In July, the Department for Education published updated statutory RSHE (relationships, sex and health education) guidance. It replaces the 2019 guidance and schools have until September 2026 to adapt their curriculum – though many will want to start sooner.
We asked Nicky Waring, RSE Trainer and Specialist at the charity Sex Education Forum, to pull out the key updates and reflect on what they mean for learners with SEND and how our special schools members can start preparing now.
-------------------------------------------------
New RSHE guidance has been released to be implemented in September 2026, but schools can start to make changes this academic year.
Although there were some disappointments, such as there being less detail specific to learners with SEND instead of more, the guidance overall has shifted in the right direction for all learners, especially those who are more vulnerable.
Here are some of the key additions to the guidance and how they impact learners with SEND.
Guiding Principles
A very positive addition is the 7 evidence-based Guiding Principles.
- The first principle is ‘Engagement with Pupils’, stating the importance of pupil voice in ensuring the curriculum is relevant and engaging. This could look like gauging and recording learners’ physical reactions and facial expressions to different lessons all the way up to pupil questionnaires, but it’s something we can involve all learners in.
- This feeds into the fifth principle which is ensuring that the curriculum is ‘relevant and responsive’ to learners’ needs, including being age and stage appropriate and being specific to local issues. This gives specialist settings the go-ahead to really tailor their provision to the needs of their young people.
Foundational topics
The new guidance reiterates the importance of teaching about key topics such as consent, privacy, rights over their own bodies and personal information; and how this helps young people to keep themselves and others safe.
It also puts more emphasis on the importance of being able to communicate our own boundaries and needs. This is especially important for our learners who may be reliant on others to meet their basic needs and will need lots of opportunities to practice and gain confidence. Across the curriculum, we can look for opportunities to give our learners real choices and chances to practice refusal.
Although not all the elements for teaching consent in a sequential, developmental way are spelt out, it is more clearly broken down, particularly in secondary, with the addition of more detail about power dynamics. A vital component for educators to consider, particularly in relation to our learners with SEND.
Consent is referenced in the context of friendships all the way up to early sexual relationships. A helpful reminder that even if intimate relationships are not yet on the agenda for our young people, we can still be teaching the skills, and we do need to be saying to all pupils that this is a possibility for you in the future if you choose.
Relationships skills
Key skills needed for healthy relationships are outlined, including being able to state boundaries, negotiate, manage and prevent conflict, recognise unhealthy or harmful behaviour and being able to seek help.
More emphasis is placed on a learner’s social responsibilities and understanding the impact of their behaviour on others. It’s vital that our learners understand the potential social, emotional and legal consequences of their behaviour, particularly as they get older. Creating characters and stories or role-playing characters’ responses to different scenarios and how this might affect the other person’s thoughts, feelings and actions is a safer way to explore these ideas.
It’s essential that, we are consistent about modelling consent, privacy and boundaries in our settings and are honest and clear with young people when they cross boundaries or make ‘social mistakes’, otherwise we are not treating young people with the respect and dignity they deserve.
Emotional literacy
Research identifies that teaching young people social and emotional literacy is effective in reducing violence, as well as being important for wellbeing, and the new guidance reflects this. It stipulates that young people need to be taught how to recognise difficult emotions, such as disappointment, frustration and loneliness, in themselves; and how to manage these emotions.
Children should be taught not just about the range of emotions but also the scale of their emotions and how to spot triggers in themselves that mean they should get help. For children with alexithymia and children with poor interoception, this will be even more important. Lots of schools use the Zones of Regulation or similar visual tools to help teach about emotions.
Online harms
Catching up with the realities of how young people are spending their time, the 2026 guidance pays more attention to online technology. Adding a lot more detail on what to address in relation to pornography, which is helpful, but also deep fakes, AI chatbots and being able to critically evaluate what they see online.
The guidance is also more explicit on the teaching about the sharing of nudes, something that students with Autism, a learning difficulty, visual impairment or speech difficulties are more likely to engage in than students without a SEND (Thorn, 2021).
The guidance is clear that even in primary, it is essential to teach topics related to preventing sexual abuse or avoiding sharing inappropriate materials online and “can be done without describing the detail of any sexual activity involved”. This is helpful framing for thinking about how we can do this teaching with our learners with more complex needs, as it gives us the go-ahead to focus on the transferable skills involved in keeping safe, asking for help and privacy.
------------------------------------------------------------
Next steps
Audit and update your RSE provision - Sex Education Forum will be launching a comprehensive audit tool to help you monitor and implement the changes. Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to hear when our audit tool is available.
Start thinking about how the new content can be made accessible for your learners - What are the essential concepts for your learners to understand? What skills do our learners need in relation to this topic? How do they relate to the Preparing for adulthood outcomes?
To discuss with your Senior Leadership Team - How much teaching time can we dedicate to this important part of the curriculum? Is there planning time available to prepare for implementation and to map skills across the curriculum?
Specialist training - Does your staff team need more support and confidence building to deliver the new curriculum? Have a look at the SEND specialist training we offer here: https://www.sexeducationforum.org.uk/training
Become a SEF member - join here to access our resources and events relating to implementing the new guidance.
You can also follow Sex Education forum on LinkedIn and Instagram.