The purpose of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) is to give children and young people the skills, knowledge and understanding that they will need to be safe and healthy, to make responsible decisions about their life, to learn to respect themselves and others, and to move with confidence from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood. RSE is centrally concerned with supporting children and young people through their physical, emotional and moral development, helping to ensure they develop resilience, and to know how and when to ask for help and where to access support.
RSE planning and teaching approaches at Ashford School consider and integrate the core values of United Learning which are ambition, confidence, creativity, respect, enthusiasm and determination.
The objective of RSE is to enable pupils to learn about:
- families and people who care for them, including the nature of marriage and civil partnership and their importance for family life and the bringing up of children;
- forming and maintaining caring relationships;
- the characteristics of healthy and respectful relationships, including online;
- how relationships may affect physical and mental health and wellbeing, and how to ensure they are safe, and;
- intimate and sexual relationships, including sexual health.
The RSE curriculum, which only uses teaching and materials appropriate to the age and the religious background of the pupils receiving it, is designed in a structured and sensitive way. It helps students to:
- Discuss and deal with difficult social and moral situations that they may be encountering in the present, or may encounter in later life;
- Make considered choices that are right for them;
- Be better able to resist social pressures in relationships of all sorts;
- Recognise how their own behaviour could inappropriately create pressures on others and to understand how to avoid this.
The Deputy Head Pastoral and Head of Global Perspectives have overall responsibility for the RSE curriculum. The curriculum content is designed and structured by the Head of Global Perspectives, in accordance with statutory and regulatory requirements. RSE is delivered primarily through Global Citizenship lessons by form tutors, but RSE is also delivered through the academic curriculum as appropriate.
This policy is reviewed and updated each year in consultation with parents.