England’s revised statutory guidance on Relationships, Sex and Health Education came into force on 1 September. Schools had more than a year to revise their curricula and policies and, in the Department for Education’s own words, to “consult parents beforehand”. That makes the beginning of this school year a good moment to ask two questions which belong together: were parents meaningfully consulted, and what understanding of human flourishing lies beneath the new language of wellbeing, healthy relationships and ethical decision-making?
England entered a new statutory RSHE settlement on 1 September. The revised Department for Education guidance had been published in final form on 15 July 2025, leaving schools more than a year to prepare. It is now the framework to which schools must have regard; provisions expressed as things schools “should” or “should not” do cannot simply be disregarded without good reason.¹ Whatever arguments continue about the wisdom of individual requirements, we are no longer discussing a proposed reform. The new regime is operating in classrooms now.
That timing matters because the Government was explicit about what was supposed to happen before September arrived. In its response to the consultation, the Department for Education said schools had until 1 September 2026 to revise their curricula and policies in accordance with the amended guidance and “consult parents beforehand”.² The statutory guidance itself requires schools to maintain an up-to-date Relationships Education or RSE policy and says they “must proactively engage and consult parents when they develop and review their policy.” Schools should show parents a representative sample of the resources they intend to use, and parents must be able to view RSHE curriculum materials on request.³
The summer term was therefore more important than it may have appeared. Schools preparing for September should have been considering policies, resources, statutory classifications, safeguarding implications and the relationship between the new requirements and existing programmes. Where policies were being developed or reviewed, parents belonged inside that process while decisions remained capable of being influenced. The Government did not tell schools merely to notify parents once implementation had begun. It told them to consult beforehand.
Were you consulted?
- Was there a consultation on your school’s revised RSE policy?
- Were you told that a new statutory framework was coming into force on 1 September?
- Were you shown the policy while it was genuinely still a draft?
- Were you shown representative examples of the materials children would actually encounter?
- Were you told which parts were statutory Relationships Education, Health Education, national-curriculum science and additional sex education?
- Were you told what changed from the previous arrangements?
- And did the school explain what, if anything, changed as a result of what parents said?
Nuntiatoria has found no national dataset capable of telling us what proportion of schools carried out that process thoroughly. An open online survey would not solve the problem: parents sufficiently concerned to respond would constitute a self-selecting sample from which no responsible national percentage could be inferred. So there is no justification for declaring that “most schools failed to consult”. There is, however, every justification for parents asking their own school when the consultation happened and what it consisted of. A genuine process should leave a perfectly ordinary documentary trail: dates, communications, drafts, resources, responses, governing-body consideration and a final policy.
Brighton provides a useful example of why those details matter. In June, parents at St Andrew’s CE Primary School were told that the school proposed to adopt Brighton & Hove City Council lesson plans and resources as its whole-school PSHE programme from September. The draft RSE policy supplied broad descriptions, but the wider Council curriculum map extended into gender equality, family diversity and LGBT-related equality teaching, while the policy itself could not reveal precisely what children would see in slides, worksheets, books, videos, teacher notes or linked resources. PSHEbrighton’s review therefore concluded that parents needed enough of the actual programme to understand what they were being asked to consider.
There was also a problem with chronology. The documentation suggested that consultation and ratification had already occurred, while the parent communication described consultation as current and the policy cover named the approving committee. PSHEbrighton advised that the school should clarify the status of the document, record the consultation period and explain how responses would influence the final version. This was not an argument over terminology. If parental responses cannot alter anything of consequence, the fact that a process is called consultation does not tell us very much about its substance.
The scope was equally important. Parents were being consulted upon an RSE policy while the proposed whole-school programme contained other sensitive strands beyond the narrowly labelled RSE lessons. PSHEbrighton recommended that the complete curriculum map and representative materials for those areas should be available rather than limiting parental attention to the Summer 2 RSE overview. It also noted that merely promising access to materials when specifically requested fell short of the new guidance’s expectation that parents should proactively be shown a representative sample.
St Andrew’s cannot be made to bear an argument it does not prove. It tells us nothing about the proportion of Brighton schools, let alone English schools generally, which consulted well or badly. What it does show is more useful. Even where consultation was taking place before September, questions could arise about whether parents were seeing the whole programme, whether they had access to enough information to judge it, and whether the timing left important decisions genuinely open. That is precisely why the Department for Education’s instruction to consult parents “beforehand” deserves to be read as more than a bureaucratic formality.
