RSHE – Let’s weave it through the whole curriculum
Ed Carlin makes his case for why teaching RSHE via a series of discrete lessons might not be the best approach…
- by Ed Carlin
- Deputy headteacher at a Scottish secondary school
Two years on from the rollout of the mandatory Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) curriculum, the verdict in many schools feels mixed.
Depending on who you ask, it’s either a long overdue moral roadmap for a generation that’s done much of their growing up online, or a weekly endurance test involving awkward silences, suppressed giggles and a collective sense among teenagers of ‘Here we go again…’
I would argue that the content of RSHE isn’t the problem. If anything, that’s actually spot on. The issues lie with its delivery.
At a time when young people are navigating unprecedented levels of online misinformation, extremism and hypersexualised content, while also absorbing conflicting value systems at home and on social media, RSHE isn’t just useful – it’s essential.
For many students, school may well be the only consistent, grounded and safe environment in which they can explore what it means to be a decent human being, a respectful partner and a responsible citizen.
Yet by ring-fencing this learning into a once-a-week standalone lesson, we may be undermining the very impact we hope the curriculum will have.
Necessary, timely, non-negotiable
Let’s be absolutely clear from the outset – RSHE matters. Young people today aren’t growing up in a moral vacuum, they’re growing up in a moral maelstrom.
Online spaces bombard them with extreme views, distorted ideas of relationships, rigid gender stereotypes, misogyny, racism, conspiracy theories and algorithm-fuelled outrage.
Some will encounter further, equally problematic messages in the family home. This may be through prejudice, neglect or rigid belief systems that go unchallenged.
Within this context, schools can’t afford to retreat into purely academic instruction and hope that the ‘values’ internalised by students somehow take care of themselves.
RSHE instead offers a structured opportunity for students to properly reflect, question, challenge and develop accountability.
It presents language with which they can think about and discuss matters of consent, respect, responsibility, empathy and self-awareness.
Done well, RSHE teaching has the potential to mitigate many of the social problems we’ll often wring our hands over later. This includes everything from abusive relationships and intolerance, to civic disengagement and lack of personal responsibility.
So no – I’m not presenting a case for scrapping RSHE altogether, or even watering it down. Quite the opposite. The problem is that we’ve been treating it as a box to be ticked, rather than as a message that needs to be meaningfully embedded.
The once-a-week problem
Anyone who’s ever taught RSHE before knows the kind of classroom atmosphere such lessons entail. Picture the scene – it’s period 3 on a Thursday. The chairs are all arranged in a circle because ‘the training said so’.
A PowerPoint presentation is displayed at the front, with the words ‘healthy relationships’ or ‘sexual consent’.
30 adolescents then slump into those seats. Some stare at the ceiling; some smirk; some brace themselves for imminent embarrassment.
And hovering over it all is the unspoken assumption that an ‘out-of-touch grown-up’ is about to tell them how to behave.
There’s a painful irony at play here. These are arguably among the most important conversations we want young people to engage with. And yet we continue to deliver them in a format that practically guarantees resistance.
Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to anything that feels forced, artificial or patronising. Ring-fencing RSHE into a standalone lesson sends out a clear message – that this is awkward, that it’s something separate, that this isn’t real learning.
It becomes something to endure, rather than engage with. We’d never dream of trying to teach literacy like this, or numeracy, or scientific thinking.
“Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to anything that feels forced, artificial or patronising”
Nevertheless, we somehow seem to persist in isolating our students’ moral, social and relational learning away from everything else, only to then act surprised when those students treat the lessons in question as cringe-worthy.
Stop isolating, start embedding
What if the answer were not to hold more RSHE lessons, but rather less obvious ones?
Imagine if relationships were explored through English literature – the power dynamics of Romeo and Juliet, for example, the coercion portrayed in An Inspector Calls, or the emotional manipulation that features in any number of modern novels.
Suddenly, the conversation becomes less about the students, but about characters. This distance allows for more honesty, giving way to discussions that feel safer, richer and more authentic.
Sex education is naturally rooted in biology and grounded in anatomy, of course. Reproduction, sexual health, evidence – once stripped of distracting embarrassment, these topics can be reframed as areas of knowledge, rather than spectacle.
Environmental responsibility already sits comfortably within geography. Citizenship, democracy and social responsibility are already woven into history and modern studies. Here, students can interrogate the real consequences of apathy, prejudice and extremism.
Under this model, RSHE can cease being a lesson and start becoming a lens. The same essential content is being covered, only now it’s contextualised, normalised and taken seriously. This is because it lives inside subjects that students already respect.
Those awkward giggles will quickly fade when the conversations being had feel purposeful. That ‘cringe factor’ will swiftly melt away once students no longer feel like they’re getting a lecture on how to live.
Instead, the messages they receive will feel like learning.
Authenticity over compliance
A striking contradiction within education is that we repeatedly claim to understand young people, yet persist in designing experiences that completely ignore what they’re clearly telling us through their behaviour.
Teenagers value authenticity and respond to relevance. They recoil from anything that feels performative or tokenistic, but when it comes to RSHE, we often default to compliance:
- Have we delivered the lesson?
- Have we covered the slide?
- Have we met the statutory requirement?
But education isn’t about coverage, it’s about impact. If the goal of RSHE is to help young people reflect on themselves, develop responsibility and challenge harmful beliefs, then its presentation is as important as its content.
A curriculum that’s technically delivered well, but emotionally dismissed by those for whom it’s intended simply won’t succeed, however well-intentioned it might be.
By embedding RSHE across subjects, however, we can move away from telling students what to think. Instead, we’re inviting them to think. We can create multiple touchpoints for them, rather than a sole awkward weekly slot.
We should respect young people enough to trust that they can engage with complex moral ideas when those ideas are presented thoughtfully.
Hinge moments
In teaching, we often talk about ‘hinge moments’. These are points in a lesson when students’ understanding suddenly deepens and their thinking visibly shifts.
RSHE lessons should be full of such moments, but too often, they consist of avoidance, discomfort and disengagement.
To be clear, though, this isn’t a failure on the part of teachers. Nor is it down to young people. It’s a design problem.
We don’t need to abandon RSHE, but rather reimagine it. Instead of asking, ‘How can we fit this into a timetable?’ we should be asking, ‘Where does this naturally belong?’
Rather than isolating the most sensitive topics of adolescence into their own quarantined teaching slot, we should be looking to integrate them across the wider intellectual life of the school.
Because if we truly believe that RSHE content is an essential part of what students should be learning – and I do – then it deserves more than a once-weekly lesson that students quickly lapse into switching off from.
Young people are already learning plenty about relationships, sex, power and values every day of their lives. What we need to ask ourselves is whether schools want to be part of that education in a meaningful way. Or do we simply tick the box and hope for the best?
Want less cringe and more hinge? Then stop isolating your RSHE messages and start embedding them in places where students can actually hear them.
Ed Carlin is a deputy headteacher at a Scottish secondary school, having previously held teaching roles at schools in Northern Ireland and England.
