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Hello, my name is Gareth and I work as a sex and relationship education worker in the UK. The main part of my job is in local schools but also sometimes work in youth clubs. This blog is about Sex and Relationship Education stuff. It is about a variety of things, my work, my thoughts, resources, policies and experiences.

It is one place for me to put stuff into the public domain, maybe the people who read this will be strangers or maybe they will be people I know. I don't mind, I am using this to try and publically reflect on my work.

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A RSE reading list

Sometimes people ask me what reading I recommend around RSE, so I thought I would put together a bit of a list.  Key (free) articles and reports  Young people’s RSE UK poll  Sex Education Forum (2018) RSE outcome variations due to facilitator differences  Young et al (2018) What do young people think about their school-based sex and relationship education? A qualitative synthesis of young people's views and experiences Pound et al. (2016) Review of sexual abuse in schools and college s Ofsted (2021) National and International RSE Guidance  UNESCO international guidance on RSE  UNESCO (2018) England   Department for Education full guidance on statutory relationships education, relationships and sex education (RSE) and health education  Department for Education (2019) Wales Curriculum for Wales guidance and code for Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE)  (Consultation stage) Welsh Government (2021)  Scotland  Guidance for teac...

Review of Channel 4's Sex in Class

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...

Creating a physical RSE resource - See It Shout It

I love making new relationships and sex education resources. " See It Shout It ", is the latest resource I have made to help young people grow in confidence to verbalise sex related words. I was asked how I choose the 31 icons that made the resource and I thought the creation process might be interesting to talk about.  Normally I create activities that can be shared digitally and then printed out or used with a projector. But sometimes I am involved in creating physical products. The process is similar for both but there are a few extra steps with making a physical product to be sold. The barriers to start making your own high quality resources is lower then ever and new creators can always bring a fresh perspective to a topic.  I have worked in the sex education field for over 15 years and this topic is what I know best but I'm sure that the same basic process can be applied to many different subjects. I am going to share the process I went through creating " See I...