The same point applies to governors. A policy is not the curriculum. Neither is a curriculum map. Our local review recommended access to the complete PSHE inventory, sensitive lesson materials, statutory mapping, withdrawal classifications, safeguarding and SEND reviews, faith-ethos scrutiny where applicable, and records showing what parental consultation produced before final ratification. That is not an extravagant standard. A governing body asked to assure itself that teaching is lawful, suitable and consistent with the school’s obligations needs to know what is actually being taught.
There is a larger reason to take all this seriously. The revised framework does not concern itself solely with information that children should acquire. Its opening paragraph gives education a formative purpose:
“Children and young people need knowledge and skills that will enable them to make informed and ethical decisions about their wellbeing, health and relationships.”
Most readers will find little objectionable in that sentence. Children plainly require knowledge about their bodies, health, reproduction, the law, abuse, consent, online dangers and where to seek help. Schools have legitimate responsibilities in all of these areas. Yet the language moves quickly beyond knowledge. An “ethical decision” about “wellbeing” assumes some account of what human beings ought to value and what a good relationship or a good life consists in.
That account cannot be supplied by evidence alone.
- What is wellbeing?
- What makes a sexual decision morally good?
- What makes a relationship healthy?
- What is freedom for?
- Does marriage have a meaning that exists before the wishes of its participants?
- Is consent sufficient to determine the morality of sexual conduct?
- Can something be psychologically difficult and nevertheless morally necessary?
Those questions have occupied philosophers, theologians and cultures for centuries. They do not become technical questions because they are placed inside a health curriculum.
The guidance goes on to speak of “positive characteristics”, “healthy norms”, “positive attitudes and skills”, resilience, self-worth, integrity, honesty, kindness and trustworthiness. Several of those goods scarcely need defending. Yet the collection makes clear that RSHE is expected to do something more ambitious than transfer factual knowledge. It participates in personal formation. The question is therefore not whether education forms children—it inevitably does—but whether the moral assumptions guiding that formation are sufficiently visible to be examined.
A Government Office for Science publication earlier this year is interesting in this connection. Summarising an expert roundtable on Relationships and Sex Education, it discussed “theory-based approaches” which begin by defining a desired outcome and then work backwards towards the method most likely to achieve it.⁴ The notes expressly do not constitute Government policy, and nothing is gained by pretending otherwise. Nor is outcome-based lesson planning suspicious in itself; teachers have always planned with ends in mind. The importance of the passage lies elsewhere. Once the desired outcome concerns behaviour, attitudes, relationships or ethical judgment rather than simple knowledge, questions about the desired end cannot be answered solely by asking whether the intervention is effective.
An effective method can tell us how to get somewhere. It cannot establish that the destination is good.
That distinction becomes particularly clear when the state framework is placed alongside explicitly religious education. As Nuntiatoria examined earlier today in Who Is Forming Catholic Children?, Catholic schools now have to consider their existing RSE programmes within this new statutory environment. The Catholic Education Service states openly that Catholic RSE should “form as well as inform”, placing sexual and relationship education within a Christian understanding of the whole person, virtue, moral judgment and the responsibility of parents.⁵
There is no embarrassment there about formation. Catholic education claims that man is created rather than self-invented; that the body has meaning; that sexual activity belongs within an objective moral order; that marriage, chastity, fidelity and procreation are connected rather than unrelated subjects; and that freedom reaches its proper fulfilment through truth and virtue. A reader may accept that anthropology or reject it, but nobody can reasonably complain that its source has been hidden.
The state framework is much less explicit about the anthropology implicit in its own language. “Wellbeing”, “healthy”, “positive”, “inclusive” and “ethical” sound like descriptions upon which sensible people naturally agree. At the edges, perhaps they do. Nobody needs an elaborate philosophy before saying that cruelty is bad or that a child ought to be protected from sexual exploitation. The difficulty appears when those broad words are used to settle disputed questions about sex, identity, marriage, personal autonomy or the relationship between desire and moral obligation.
For a Christian, wellbeing cannot be reduced to psychological ease or successful self-expression. Truth sometimes wounds before it heals. Duty limits possibilities. Chastity asks people not to act upon every sexual desire. Fidelity deliberately closes alternatives. Parenthood brings obligations that cannot be measured simply by whether they maximise personal freedom. These claims rest upon an understanding of human nature and purpose. Other philosophical traditions will disagree, perhaps profoundly, but the disagreement does not disappear when one side employs the language of health.
The revised guidance deserves considerable credit for recognising this difficulty in one area. It now states that beyond factual and legal matters there is significant debate around sex and gender, and schools should not teach as fact that every person possesses a gender identity. They should not endorse one contested view as though the dispute had been resolved, present social transition as a simple remedy for distress, or use strongly partisan external providers without proper caution.³ Those are substantial improvements.
