience many people are tired of being taught about consent and sex in over-simplistic terms and not be given the opportunity to talk about it. So this activity is to encourage people to think about their values and attitudes and to hear those of other people too. Over 30 challenging discussion cards, each with facilitator prompts.

Handshakes

An experiential learning tool to help people understand what it feels like to communicate your needs and to meet the needs of another, whilst also learning about the societal messages which make this more difficult. This has proved to be a very popular activity on here, but I’ve included an updated version with comprehensive slides to help pull the learning together.

Body Maps

To think about where people might and might not want to be touched (and how to find out). We receive messages from sex advice and sex education that there are parts of the body where everyone likes to be touched — this activity explores why this is not true and also not helpful when it comes to consensual sex.

Body Reactions

This activity explores how bodies might react when they are enjoying or not enjoying something.

How to Listen

Thinking about how we can pay attention to how people react to make sure that sex (or any other activity we do with another person) is consensual.

What is Sex?

Explore the many different ways of having sex with someone with a view to learning about safer sex, consent and sexual scripts. The messages we receive about what counts as sex often boil down to sex being just about penetration. This is a problematic idea because it excludes a lot of people (who can’t have or don’t enjoy that kind of sex) but it also puts pressure on people to have a particular kind of sex. This activity helps participants to think of a range of sexual activities which people may enjoy. This opens up the idea of having sex that we might actually want, rather than having sex which we feel we should have.

Who is Allowed to Have Sex?

Finding out who gets status for having sex and who gets stigma. This is a critically important part of learning about consent.

Power and Sex 

How stigma and status can lead to a difference in power between people when it comes to sex and relationships.

Create a Consensual Sex Scene

To think about how consent might look on-screen if they paid attention to consent.

Also included is a simple explanation of the law and consent in a slideshow.

Teaching RSE in Schools

If you are a teacher in a school and you are getting started delivering Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) I would strongly recommend you head to DO… RSE for Schools. There you will find everything you need to get started delivering really high quality RSE in schools. It has lesson plans written by me and Alice Hoyle. It’s about how we feel about ourselves, gender expectations, relationships, consent (featuring a version of the handshakes activity in this pack), and safer sex. These resources are all free and available now.

Going Beyond Consent

I think that consent is by far and away the most important topic in sex and relationships education and in sex advice. However, it isn’t the only topic. If you would like some more teaching resources might I recommend my ‘Love, Innit’ teaching pack about relationships.

You might also find my Bish Activity Book helpful. This is a book featuring over 40 worksheets and activity ideas for RSE and one-to-one work with young people. I’ve included a few of the relevant pages from that resource here.

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This activity book is a companion piece to Bish to help young people to make sense of relationships and sex for themselves. It’s about asking students some big questions to help them work out how they feel about themselves and relationships and sex.

To that end there are worksheets around self-esteem, self-care, relationships, feeling better about our bodies, sex, consent and communication in this resource. As well as some of these more serious worksheets there are also fun activities such as join the dots, spot the difference, colouring-in, and a board game.

With the two approaches combined I hope that young folk will be able to have some of the outcomes of good RSE.

However, even a comprehensive advice website and an accompanying activity book is no substitute for good classroom RSE. Having a space where people can discuss the big topics that I cover in this resource can be invaluable to them.

If you are new to delivering RSE, or are wishing to revamp your curriculum, you might want to have a look at the rest of my resources at bishtraining.com. You might also be interested in another comprehensive resource that I was heavily involved in writing, called DO….

DO… is a free resource for teachers containing everything they need to get started delivering really great RSE. It’s super inclusive, is all about the students, and is modern and relevant. Best of all you don’t need to be an expert in RSE to deliver it, just a confident teacher.

This activity book complements Bish but I think it would also make a great companion resource for DO…. You could use some of these pages as worksheets in tutor time, or as a plenary activity, or even as homework.

This resource is for over 14s and maybe a little bit older (just like everything at Bish and DO…). You know your students best though. There might be some sections that you want to give them and some you may want to leave out (which is why there are no page numbers).

For latest updates about RSE and ideas on best practice, don’t forget to check out the blog section of bishtraining.com or indeed follow me on twitter @bishtraining

Hope you find this resource useful!

Total number of pages – 51

Page size – A4

Instant download

180 dpi resolution

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A unique and inclusive way to show the huge diversity of genitals. These beautiful pictures by Stuart F. Taylor are detailed enough yet beautifully rendered so that they are not too confronting.

Included in this download pack is:

A two sided A4 leaflet for you print and copy. This can be folded into 8 as you can see here

Inside this leaflet is a fun join the dots activity!

And also two different kinds of posters — again this is for you to download, print and copy

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This isn’t really a teaching resource as such but more a resource for you to print out and make available. So you could use it for one-to-one work, or you could have some on a stall, you could leave some lying around in communal areas in halls, you could even make a display I guess.

