In this blog, Harriet Gill, Managing Director of Education and Wellbeing at Coram, broadly welcomes the long-awaited update to statutory guidance on relationships and sex education published by the Government over the summer, and argues that life skills education must reflect real world to keep children and young people safe.
Keeping our children and young people happy and safe is an objective that crosses party lines. In recent years the content of the personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education curriculum, of which Relationships, Sex and Health Education is a part, has at times been misrepresented, and become embroiled in the ‘culture wars’ in a way that I believe to be unhelpful to young people needing support and guidance in navigating adolescence and modern life.
As well as being the largest charity provider of PSHE, supporting over 600,000 pupils annually, Coram Life Education & SCARF engages with voices across the political divide to explain how we enable educators to prepare pupils to make sense of and stay safe in the real world they live in. Inevitably, that means at times addressing issues in primary school that would traditionally been considered appropriate for secondary level – such as online safety, sexual harassment and knife crime.
Just last month the Children’s Commissioner’s report ‘Sex is kind of broken now’ – children and pornography’ set out what children in 2025 are living with, highlighting that the average age a child first sees porn is now 13 and, shockingly, one in four children has seen pornography by the age of 11. This is not the world we have chosen as educators, but the world our children are living in, and it is vital we calibrate our programmes accordingly.
That is why, in July, Coram Life Education welcomed the long-awaited update to the statutory guidance on relationships education, relationships and sex education (RSHE) and health education published by the Department for Education, due to be implemented in place of existing guidance on 1 September 2026. This guidance is knowledge and skills-based and will help children and young people to make healthy choices, recognise and manage feelings, and develop the critical-thinking skills to be safe from harm, both online and offline.
We were particularly pleased that ministers have left teachers and schools with the flexibility to design their own curriculum by not imposing upper age limits on them. The introduction of age ratings could have stifled children and young people’s genuine questions and cut off a vital avenue for safeguarding and accessing help. Whereas this guidance strives to meet children’s needs at a timely point, stating that from early primary can support children to develop skills to navigate boundaries in relationships, and from late primary, where needed, discuss the pressure to share naked images or online sexual content. A skills-based rather than a one-size-fits-all approach will, we believe, best enable schools to meet the needs of all their pupils and their diverse experiences.
Other welcome updates to the existing guidance include:
- Positive masculinity: There is a new emphasis on helping boys develop a healthy sense of masculinity, enabling emotional expression, help-seeking behaviour, and respect in relationships. This proactive approach aims to reduce future harmful behaviours and promote gender equality;
- Safeguarding: Young children are to be taught how to recognise and report abusive behaviour, including the correct terminology for body parts – a clear step forward for early safeguarding; and
- Health education: Teaching about periods must now begin by age eight, and secondary students will also learn about pelvic floor health to support long-term wellbeing, by reducing shame and anxiety, and promoting self-esteem and body confidence.
There are gaps that remain. For instance, we are concerned that the current requirement for governors to ensure proper resourcing is absent in the 2025 guidance, raising questions about responsibility for implementation. We are concerned that consent or permission-seeking is omitted from the primary syllabus, although there are wider references to boundaries. And while education about same-sex families is included, there is no guidance on teaching about same-sex attraction, and we feel this may limit understanding of diversity as children enter puberty. At the time of publication, the government is yet to publish anticipated gender questioning guidance.
For now, schools are bound by the 2019 statutory guidance and will have until September 2026 to adapt their curriculum to reflect the updated guidance, though they can start following it from September 2025 should they wish. Coram Life Education will support the schools we work with to make these changes and align our resources accordingly.
Finally, we would like to extend an invitation to any parliamentarian or otherwise interested group to attend a workshop as we have operations across almost all local authority areas in England. There really is no better way to find out about our work and the experiences of children and teachers than by attending a workshop and talking to pupils and teachers about the difference we make.
Harriet Gill, Managing Director of Education and Wellbeing at Coram
About Coram Life Education
Coram Life Education & SCARF is the leading provider of health, wellbeing, relationship and drugs education to over 600,000 pupils across the UK every year. Through the Coram SCARF whole-school approach to developing children’s health & wellbeing through PSHE, we are the preferred partner to some 3,000 schools, supporting 50,000 teachers to deliver programmes to over 600,000 children. For more information please visit https://www.coramlifeeducation.org.uk/