They also establish a principle capable of wider application. Once the Department for Education accepts that schools must distinguish established fact from contested interpretations in one anthropological controversy, it becomes reasonable to ask for the same intellectual discipline elsewhere. “Healthy relationship” may contain a moral judgment. So may “positive sexuality”, “wellbeing” or a claim about the place of autonomy in intimate decisions. Schools do not have to treat every proposition as uncertain, but they should know when they have crossed from teaching facts into presenting a particular moral account of those facts.
The Government’s own guidance on political impartiality already recognises that political questions extend beyond party politics. Campaigning propositions and disputed ethical questions can become political issues, and schools must take care not to turn a partisan position into apparent fact merely by leaving the controversy unmentioned.⁶ This is relevant to RSHE precisely because some of its most difficult questions sit at the border between ethics, law, health and politics.
Nuntiatoria addressed a related problem after the Supreme Court’s Northern Ireland religious-education judgment in The Northern Ireland RE Judgment and the Hidden Contradiction in Modern British Education. The judgment placed considerable weight upon objective, critical and pluralistic teaching where religious and philosophical convictions are engaged.⁷ The broader inconsistency remains uncomfortable: propositions recognised as “religious” are readily acknowledged as matters of belief, while secular propositions may pass through another part of the curriculum under the labels of health, equality or wellbeing without attracting equivalent philosophical scrutiny.
That does not make secular education inherently dishonest. It does mean that administrative language should not be mistaken for the absence of a worldview.
Ofsted adds another institutional dimension. The inspection toolkit now in use evaluates “inclusive personal development and wellbeing”. Inspectors consider the quality of personal-development provision, pupils’ understanding of healthy relationships and their preparation for life alongside people with different characteristics and beliefs.⁸ It would be inaccurate to suggest that Ofsted inspects the private conscience of each pupil or demands personal assent to a prescribed political creed. The more significant point is institutional: inspection criteria help determine what schools understand as successful provision, and over time that vocabulary shapes curriculum planning, leadership priorities and the evidence schools expect to produce.
The effect does not depend upon an explicit ideological instruction. Inspection criteria, curriculum expectations and professional incentives gradually establish their own institutional vocabulary of success. That is normal in any regulated system, but where the criteria concern personal development rather than simple academic attainment, it is reasonable to ask which moral assumptions have entered that vocabulary.
Parents matter precisely because they represent an authority which does not originate in the educational bureaucracy. The new guidance recognises this more clearly than some previous practice did. Parents must be consulted when RSE policies are developed or reviewed. They should see representative resources and may ask to inspect the full materials. Primary parents retain an automatic right to withdraw children from additional sex education outside national-curriculum science.³ These protections are valuable and should be used.
The guidance also states that parents cannot veto curriculum content. That is hardly surprising. A common school curriculum cannot be rewritten by every individual parent, and parental authority itself is not unlimited. The more serious question concerns the order of responsibilities. When education moves from factual instruction into the moral formation of children, who begins with the stronger claim to decide the underlying account of the good: the family or the state?
Catholic teaching has a settled answer. Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri taught that the family possesses an educational right and duty prior to the state. St John Paul II described parental education in Familiaris Consortio as original, primary and irreplaceable, while canon 226 §2 speaks of parents’ grave obligation and right to educate their children.⁹ These principles have never meant that the state should stand idle where children are neglected or harmed, nor that parents may demand whatever curriculum they please. Civil authority has genuine responsibilities for education, safeguarding and the common good. The point is one of order: the state assists a human society which already exists in the family; it does not invent the family’s educational responsibility by granting it administrative recognition.
This is why consultation is more than a procedural side issue. If parents possess a genuinely prior responsibility, the opportunity to comment upon moral and relational education should come while important decisions remain open and with sufficient information to make the comment meaningful. A consultation cannot bear that weight if parents are shown general policy language while the educational substance remains in resources they have not seen.
Brighton’s recent experience outside the narrow curriculum question reinforces the concern. Following the NHS investigation into WellBN, more than one hundred residents, including parents and carers, asked Brighton & Hove City Council what lessons should be learned about safeguarding, parental involvement, social transition, outside organisations and the treatment of previous concerns. PSHEbrighton later sought a private meeting in which affected families could describe recurring experiences concerning schools, communication, vulnerability and referral pathways. The importance of that episode lies in how readily a public institution can possess extensive procedures for hearing people while remaining far less well equipped to reconsider the framework through which their concerns are interpreted.
