Blindfish RSE

Review of Channel 4's Sex in Class from a relationship and sex educator's perspective. In this review I will try and bring my perspective as a relationship and sex educator to look at Channel 4's one off show Sex In Class . The show is about a Belgian sexologist Goedele Liekens  testing out her approach to relationship and sex education for 15-16 year olds at a Lancashire school. You can read some great overall reviews from Jules Hillier at Brook  and  Sam Wollaston at the Guardian   of the show. In this blog I am trying to focus specifically on my my perspective as a relationship and sex educator on Goedele's content and approach.  Goedele Liekens with her charges in Sex in Class. Photograph: Matt Squire The show starts with a pretty unsurprising statistic of " 83% of kids have seen porn by the time they are 13" (source not cited) and goes on to show how teachers at this school don't think current RSE is good enough and also gives some quot...

Thoughts on how Relationship and Sex Educators may have to respond to the 50 Shades of Grey film with young people.  2 and a half years ago I wrote a review of the 50 Shades of Grey book from a relationship and sex educator perspective . Today I saw the film adaptation with the aim to do the same for the film. 1 in 10 young people have read the novel and I am confident even more will try and see the film. This film (at least in the immediate future) will have an impact on young peoples perspective of sex and relationships and I am keen that people who work with young people equip themselves to respond to questions and concerns this film might raise. Imagine being asked by a young person "why do people enjoy spanking?" "What is fetish?" What is BDSM" "Explain 50 shades of grey?" are we ready to answer young peoples questions? This film raises issue of consent, healthy/unhealthy relationships, BDSM sex, boundaries, communication and value in sex.  ...

After getting a brush off answer to start with I'm starting to get better response from my MP about why he does not vote for teaching young people about Consent.  This is just a short update on my previous post on my MP ( Stephen Mosley )  voting against Clause 20 which would have made SRE compulsory and explicitly made it clear we need to educate young people about Consent.  This sentence is at least a genuine answer, he is claiming their was not sufficient evidence and reasons. Now immediately after reading his reply I wanted to push all the evidence I could find at him so he could realise how wrong he was and how right it would have been to vote Yes and if wants more evidence I can direct him to loads. When tweeting about this the Sex education Forum replied offering help. @blindfishideas sounds like you are preparing your reply... There is so much evidence that SRE works.... http://t.co/5mJyXiyKYN — Sex Education Forum (@...

On the 11th of June the commons voted against making Sex and Relationship Education a compulsory part  of the national curriculum and specifically this amendment including the following "(1) For the purposes of this Part, personal, social and health education (“PSHE”) shall include sex and relationship education, including information about same-sex relationships, sexual violence, domestic violence and sexual consent. " My MP for Chester, Stephen Mosley was one of the MP who voted against this clause. You can read a good briefing on why this clause was so important here   by the sex education forum. This was a key opportunity to get SRE into the heart of what schools need to be providing. But MPs voted not to help young people on this issue and my MP was one of those who voted against. If you want to read more about the no vote, what it means and why it matters you can read Brook here  or read this blog post exploring how the clause may still have life in it ...

Over the last 2 weeks, for the first time I have taught a full Sex and Relationship Education trainer course. In the past I have helped out on someone elses course and have lead workshops on specific topics at events/conferences. This was the first time I took  responsibility for an entire course. The course I taught is the 4 day  Esteem Resource Network  course. This was the course I was originally trained in and 5 years and 500+ hours of classroom experience later I was now teaching the course. The course had 10 people and I loved opening up the wide field of Relationship and Sex Education to them.  On the course I had 1 co worker, 1 local church based child and family worker, 2 third year youth work students (one who has been on placement with me) and a herd of 6 second year youth work students. So basically everyone was a youth worker or similar  This helped me as it's the group of people I work with the most. I know ...

I was reading this article today  Campaigners say the young don't know enough about HIV  on BBC Newsbeat. This is a key concern for myself in my work and not something that should be quickly ignored. From my experience awareness of HIV is dropping, even in just the 5 years I have been teaching on HIV. I talked about this in a blog post in February. Young people really don't seem to have a decent level of understanding they mistakes and myths they believe have two dangerous consequences.  Consequence one - stigmatization Stigmatization of HIV+ population continues. It is the simple everyday myths that can do the most harm. "HIV can be passed by sharing cutlery/cups/bathroom/holding hands". When people think HIV is infectious like the common cold they get scared, combined with fears of AIDS being terminal this fear turns to stigmatization. Pushing HIV+ people (or suspected HIV+) away from mainstream society. As levels of awareness remain low then communities...

Pattaya - the Thai city of sin? Both Thailand and Great Britain share a number of the same issues in Sexual Health but these issue express themselves in different ways. I want to learn from the situation in Thailand, especially how people are responding, to improve my work in the UK. I have just returned from a 12 week trip around South East Asia as part of this trip I visited a number of projects in Cambodia, see previous posts and I spent a month in Thailand. In Thailand I visited three projects all tackling different sexual health issues. "The House of Grace" A HIV orphanage, "The Tamar Centre" helping people who wish to leave the commercial sex trade and "ACET Singburi" a schools based prevention programme and HIV+ home visit team. Traveling around South East Asia I became aware of a number of cultural differences that permeate society and impact sexual health in complex ways. I cannot claim to understand the social sexual health situation ...

Trying to interest and educate over 100 young people about key issues in just 10 minutes. I kind of hate assemblies, I hated them when I was at school and now working in schools I still kind of hate assemblies, especially Sexual Health assemblies. However, the reasons have changed. When I was a student I hated assemblies because I found them tedious, irrelevant and usually very boring. As I became a 6th formers I sometimes found myself feeling sorry for the poor teacher standing in front of 100 bored students plowing through some moral example or thought for the day. Now i dislike these assemblies for a completly differant reason. I struggle with the assembly format because the format does not make discussion, feedback or questions easy. These are the most qde important parts of a good sex and relationship education session. Yes im sure young people can recieve information just from watching & listening to someone delivering a assembly. Maybe one of the key points will...

76% of teenagers have not thought about how porn distorts what real sex is. Figures come from my research in this trial run of lessons Over the last few weeks and months I have been researching and writing a lesson looking at how the media distorts sex and relationships. Pornography has been a big issue to tackle and this week I have tested my lesson and I wanted to share my early results. I've posted the lesson plan, print out resources and powerpoint on my website , just scroll down to the Distortions of media section.  The Lesson progresses through a foundation of media distorting what is beautiful, moving on to how films/TV distorts relationships and finishing with an exercise that shows how porn distorts sex and what the consequences of believing porn could be. At the end of the lesson i hand out a feedback sheet. one of the questions asks them to write down what words they associate with porn. I've made their results into a wordle for you. (the bigger the word the mo...