I just wanted to create some resources for you to use to get the message across about what good consensual behaviour looks like but also to give people tools for working out how to do consent better. It draws a lot on what I’ve written at BISH but by offering them in these nice printed formats they might be picked up by new people. If you are looking for a teaching pack, for if you want to run workshops about consent then you might like my Consent Teaching Pack, which has loads of ideas for different activities you could run.

It contains:

How to Have Consensual Sex Zine

University will be the first time that many people will be having, or interested in having, sex and relationships. So this is a practical and hopefully useful guide which is pitched at the older teen/early twenty something (and I’d appreciate it if it was not used with a younger audience than this). As you can see it’s not just telling people what consent is but also how to get it, what makes consent harder, and ideas for how to have more enjoyable sex. There’s also a space where you can put the details of where people can report non-consensual sex, or non-consensual behaviours generally, or just get support.

Consent Worksheets

These are taken from the Bish Activity Book and are some of the worksheets which can help people to figure out for themselves some of the key questions about consent. Such as: what kind of sex they may like; where they do or don’t like to be touched; and, how to make sure that first time sex with someone will go okay.

How to Ask Someone Out Consensually

This is a poster taken from one of my more popular posts at BISH. It is an antidote to pick up artistry and tries to give people realistic and honest advice about how to chat to someone they don’t know in real life. You might want to put this up in venue toilets (of all genders) or at whatever social event you might be having.

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• Relationships and You,
• Doing It Not Doing It and Doing Stuff,
• Bodies,
• Safety and
• Porn.

“It’s the sort of thing that I wish had been around when I was a teen…. packed with advice directed at older teens (the 14+ crowd)… but pretty relevant and insightful reading for parents, carers and educators too…. it’s also very accessible – neither too medical nor full of pointless euphemisms, Sex Explained is written with no-nonsense panache…. The main point is embracing and encouraging thoughtful consent at the right time for you.” Dr Brooke Magnanti telegraph.co.uk

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Included in this Big Bish Download are all the resources from Bish that are suitable for over 14s.

Talking Sex Ed

A (mostly) self-facilitating card game to get the conversation going about relationships and sex education.

The Consent Teaching Pack

A series of participatory activities to help young people to explore how to negotiate consent as well as understanding it.

Bish Leaflets download 

A series of leaflets for you to download and print. The best of BISH in 24 attractively designed and easy to print leaflets.

Bish Activity Book

An innovative set of worksheets plus old school activity books to help students to work out how they feel about themselves, relationships and sex

Love, Innit

A teaching resource pack about relationships. Encouraging people to be critical about the messages they receive about love and relationships. It also gives us the opportunity to think about which messages about relationships we teach young people.

Planet Porn

As well as talking about porn this resource enables conversations around self-esteem, body image, boundaries, pleasure, consent, communication, safer sex, sexual safety, the law, emotions, relationships, gender and sexual diversity and oppression.

Safer Sex Aces

A ‘Top Trumps’ style game and teaching pack about safer sex. This is for you to download and print your own.

Condom Teaching Pack

A video, slides, handouts and lesson plans for teaching about how to use condoms.

Booze and Sex Poster and Handout Pack

A poster, image and handout pack to teach about the effects of alcohol on sex and relationships.

Genitals Leaflet and Poster Pack

A unique and inclusive way to show the huge diversity of genitals. These beautiful pictures by Stuart F. Taylor are detailed enough yet beautifully rendered so that they are not too confronting.

For the Big Bish Download, I can accept invoicing for payment. Send me your invoice address via the contact page and I’ll send you an invoice when I can. All of the details of how to be ‘set up for your system’ will be on the invoice (eg address, bank details etc) , so please can you do that after you receive the invoice.

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New for 2023, a major update to the BISH Leaflets resource. 24 leaflets covering a broad range of RSE topics, ideal for working with young people in one-to-one or small group settings. Designed for sexual health services, C-card schemes, and outreach projects. 

In the last 9 years, language has changed, I’m a better educator, and I’ve got a lot better at drawing too! In one way or another I’ve been working on these leaflets since 1999. 

The History of BISH Leaflets

I first developed them for working with young men in various sexual health drop ins. Over time I realised I needed a resource which I could use to help explain something to a client and then fold up and put in their condom bag. I found that the resources available at the time weren’t really in a style which suited the young people I was working with. I needed something which I could get onto two sides of A5, with illustrations. 

On the various projects I was working on, as I developed as an educator in response to the kinds of questions I was getting from young people, I developed more leaflets. When I got to about 10 leaflets I started to more formally introduce people accessing the service to different topics. This ended up being a kind of RSE course, so each time a young person attended they’d get a different leaflet. 

