RSHE
The RSHE curriculum was updated in September 2026. New guidance builds positively upon what we already teach, with a stronger focus on the realities children face today, particularly online.For primary-aged children, the key updates include:
- Enhanced Online Safety: Greater emphasis on navigating digital spaces safely, understanding age-restricted content, and recognising online boundaries.
- Mental Health & Emotional Wellbeing: Expanded focus on helping children identify and manage complex feelings, including building resilience, and understanding grief, loss, and loneliness.
- Practical Personal Safety: New, explicit content to help children recognise risks around roads, railways, fire, and water safety.
- Body Protection & Safeguarding: Reaffirming best practice by teaching children accurate anatomical vocabulary for body parts. This is a vital safeguarding tool that reduces stigma and empowers children to speak up if they ever feel unsafe.
- Diverse Families: Ensuring our lessons continue to reflect and respect the diverse family structures within our modern British society (such as single parents, same-sex parents, foster carers, and blended families).
For secondary-aged children, the key updates include:
- Wellbeing Online: The curriculum expands beyond basic internet safety to address modern digital cultures. New mandatory topics include the risks of AI and deepfakes, online scams, and the impact of harmful online influencers, misogyny, and toxic subcultures.
- Sexual Harassment & Consent: Lessons will look beyond basic consent to focus on healthy, ethical relationships. Clear, age-appropriate teaching will cover the legalities of sharing indecent images, stalking, upskirting, and pornography.
- Gender Identity & Inclusion: In line with updated guidance, schools will focus on the legal and biological facts surrounding sex and gender reassignment under the Equality Act. The guidance states that schools must not teach contested ideological views—such as the concept of an internal "gender identity"—as absolute fact.
- Mental Health & Resilience: Lessons will focus heavily on emotional regulation, helping pupils distinguish between normal difficult emotions (like stress or loneliness) and clinical mental health conditions. Crucially, any teaching around self-harm or suicide prevention must avoid discussing specific methods.
- Physical Health & Medical Literacy: The health curriculum expands to cover gynaecological health (including endometriosis and menopause), knife crime awareness, and how young people can safely navigate NHS healthcare services.
Approach to Teaching
At Joseph Clarke School, our RSHE curriculum is designed to empower pupils with the knowledge, skills and values they need to lead safe, healthy, respectful and fulfilling lives. Rooted in care, inclusivity and age-appropriate progression, our curriculum promotes the personal, social and emotional development of every child.
Drawing on the Statutory Guidance for Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE), alongside specialist resources from Oak National Academy and the PSHE Association, our provision supports pupils in understanding themselves, building positive relationships and navigating an increasingly complex world.
Through carefully sequenced, pupil-centred learning, pupils explore themes such as friendship, emotions, physical and mental health, rights, identity and equality. They are encouraged to think critically, communicate effectively and act with empathy, confidence and responsibility. Our curriculum creates a respectful and supportive environment that prepares pupils for the opportunities and challenges of modern life, both now and in the future.
As a specialist school, we recognise that every pupil develops at their own pace and that learning in RSHE must be tailored to meet individual needs. We carefully adapt the content, language and delivery of lessons so that pupils can access learning in ways that are meaningful and appropriate for them. This may include simplifying or pre-teaching vocabulary, using line drawings, tactile resources or objects of reference, providing audio description, adapting communication methods, or presenting information through a range of accessible formats. Our teachers use their knowledge of each pupil to judge when they are ready to explore new concepts, revisiting learning where needed and ensuring that sensitive topics are introduced in a safe, supportive and developmentally appropriate way. This personalised approach enables every pupil to build understanding, confidence and independence at a pace that is right for them.
RSHE is taught primarily through dedicated PSHE lessons, where pupils develop their understanding in a structured and progressive way. These key concepts are then revisited, reinforced and contextualised across the wider curriculum. For example, pupils explore themes such as resilience, diversity and different family structures through literature in English, while online safety and responsible digital citizenship are developed through Digital Skills lessons. This cross-curricular approach helps pupils make meaningful connections between their learning and the wider world.
Our RSHE curriculum is always delivered by class teachers, who know their pupils well and are best placed to provide a safe, supportive and responsive learning environment. We also welcome contributions from visiting professionals, including Waltham Forest Public Health outreach workers and other specialist agencies, who enhance our provision by offering expert advice, guidance and targeted sessions that complement and enrich our curriculum.
RSHE Policies & Curriculum Maps
RSHE Lead/ contact details
The RSHE Lead at Joseph Clarke School is Ross Burrell.
Please contact the school via telephone or email info@josephclarke.lihtrust.uk if you have any questions.