PUPIL SUPPORT
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very teacher should be upskilled to provide holistic support to their pupils around sex and relationships. This is the mantra for charity Brook, working to promote healthy conversations around sex and relationships by reducing stigma. Education and wellbeing specialist at Brook, Amber Newman-Clark discusses the steps you can take to ensure your relationship and sex education (RSE) lessons are informative, engaging and accessible to provide all pupils with a positive experience. With free resources available for teachers, it is easier than you might think to get confident with RSE. Why is RSE important for pupils with additional educational needs and disabilities? It is genuinely important for everyone, including disabled people, to know and learn about their bodies, relationships and sex. Without this education we are doing people a massive disservice as they are getting older. It is a matter of equality, having the same access to sex and relationship education. If you are disabled, you are still absolutely able to – and likely to – have sexual and/or romantic relationships so you need to know how your body works, how it grows and the changes you can experience in puberty and what to call your sexual organs, both public and private, and awareness of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STI). People want to learn about sex and relationships. LGBTQ+ education is now being integrated into the curriculum, why is this important for everyone in the classroom? We want to be inclusive in the classroom so that everyone can relate to what we are talking about. Otherwise we end up excluding people in the classroom and we don’t know what their identities are, and as teachers, we need to be aware of that. It is important for children and young people who are not LGBTQ+ too, because they need to be aware of society. We live in a society where people are LGBTQ+ and we cannot ignore that, we need to be kind and accepting and the only way we can do that is by incorporating society outside of school into the school environment. RSE that is inclusive benefits everyone and helps people to be more accepting. 24 Teachers’ Resource SEN
In what way do we need to move away from conversations of worry, concern and exploitation when discussing relationships and sex with disabled pupils, to make learning more fun for disabled pupils? For a lot of people, we can worry that if we speak about sex and relationships in any positive way that we are encouraging people to try it or have sex. Actually, research in countries where RSE has been mandatory suggests that young people with good RSE are more likely to have sex older and less likely to have negative experiences because they know what to expect and what they are consenting to. We are showing people that talking about sex in a non-negative way doesn’t encourage people to have sex, we are just giving them information. There is no point talking about negative experiences and unhealthy relationships if we don’t understand what a healthy relationship is. This is a really important balance we have to strike. Plus, it is generally more engaging if we talk about RSE in a fun and interesting way.
“It is genuinely important for everyone to know and learn about their bodies”
What more do you think needs to be done to change attitudes around sex and disability? We see it in all sorts of areas where disabled people are not seen as full people. A lot of time in the media we don’t see people in happy, healthy relationships if they are disabled and then that leads us into not seeing it in real life. This is still something that is really behind in a lot of ways. Assessing our own values can be really important and this is something we do in all of our training sessions. We have training on how to talk about relationships with disabled people and sex and disability in a broad way. Having that practice and thinking about some things going on in the world and in the news and thinking about your own thoughts and challenging your biases, where it comes from, does it affect the young people you work with and work out your boundaries. How can Brook support teachers to build their confidence when teaching RSE? We acknowledge at the beginning of sessions that we all have different knowledge of sex education. We assess how our own sex education was; was it inclusive, too late? This helps us think about why sex education is important. Educating yourself on this subject when you have never experienced the education first hand can be a challenge. Brook run Facebook Live sessions with specialists answering frequently asked questions. In April we featured Sex and Disability, where we answered questions on this area (previous sessions are archived on Facebook, @ BrookCharityYP). Additionally, no matter where you are, we can offer educational sessions or training for professionals. For teachers preparing to take an RSE class, what advice do you have for them? In general, I would say take the time to think about the most extreme questions you imagine being asked and write down how you would answer the question. Also, get comfortable using the medically correct terminology to give you the confidence when speaking about this topic.
FIND OUT MORE Brook (www.brook.org.uk), Sexpression (sexpression.org.uk), Sex Education Forum (www.sexeducationforum.org.uk) and SHADA (shada.org.uk) all provide disability specific RSE training for teachers. www.teachersresource.co.uk
