Should English teachers be asked to teach sex education?

The new statutory relationships and sex education (RSE) guidance (2025), which comes into effect this September, introduces around 50 per cent more content for schools to cover, across topics including consent, misogyny and exploitation.

As a sex educator and doctoral researcher in the field, I am delighted about this long-overdue update, which is designed to meet needs identified in recent consultations.

But as a teacher, I am concerned about its implementation. Research by the Department for Education shows that schools’ PSHE allocation typically amounts to “a few times per week to once per fortnight” - and in my experience, just a fraction of this goes specifically to RSE.

So, how can schools fit 50 per cent more content into an already-overstuffed curriculum?

The guidance itself provides a possible answer: English lessons.

Teaching RSE in English lessons

Specifically, the document recommends looking for “opportunities across other curriculum subjects”, such as English or history, “to reinforce concepts introduced” in RSE. For example, it suggests using examples from literature to catalyse discussions around “positive and less positive examples of relationships”.

While some would argue that responsibility for teaching or reinforcing RSE learning should not fall to subject teachers, who are already struggling to cover all the content in their own areas of the curriculum, there are some potential benefits to this approach.

For one, it could solve a common challenge of PSHE: providing rich and meaningful examples.

Historically, PSHE lessons have tended to either generate artificial scenarios in a vacuum - perfunctory and forgettable - or to draw on teachers and students’ own lived experiences, which is fraught with the risk of exposure.

What’s more, I’ve been a teacher of English for over a decade and a PhD candidate in RSE since 2021, and from my vantage point it’s clear that this “new” responsibility for literature teachers is not new at all.

Indeed, it’s nearly impossible not to engage in stimulating, PSHE-adjacent conversations with literature students when the characters they’re invested in are so often put in ethically and emotionally complex circumstances.

That said, English teachers may lack RSE-informed strategies for developing these conversations in ways that ensure suitability, safeguarding and substantiveness.

So, here are my key points of advice:

1. Teach RSE topics English-first

An English teacher’s core responsibility is to prepare students for their English exams. As such, the RSE-friendly lesson format cannot justifiably proceed from RSE-theme to literary example, without teaching students an element of analysis or background.

This would undermine the primary purpose of the lesson - and wouldn’t serve RSE, either, as it wouldn’t be helping students to translate their understanding of the theme being explored in the text to apply it to the context of their own lives.

So, beginning the lesson with some literary context, proceeding to textual analysis, and then extracting the RSE-theme for a (recontextualised) discussion of the ideas in one’s own setting makes more sense. In short: integrate, don’t overhaul.

2. Make (and enforce) a conversation protocol

Some students report being or feeling “silenced” in PSHE lessons when voicing dissenting opinions, and teachers feel broadly ill-equipped to manage this.

Meanwhile, resorting to the school’s behaviour policy after the fact can erode discussion culture. As such, some precautions are necessary.

For example, restricting the use of specific names (peer, family, teacher, etc) and the telling of personal stories can reduce the risk of conflict and exposure. Luckily, the English classroom offers the chance to take examples from texts instead, helping to keep things impersonal.

I like to be clear on the rules: writing them in advance, agreeing them with the class prior to discussion and keeping them visible throughout.

3. Pre-empt conflict with clarity

When I headed up PSHE in a school in 2020, I delivered a Year 12 assembly on consent. I was then branded a “man-hater” by a vocal minority of the year group - despite my being a man, and despite not mentioning gender in my assembly.

As such, I’m now hypervigilant, and promote strict verbal hygiene around terms such as “toxic masculinity”.

For example, in discussions about masculinity in Macbeth, take care to frame this in terms of the performance of masculinity as distinct from the quality of being a man - foregrounding the role of choice in embodying masculinity. You might draw attention to Macduff’s choice to feel his family bereavement, “as a man”.

Clarity helps when discussing any theme that flirts with controversy.

4. Find hope in the bleakness

Looking at the GCSE and A-level texts I’ve taught over the years, I see a concerning pattern: a massive overabundance of “doom and gloom” and cautionary tales.

Considering the much-maligned history of traditional, risk-centric RSE, it seems important that positive literary models of sex and relationships get their airtime, too.

Take dear Juliet Capulet in Romeo and Juliet: an equal contributor to the sonnet of consent that precedes her first kiss with Romeo; someone insistent on the respect of her boundaries and relationship expectations; a sexually autonomous woman - attuned to her desire on her wedding night. It’s a balm to the sting of her otherwise circumscribed freedoms in the play.

Such cases abound in the canon, but only if you seek them out. As such, when I design literature curricula that embed RSE-specific issues, I colour-code my first draft medium-term plans to gauge the preponderance of negativity and adjust accordingly.

5. Prescribe the journey, with flexibility

My gym has a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the wall, flexing his biceps, with the slogan: “Failed to prepare? Prepare to fail.”

That cliché rings true in the context of PSHE: so many teachers strand themselves in conversational snarl-ups by failing to plan what I call the “conversational roadmap”.

As when teaching any topic, it pays for any RSE-related conversation to have a route plan: a provocation for the journey, a destination, focal landmarks en route and any permissible diversions.

Regarding diversions, we all know that pursuing a tangent often leads to gold, so pre-approved sideroads are prudent allowances; but other deviations - such as into debates about whether the blame for abuse might lie with a victim - are never acceptable. We can block those exits.

Louis Provis is an English teacher and part-time doctoral researcher at the University of York