New Government guidance on relationships, sex and health education
New Government guidance on relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) was published on 15 July 2025, giving schools until 1 September 2026 to follow it. This is the first published update to RSHE guidance since 2019 and builds on the curriculum changes secured with cross-party support.
RSHE has been evolving slowly over the last thirty years, often struggling to effectively balance a fine line between inclusion, public health pragmatism and moral rhetoric. At the school level, despite best efforts, it is often delivered by teachers with limited training in effective RSHE and with a very crowded curriculum. Teachers have too little time and space available to do a really good job, and pupils repeatedly say it is too little, too late and too biological.
Every young person, including those who are LGBTQ+, needs to be, and feel, safe and seen at school. That means providing high quality RSHE combined with excellent pastoral help and support whenever they need it, including relating to issues on sexual orientation and gender.
Just Like Us, the LGBT+ young people’s charity, found in their 2021 report ‘Growing Up LGBT+’ that 43% of LGBT+ school students have been bullied in the past year, compared to 21% of non-LGBT+ students.
Polling conducted by the Sex Education Forum in 2024 found that social media is filling gaps in RSE. School is the main source of information about consent (47%) and healthy relationships (32%), but for learning about LGBTQ+ issues, young people are more likely to turn to social media (30%).
Against that backdrop, teachers need strong guidance, training and high-quality teaching materials that are inclusive of LGBTQ+ lives if they are able to provide RSHE that reflects the world we live in. Many pupils will have close family or friends who are LGBTQ+, or be part of the community themselves. Ensuring young people see themselves, and those they love, positively reflected in a RSHE curriculum that encourages equality and respect for others will help give them knowledge and skills to prepare to manage their lives now and in the future.
The Sex Education Forum provides a summary overview of the guidance and our friends and colleagues at the Proud Trust, who provide training and support for schools on a day to day basis, have done a more detailed breakdown of the LGBTQ+ section of the guidance.
We cannot allow another generation to grow up with the invisibility, silence and discrimination that so many in the LGBTQ+ community felt in the past.
As well as continuing to work with government to influence their support for all LGBTQ+ people, we will be working with the Proud Trust and other experts in RSHE to provide further support for teachers so they can develop and deliver a curriculum that helps all children and young people to grow up with the confidence to navigate the joys and challenges of the 21st century.
