Yesterday I was at St Damian’s delivering RSHE training to around 50 teachers, getting them up to speed with what’s coming in the 2026 statutory RSHE guidance and building confidence around some of the new and more challenging topics they’re going to have to teach.

And I do sometimes think we forget what we’re actually asking teachers to do here. Imagine choosing your career because you love English literature, drama, maths or science, and then one day discovering there’s a government expectation for you to now confidently lead a room full of teenagers through conversations about pornography, harmful sexual material, sexual harassment or non-fatal strangulation!

For me, that’s a standard Tuesday. But I’m pretty sure I’d feel very differently if I turned up at school with my bag of uteruses and somebody said “Kerry, you’re teaching geometry today.” I’d be out of there like a shot.

I support statutory RSHE. But…

I absolutely support compulsory Relationships, Sex and Health Education. Young people deserve good education about their bodies, relationships, sex, consent, safety. What I don’t support is continually expanding what teachers are expected to deliver without properly investing in the people being asked to deliver it.

The updated statutory guidance coming into force from September 2026 adds more expectations in areas including misogyny, pornography, harmful sexual behaviour, consent and sexual violence. These aren’t subjects where we should be handing somebody a PowerPoint at 3pm and expecting them to confidently teach it at 9am the following morning.

And non-fatal strangulation is a really good example. If we’re expecting teachers to talk to young people about something this serious and complex, they need to understand the subject themselves first. They need the language, knowledge and confidence to facilitate the conversation safely and know what to do if that conversation raises a safeguarding concern.

That’s why staff training matters. I’d love to see proper RSHE embedded into initial teacher training, so new teachers arrive in the profession with a foundation in relationships, sex and health education rather than discovering after qualification that it has somehow become part of their job.

I’d also love to see meaningful investment at local-authority level. Give areas the funding to build specialist RSHE teams that can support schools, train staff and deliver specialist work directly with young people. If we’re serious about prevention and improving young people’s health and relationships, investing in the education that happens before things go wrong seems a fairly sensible place to start! Anyway… I am off on one.

If you need RSHE training, you know where I am. 🙂