This opened up new spaces for them to ask different kinds of questions, to chat about things that they might not normally get to chat about in a sexual health setting. Things like actually enjoying sex (which I was finding a lot of men and women were not doing), consent, gender, communication. I was beginning to find that young people were coming in as much for these leaflets as the condoms. Groups of young people would travel long distances to take part in their own RSE over the course of many weeks. They really valued someone being able to calmly explain a topic with a leaflet to back up the information and resources being provided.

What these sex ed leaflets do

These A5 bits of paper were acting as really valuable technologies of the self. A piece of paper gave us the focal point of having a conversation about sexuality in a similar way that intently watching a float when fishing gives the youth worker and the young person the possibilities of talking about their lives. The materiality of the paper does something here. Just as being able to fold it up and put it in their condom bag gives them an ‘extra’. As well as an opportunity to read it at home when they might have more time and space and comfort. I initially called these leaflets ‘bite size chunks’ because I was finding that they just really valued little bits at a time. It also encouraged them to come back to the service and to voluntarily build the relationship with me (which they did). 

When we think about the relationships and sexuality education we all received and how much shame and stigma this installed in us, I was finding these leaflets to be really quite transformatory. Of course, this also really helped to transform my practice too. Through the hundreds and hundreds of conversations over the total of 13 years of working in these settings, with these leaflets, I learnt how to make these kinds of resources and what might work. I also had to do my research and get a lot better at drawing, writing, and designing resources. I also got better at holding the space, asking the right questions, paying attention to the vibe, getting my tone of voice right. All of this was facilitated, or helped to emerge, from having leaflets like these. 

The leaflets led to the website

Eventually, when I saw young people with their Blackberries, I realised that I should probably start a website, which is when BISH started. The website began by me putting the content of my leaflets on a wordpress blog. Once I ran out of leaflets I started to upload other bits of content too. Eventually the funding was cut for the last of my (very successful) face to face projects and I began working online. If I was working in a sexual health service, or in any kind of one to one work or small group work, I would have a set of these leaflets photocopied and ready to give out. I would also have the BISH Activity Book to hand too, as these have more interactive worksheets. 

How to use these RSE leaflets

So this is a long way of saying that this is what the BISH Leaflets were designed for, working with young people who want some answers to questions, or some resources for them to make sense of sexuality and relationships for themselves. So they are great for health advisors, outreach workers, youth workers, counsellors, ISVAs, IDVAs, or anyone doing work with individuals over 14 who would value a bit of one to one RSE. 

Each leaflet is A4 size, with enough space to print them back to back on A5. If you need to print them on A3 that should be fine as the resolution is 300dpi. This means you could also have them professionally printed too if you wanted. 

Each purchase of the BISH Leaflets Download gives you a licence for you to use this for your work. You can print off as many copies as you like to use in your own work (copies shouldn’t be resold without my permission). Please don’t share the file electronically with anyone else. If you have any questions about this do let me know, I’ll probably say yes.

The relationships and sexuality education leaflet topics

About You

Sex and Gender

Sexualities

A Guide to Relationships

How’s Your Relationship?

Should I Have Sex?

How to Ask

A Guide to No

What Sex You Might Want and How to Talk About It

Sexting

How to Have Sex

Booze and Sex

Communicating During Sex

How to Enjoy Sex More

Have Amazing Sex Without Having ‘Sex’

A Guide to Masturbation

Sexual Health Services

Contraception

Condoms and Dams

STIs

Vulvas

Penis and Balls

An Educational Guide to Porn

Porn and You

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The report ‘Alcohol and sex: a cocktail for poor sexual health’ from RCP and BASHH point out the correlative evidence for young people, alcohol use and sexual health.

“Young people are a key risk group: 16–24-year-olds are among the highest consumers of alcohol, in terms of both prevalence and unit consumption, and have the highest rate of sexually transmitted infections.”

They recommend that “Sexual health services should provide information that highlights the link between alcohol consumption and poor sexual health outcomes.”

This unique pack gives practitioners the opportunity to do just this. This download offers a simple and straight forward way to produce your own posters, handouts and worksheets for young people – as students or patients.

The pack contains:

Display/Poster Images

This set of 6 A4 images can be printed out and stuck up together to create a large poster. Or they can be placed on a noticeboard with other posters about local services and sensible drinking.

Also included in this pack are printer friendly versions of these posters with a white background.

Handout/Worksheet

This pack also contains a unique A4 handout and unique tool for young people to think carefully about their own booze & sex behaviour. This covers safer drinking advice but also gives young people the opportunity to think about their own self-esteem and where their sexual boundaries might be. These resources are unique and are not available anywhere else.

Purchasing this pack gives the purchaser a licence to produce a reasonable number of poster and handouts at a time.

As with all Bish products these resources are supported by the award winning free sex and relationships education website bishUK.com

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