Great Relationships and Sex Education

200+ Activities for Educators Working with Young People

Alice Hoyle, Ester McGeeney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351188258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Great Relationships and Sex Education is an innovative and accessible guide for educators who work with young people to create and deliver Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programmes. Developed by two leading experts in the field, it contains hundreds of creative activities and session ideas that can be used both by experienced RSE educators and those new to RSE.

Drawing on best practice and up-to-date research from around the world, Great RSE provides fun, challenging and critical ways to address key contemporary issues and debates in RSE. Activity ideas are organised around key areas of learning in RSE: Relationships, Gender and Sexual Equality, Bodies, Sex and Sexual Health. There are activities on consent, pleasure, friendships, assertiveness, contraception, fertility and so much more. All activities are LGBT+ inclusive and designed to encourage critical thinking and consideration of how digital technologies play out in young people's relationships and sexual lives.

This book offers:

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• Session ideas that can be adapted to support you to be creative and innovative in your approach and that allow you to respond to the needs of the young people that you work with.

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• Learning aims, time needed for delivery, suggested age groups to work with and instructions on how to deliver each activity, as well as helpful tips and key points for educators to consider in each chapter.

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• Activities to help create safe and inclusive spaces for delivering RSE and involve young people in curriculum design.

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• A chapter on 'concluding the learning' with ideas on how to involve young people in evaluating and reflecting on the curriculum and assessing their learning.

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• A list of recommended resources, websites, online training courses and links providing further information about RSE.

With over 200 activities to choose from, this book is an essential resource for teachers, school nurses, youth workers, sexual health practitioners and anyone delivering RSE to young people aged 11–25.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Who, what and why

This is a book of activity ideas for developing Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programmes with and for young people. It is aimed at all educators who work with young people, including teachers, youth workers, school nurses, professional relationship and sex educators, and all the rest of us who work with young people as part of our roles to develop and deliver RSE programmes. There are ideas in this book for those who are new to RSE and for those who have been designing and delivering RSE programmes for years.

We are both educators, living and working in the UK. Alice is a qualified teacher with a MSc. In Sexual Health Education. She currently works as a youth worker and RSE specialist writing, delivering and training on a wide range of RSE programmes from early years to post 16 and parents. Ester is a trained youth worker and social researcher with a PhD entitled Good Sex?: Young people, sexual pleasure and sexual health. Ester researches young people’s sexual and digital cultures and writes, trains and facilitates RSE programmes across the UK.

Over the past five years Alice and Ester have both worked with researchers at the University of Exeter on the Sex and History project to develop education resources that use historical objects as the starting point for conversations about sexuality, relationships, gender and the body. Alice has worked with Justin Hancock to develop the DO…RSE online resources which encourage educators to be reflective of their own practice and clarify their own values before starting to develop or deliver an RSE curriculum. Ester has spent many years delivering education and training around including pleasure in RSE programmes, including developing online training resources as part of the Brook Learn training modules. Ester has been working in Wales for the past two years, supporting Professor Emma Renold at Cardiff University in her work developing a new framework for RSE curriculum in Wales that is underpinned by rights, gender equity, inclusivity, creativity, empowerment and co-production. All of these projects are strongly reflected in this book, not just in the activities we use and resources that we recommend but in the ethos, approach and core values that underpin all the activities in the book.

In addition to those mentioned earlier, this book draws on our own experiences of working alongside some of the best educators in the field. It includes new ideas that we have developed through our own practice as well as activities created and used by fantastic individuals and organisations around the world. There are also some old favourites that have been around in the RSE community for a long time and for good reason. We wrote this book to bring together all the great RSE ideas and resources we know of and collate them in one easy and accessible guide. We hope that this saves educators time searching online and offers new and creative ideas for RSE that are grounded in research, experiences and a set of key principles.