The same danger exists in curriculum consultation. Parents can receive an email, complete a form and appear in the consultation record while having little opportunity to engage the premises on which the programme itself rests. That is why the statutory requirement should be read seriously. The meaningful questions concern timing, disclosure and consequence: when were parents consulted, what did they know when they replied, which decisions remained open, and what happened to the representations they made?
There is no evidence presently before us which would justify saying that most English schools failed this test before September. Nor is such an assertion necessary. The Government has given parents a much better question to ask at the level where an answer can actually be obtained.
- When did you consult us?
- What were we shown?
- What was still capable of being changed?
- What changed because parents responded?
Schools which handled the process properly should have no difficulty answering. Those which discover that consultation was thin, late or inadequately informed have an opportunity to correct it. The purpose of asking is not to manufacture another national scandal from insufficient evidence. It is to make the Government’s promise of parental participation mean something in practice.
There is much in the revised guidance which deserves support. The greater transparency over resources is welcome. The refusal to allow contested claims about gender identity to pass as unquestioned fact is overdue. Caution concerning partisan external organisations is sensible. Clearer parental access and stronger safeguarding expectations are improvements. Criticism should acknowledge them, not least because those provisions supply parents and governors with tools capable of improving local practice.
The deeper argument begins after those improvements have been recognised. A school serious about evidence and intellectual balance should be prepared to ask the same questions about its own moral vocabulary that it now asks about controversial external resources.
- What does “wellbeing” mean in this programme?
- What moral assumptions sit behind its definition of a healthy relationship?Where does factual instruction end and moral judgment begin?
- Where serious religious and philosophical traditions disagree, are pupils told that disagreement exists?
- Are children being taught how to reason about moral questions, or chiefly how to speak the language in which an institutional answer has already become normal?
Those are educational questions before they are culture-war questions. A pupil who cannot distinguish law from morality, evidence from interpretation, tolerance from agreement or psychological comfort from human flourishing has not been educated adequately for a plural society, however confidently he can reproduce approved vocabulary.
Children need accurate knowledge about bodies, reproduction, health, consent, abuse, exploitation, pornography, coercion and the law. They need trustworthy adults and clear routes to help when something is wrong. Schools have an indispensable part to play in giving them that knowledge and protection. None of those duties requires pretending that every moral judgment made within RSHE follows automatically from empirical evidence.
The new framework will be stronger if schools resist that temptation. Its own safeguards point towards the right discipline: disclose the materials, involve parents, distinguish fact from contested interpretation, scrutinise external providers, respect religious backgrounds and teach contentious questions without disguising their contentious character.
The same discipline should be brought to the concept of the well-formed child itself.
Catholic education gives an explicit account of what human flourishing means. Other religious and philosophical traditions do likewise. The state need not adopt any one of them as its established creed, but neither should it imagine that words such as “wellbeing”, “ethical”, “healthy” and “positive” float free of philosophical commitments.
Ten days into the new regime, the immediate task is practical. Parents should ask to see the policy and resources, establish when consultation occurred, and find out what changed because of it. Governors should know the actual materials for which they are assuming responsibility. Schools should welcome that scrutiny because the revised guidance itself now requires much of it.
Once those questions have been answered, another remains.
Whose understanding of the well-formed child is guiding the curriculum?
That is not an objection to education.
It is one of the questions education ought to teach children to ask.
¹ Department for Education, Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education: Statutory Guidance, revised guidance in force from 1 September 2026.
² Department for Education, Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education in England: Government Response to the Consultation, 15 July 2025.
³ Department for Education, Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education: Statutory Guidance, especially paras 1–3, 12, 16–21 and 49–61.
⁴ Government Office for Science, Relationships and Sex Education, 29 January 2026, summary of the expert roundtable on approaches to communicating RSHE topics; the publication expressly states that the roundtable notes are not Government policy.
⁵ Catholic Education Service, Relationship and Sex Education, current guidance; see also Nuntiatoria, Who Is Forming Catholic Children?, 11 September 2026.
⁶ Department for Education, Political Impartiality in Schools, current guidance on partisan political views, contested questions and balanced presentation.
⁷ Nuntiatoria, The Northern Ireland RE Judgment and the Hidden Contradiction in Modern British Education, 21 November 2025.
⁸ Ofsted, State-funded School Inspection Toolkit, in use from 7 September 2026, especially the criteria concerning inclusive personal development and wellbeing.
⁹ Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, 31 December 1929; Pope St John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 22 November 1981; Codex Iuris Canonici, can. 226 §2.
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