The Puberty Issue (2016) provides teachers with ways of introducing puberty in an age-appropriate fashion. It includes features on: • The factors that may be contributing to a current increase in early onset puberty in girls. • How the adolescent brain develops during puberty. • Using art to express the emotional aspect of puberty • How a child in every class could start menstruating before leaving primary school, and the practical steps schools can take to support them. The magazine includes findings from a survey of young people which suggests that schools are leaving discussions about puberty too late, with nearly a quarter (24%) of girls start having periods before the subject is covered in RSE classes at school. Almost 15% of young people said they were taught nothing at school about menstruation. The pattern is repeated for boys with 38% experiencing wet dreams before having learnt about them. Over 50% of young people go through school without this aspect of puberty ever being mentioned. The survey of over 2,000 young people aged 11-25 found that nearly a third of young people (30.4%) did not learn all they needed to at school about how their body changes during puberty – this rose to 46% for young people who identify as transgender, non-binary or other genders.

To support you in designing your RSE curriculum, this document helps you consider what to include in RSE and how to structure your programme. We have developed a set of questions to help parents, carers, schools and other educators understand what children and young people want to learn about in relation to growing up, relationships and sex from ages 3-19, organised by age.

The Sex Education Forum is pleased to support the publication of this new fact sheet on abortion and abortion care produced by the professional medical bodies RCOG and FSRH. It provides teachers with a reliable source of information about abortion. This will help address the gap in teacher knowledge, but more in-depth training and support is needed to ensure teachers of RSE have the tools and confidence to craft high-quality lessons on the subject.

The Pornography Issue (2013) is the Sex Education Forum’s first edition of the e-magazine. It aims to help school deliver high quality relationships and sex education to classes to tackle potentially taboo subjects and offer practical advice drawn from consultation with those on the front-line of sex education: teachers and young people. This magazine includes: lesson ideas suggested resources and recommendations from young people about what they want to know advice for schools on how to broach this potentially difficult subject “Teachers have told us they are nervous about mentioning pornography in RSE, yet given the ease with which children are able to access explicit sexual content on the internet, it is vital that teachers can respond to this reality appropriately. Whilst in some cases children find this material by accident, there are instances when they come across pornography whilst looking for answers to sex education questions; it is therefore wholly appropriate that pornography and the issues it reveals are addressed in school RSE. In addition, teaching children and young people to be critical consumers of media and able to discuss issues about the body, gender and sexual behaviour will equip them with “filters in their head” to be more in control of the media available to them.”

This poster-style document sets out 10 steps to providing high quality Relationships and Sex Education as an identifiable part of PSHE education. The poster includes hyperlinked buttons making it easy to navigate resources from both the PSHE Association and Sex Education Forum that will support school leaders in preparing for statutory RSE. The roadmap was co-produced by the PSHE Assocation and Sex Education Forum and is supported by five education unions.