This book is written with UK educators in mind, although those in other parts of the world may want to use, adapt and develop the activity ideas. At the time of writing in the UK there is an increased national focus on RSE as governments in England and Wales have made the landmark decision to make RSE compulsory in all secondary schools (with Relationship Education becoming compulsory in English Primary schools and Relationship and Sexuality Education becoming compulsory in Welsh Primary schools). Also at this time governments in England, Scotland and Wales have been engaged in revising and updating the guidance on RSE. These changes are most welcome since the research evidence suggests that the quality and quantity of RSE in the UK has historically not been good enough. It has been too little, too late and too focussed on biology, reproduction and the negative outcomes of relationships and sex such as unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, violence and abuse. Whilst these are all important issues to cover in RSE, research tells us that this happens at the expense of tackling key issues such as gender and sexual equality, positive relationships and sexual pleasure. We also know that RSE programmes fail to meet the needs of LGBT+ young people. Current national policy developments in the UK therefore present new opportunities to improve the quality and quantity of RSE and to ensure that all provision is inclusive, affirmative and rights based.

The research also tells us that what is needed to tackle the current gaps in RSE programmes is high quality professional training. We could not agree more. Our book is no replacement for good quality professional training and we would recommend that anyone delivering RSE has regular training, development and support. Where this isn’t possible, we recommend seeking out peer support online or in your local area so that you can share ideas, get support and reflect on your practice with other educators. As a starting point you may want to complete the self reflection tool produced by DO…RSE for schools¹ which will enable you to unpack your own attitudes, values, knowledge and skills in delivering this subject. Throughout the book we also provide as much guidance and support as we could squeeze in and signpost to fantastic resources and organisations that can support your delivery. Some of the links we have included may age but we hope that the organisations and individuals who produce them will continue to keep their high quality and inspirational content up to date.

A note on research

There is a wealth of international research on RSE. Much of this consists of small- scale qualitative studies of young people’s experiences of RSE within different social and cultural contexts and small, medium and large-scale surveys of young people’s views and experiences of RSE. This research is often child and young person centred and seeks to put the experiences of children and young people at the heart of education policy and practice. There are also a number of international evaluations of RSE programmes that seek to ascertain the impact of RSE for children, young people and wider populations. Here the focus is often on the public health benefits of RSE, rather than the wider benefits and outcomes of RSE. There is a focus in the literature on the views and experiences of secondary age young people (or of young adults’ views on their secondary education) and on education about sex and sexual health, rather than relationships. Internationally there is also scarce research on professional training for RSE. In the UK there is a focus on the delivery of RSE in England, with far less research conducted in the devolved nations.

The most authoritative source of evidence on sexual behaviours and attitudes in Britain is The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL) which is a representative survey of over 15,000 people aged 16–74 in Britain. The survey is conducted every ten years allowing for longitudinal comparisons.² There is no equivalent evidence on relationships or the wider aspects of sexuality beyond sexual behaviours, sexual health and sexual attitudes.

Useful resources that provide a summary of recent research and that are free and accessible to educators without research training include:

•Two articles by Pandora Pound and colleagues that synthesise qualitative research on RSE:

oPound, P, Denford, S, Shucksmith, J, Tanton, C, Johnson, A, Owen, J, Hutten, R, Mohan, L, Bonell, C, Abraham, C & Campbell, R, (2017) ‘What is best practice in sex and relationship education? A synthesis of evidence, including stakeholders’ views’. BMJ Open, vol 7. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/5/e014791

oPound, P, Langford, R & Campbell, R, (2016) ‘What do young people think about their school-based sex and relationship education?: A qualitative synthesis of young people’s views and experiences’. BMJ Open, vol 6. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/9/e011329

•UNESCO (2018) International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education: An Evidence-Informed Approach. (Revised edition.) (See Useful resources at the end of this book.) A summary of international evidence underpinning RSE as well as an example curriculum with eight concepts and corresponding topics and learning objectives.

•Renold, E & McGeeney, E (2017) Informing the Future of the Sex and Relationships Education Curriculum in Wales. A summary of recent evidence relating to RSE. There is a focus on Wales but this is relevant to educators working in England and all the devolved nations.

