AWARDS FINALIST
SHOWING RESPECT Stamford’s Learning for Life curriculum, which teaches pupils RSE made the Lincolnshire school a finalist in our awards campaign. Kendal Mills, Deputy Head (Pastoral) tells us more
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he recent allegations of historic peer-on-peer sexual harassment and abuse by students at thousands of schools, colleges and universities rocked the world of education, and the harrowing accounts written on the Everyone’s Invited website made for difficult and painful reading. As schools, we needed to respond without any hint of defensiveness or by appearing to underplay or even deny the problem. The media-coined term ‘rape culture’, was initially applied to ‘private’ schools and
tended to be linked to words like ‘elitism’ and ‘entitlement’. That was unhelpful and somewhat misleading because it generated a caricature of the issue. The thousands of allegations made by current and former students were varied – offensive and degrading language used by male students towards female students, body-shaming, indecent postings online, non-consensual sexual touching and, in extreme cases, rape – so, as schools, our response to that complex range of transgressions needed to be sure-footed enough to address them all in a variety of ways.
Although it only became statutory from September 2020, Stamford School has been delivering a robust and relevant Relationships & Sex Education (RSE) curriculum for many years. We’ve always believed that part of Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) – which we now call Learning for Life – to be of central importance, mainly because it touches on so many aspects of young people’s lives and is territory that they, by their own admission, find fiendishly difficult to negotiate. In year seven – ages 11 and 12 – our focus is very firmly on respectful relationships of all An RSE curriculum has been taught at the school for several years
