The Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programme
The Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programme at Charles Darwin School has been enhanced over the past year to ensure students have access to the statutory requirements for Relationships and Sex Education. It is delivered both within and alongside the curriculum. It is delivered by a mixture of teachers and visiting specialist agencies.
The aim of the programme is to equip Charles Darwin Students with the information needed to help students develop healthy, nurturing relationships of all kinds, not just intimate relationships. It should enable them to know what a healthy relationship looks like and what makes a good friend, a good colleague and a successful marriage or other type of committed relationship. Later in school life it will also cover contraception, developing intimate relationships and resisting pressure to have sex and also not applying pressure. It should teach what acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in relationships is.
This overall aim is to help students understand the positive effects that good relationships have on mental wellbeing, identify when relationships are not right and understand how such situations can be managed.
In delivering the programme this academic year we have: -
- Completed a whole staff CPD in September 2021 delivered by Stacey Burman.
- Designated PSRE lessons for an RSE curriculum, which is currently under evaluation to prepare for next year.
- As part of a whole school approach all year groups from 7-13 have experienced an RSE drop session delivered by their form tutor. This time out from curriculum enabled us to ensure every student and the majority of staff in the school had access to the cornerstones of RSE: Identifying healthy and unhealthy relationships both in person and online and the impact of toxic relationships on wellbeing, as well as strategies to keep relationships healthy.
- Worked with Tender in the RE:SET project to achieve “Healthy relationship Champion School” status. Within this project we have monitored and evaluated our curriculum, surveyed our students (and are using their feedback to further improve the curriculum), successfully delivered a parent and carer online workshop on RSE with another to follow on a topic requested by parents: safety in online relationships.
- Had our SLT deliver assemblies to all year groups raising awareness of sexual harassment and encouraging the reporting of this.
How we deliver Relationships and Sex Education per year group can be found in the student planner document and policy documents linked to this page.
”Schools that champion healthy relationships across the whole school, can help prevent gender-based violence and abuse and support children to thrive as future citizens."