•The Sex Education Forum’s evidence page provides summaries and links to up to date relevant research, with a focus on England.³

Great RSE is…

There are very many different ways of designing and facilitating Relationships and Sex Education programmes, based on different theoretical and philosophical approaches. Our approach to RSE is based on the following six principles which draw on an international body of research evidence and our own experiences of developing and delivering RSE and training other educators to do the same. For a more detailed exploration of these (and other) principles and the underpinning research evidence we recommend you read the freely available report by Emma Renold and Ester McGeeney, Informing the Future of the Sex and Relationships Education Curriculum in Wales (2017 – see Useful resources).

Co-produced with young people

A key feature of high quality RSE programmes is that they are designed and developed with young people. At a minimum this means asking young people what they are already learning (and remembering that learning about relationships and sex happens in many informal and formal settings – not just in curriculum time!), what else they would like to learn about and what issues and topics are important to them. The first chapter in this book (Chapter 2: Creating safer spaces) has some simple and creative ideas for how to do this. It also means creating spaces for young people to reflect on and evaluate their learning, providing you with valuable feedback for future programming. The last chapter of this book (Chapter 8: Concluding the learning) contains some quick fire and more in-depth ideas for how to do this.

Co-production also means seeing the young people that you work with as your fellow enquirers. Many of the activities in this book can be extended into small-scale research projects in which young people are encouraged to investigate their online and offline worlds and think critically about what they observe and find out. Working in this mode means that you do not need to have all the answers when it comes to relationships and sex and are discouraged from delivering RSE in a didactic manner. Rather you are the facilitator tasked with creating a safe and engaging learning environment in which young people can ask questions and pursue lines of enquiry that are important to them.

We know from the research that there is often a gap between young people’s lived experiences of relationships and sex (the issues they face, the questions they have) and the content of RSE curriculums. One way of closing this gap is to ensure that we create opportunities to listen to young people and work with them to create a curriculum. Adopting an approach to RSE that is creative and critical involves asking young people to create and imagine the experiences, issues and scenarios explored in the curriculum. This helps ensure that discussions are rooted in young people’s everyday experiences and that all young people see themselves and each other in what they are learning. It also helps move beyond what young people know and need to know to explore the social and historical contexts within which messages about relationships and sexuality are created and circulated.

Inclusive and critical

It is essential that all RSE programmes are inclusive. We know from the research that too often RSE focuses only on heterosexual relationships; for example, by delivering programmes that assume relationships always happen between a man and woman (they don’t!), or that all sex can lead potentially to pregnancy (it can’t! This is only the case if you have penis-in-vagina sex and there are so many other ways of having sex). This privileging of heterosexuality in RSE programmes reflects and contributes to the privilege given to heterosexuality in all areas of western society. RSE programmes are a great space to explore and challenge this inequity.

Being inclusive means, therefore, not only ensuring that we use language, case studies and scenarios that are inclusive of LGBT+ people (the ideas and resources in this book will help with this) but that we create spaces to think critically about privilege, power and equality. There are activity ideas to address some of these big concepts in Chapter 4: Gender and sexual equality, but we have also embedded a critical pedagogy throughout the book. Many of the activities contain questions for you to explore with your co-enquirers that aim to develop critical thinking skills and to connect RSE topics such as contraception, online safety and consent with questions of social justice. This means asking young people to consider what is just, fair and ethical.

Being inclusive also means that all young people see themselves and others reflected in the curriculum. This is part of ensuring that the curriculum reflects the lived experiences of all young people. This means not only recognising diversity and difference across the domains of sex, gender, sexuality and relationships, but exploring how these forms of difference interlink and intersect with others such as religion, (dis)ability and ethnicity. If this sounds like a tall order then always start with co-production. Young people will take you to the case studies, scenarios, role models, folk devils and images that they relate to and that feel relevant to them and those in their communities....