What Is Relationship and Sex Education?
Relationship and Sex Education is lifelong learning about physical, sexual, moral and emotional development. It is about the understanding of the importance of stable and loving relationships, respect, love and care, for family life. It involves acquiring information, developing skills and forming positive beliefs, values and attitudes.
Principles and Values
In addition, Cononley Primary School believes that RSE should:
- Be an integral part of the lifelong learning process, beginning in early childhood and continue into adult life.
- Be an entitlement for all pupils in our care.
- Encourage every pupil to contribute to make our community and aims to support each individual as they grow and learn.
- Be set within this wider school context and supports family commitment and love, respect and affection, knowledge and openness. Family is a broad concept; not just one model, e.g. nuclear family. It includes a variety of types of family structure, and acceptance of different approaches, including LGBT families, without promotion of any particular family structure. This was a key principle for the parents/ carers and staff, who were involved in the consultation. We consider the important values are love, respect and care for each other.
- In our school and community we aim to encourage pupils and teachers to share and respect each other’s views. We aim to generate an atmosphere where questions and discussion on personal matters can take place without any stigma or embarrassment.
- Recognise that parents/carers are the key people in teaching their children about relationships, growing up and sex. We aim to work in partnership with parents/carers and pupils, consulting them about the content of programmes.
- Recognise that the wider community has much to offer and we aim to work in partnership with health professionals, social workers, other mentors or advisers