Life to the Full, statutory RSE and the authority parents cannot surrender
Since 1 September, Catholic secondary schools in England have been working under a revised statutory regime for Relationships, Sex and Health Education. By the end of secondary education pupils are to know about the “full range” of contraceptive choices and their efficacy, abortion among the available responses to pregnancy, condom use and “safer sex”, and where confidential sexual and reproductive health advice and treatment may be obtained. In the same statutory table, schools are told to teach that sex, for those who feel ready and are over the age of consent, “can and should be enjoyable and positive”. Faith and family values appear later among the considerations which a young person might take into account before sexual activity.¹
There, in a few pages of Government guidance, lies much of the difficulty confronting Catholic education. The State has not merely required schools to teach reproductive biology or the law of consent. It has supplied a moral framework in which adolescent sexual decision-making is treated principally through readiness, consent, health, contraception and access to services. Marriage is not the organising principle. Chastity is not the organising principle. The objective moral character of the sexual act is not the organising principle. A Catholic school may teach all the facts Parliament lawfully requires it to teach, but it cannot accept that architecture without ceasing, at precisely the point where formation matters most, to think as a Catholic institution.
This would be serious enough were the matter confined to a handful of schools. It is not. Ten Ten Resources says that more than 80 per cent of Catholic schools in England and Wales used some form of its material during 2024–25. More than 70 per cent of Catholic secondary schools now use its Life to the Full programme for their Relationships, Sex and Health Education. Ten Ten describes its resources as approved by Catholic dioceses throughout England and Wales and says that it has worked in partnership with almost all Catholic dioceses, as well as with the Catholic Education Service. Its secondary programme takes its framework from the CES Model Catholic RSE Framework.²
This is therefore no peripheral dispute about an obscure teaching resource. Life to the Full has become part of the ordinary formative environment of a very large proportion of Catholic children in England and Wales. Parents are entitled to know exactly what is being put before their sons and daughters. Priests serving as governors should know. Governors should know. Diocesan education departments should know. Bishops whose authority stands behind Catholic education should know.
Above all, parents should never be persuaded that asking is itself somehow disloyal.
The Church places upon them an obligation which no episcopal approval, school policy or Government regulation can remove. Canon 226 §2 says that, because parents have given life to their children, they possess a “most grave obligation” and the right to educate them, with Christian parents particularly bound to secure their education according to the doctrine handed down by the Church. Canon 793 says the same in the specific context of Catholic education. Canon 796 describes schools as the “principal assistance” to parents in carrying out that task and requires teachers to collaborate closely with them.³
Saint John Paul II went further when addressing sexual education itself. In Familiaris Consortio he called the educational right and duty of parents original, primary, irreplaceable and inalienable. Sexual education, he wrote, “must always be carried out under their attentive guidance”, whether at home or in institutions chosen and controlled by them. The school enters this field according to subsidiarity. It assists the family; it does not acquire an independent mandate to form the child according to a different moral order.⁴
Pius XI had already stated the principle with characteristic precision in Divini Illius Magistri. The family receives its educational mission directly from the Creator. Its right is prior to that of civil society and the State because generation and education belong together. The State has real duties towards education and the common good, but its function is to protect and foster family life, “by no means to absorb the family and the individual, or to substitute itself for them”.⁵
That hierarchy of responsibilities matters because Catholic parents are often placed in an extraordinarily difficult position. They may have chosen the local Catholic school precisely because they wanted assistance in handing on the Faith. Their parish priest may be a governor. The school may have an excellent academic reputation. The RSE programme may carry diocesan approval. Most parents have neither the time nor professional experience to audit dozens of lesson plans, videos, teacher scripts and external links. When a concern arises, “this is the approved Catholic programme” can sound very much like the end of the matter.
It is not.
The Catholic Education Service itself says that effective Catholic RSE must be faithful to the Church’s vision of the human person, must involve parents because they are the primary educators of their children, and must be delivered by professionals who understand Church teaching. Its current guidance says Catholic schools should collaborate “extremely closely” with parents on RSE. Those are not standards invented by critics of the present system. They are the standards published by the Catholic educational establishment itself.⁶
The contents of Life to the Full deserve examination against them.
Take contraception. The programme includes a Year 9 unit on fertility and contraception. Ten Ten has explained that an earlier version gave pupils factual information about contraceptive methods, their failure rates and possible side effects, but did not develop the Catholic teaching on contraception within that lesson. The session ended instead by encouraging pupils to save sex for marriage. Ten Ten subsequently reviewed the material. The current version explicitly teaches that contraception is wrong, situates that teaching within marriage between a man and a woman, and corrects an earlier reference to Natural Family Planning as “natural contraception”.⁷
Those revisions matter. They also demonstrate why scrutiny matters. A thirteen- or fourteen-year-old does not receive moral formation in footnotes. Sequence, emphasis, vocabulary and context matter. A pupil who is first given a detailed account of contraceptive choices within the familiar public-health vocabulary of efficacy, failure and side effects is already being invited to think about the subject in a particular way. Catholic teaching cannot simply arrive at the end as the denominational answer appended to an otherwise settled framework.
The Catholic objection to contraception is not that condoms have a failure rate or that hormonal contraception may have side effects. Nor does the Church teach chastity because abstinence happens to be an especially reliable method of avoiding pregnancy. She teaches that sexual intercourse has an objective meaning: the one-flesh union of husband and wife, unitive and procreative by its nature, belonging within marriage and inseparable from the gift of self which marriage signifies. Contraception is judged in relation to that truth. Without the truth, the prohibition becomes arbitrary. Without the anthropology, Catholic sexual morality appears to adolescents as a collection of ecclesiastical restrictions laid over the sexual culture they have already been taught to regard as normal.
The same difficulty arises with abortion. Life to the Full does teach that abortion is objectively wrong. Its materials describe abortion as the deliberate ending of unborn human life, affirm that human life begins at conception and call pupils to support both mother and child. Ten Ten has also altered earlier wording which described the beginning of human life at conception as a “Christian belief”, recognising that the beginning of the individual human organism is not a confessional opinion from which Catholics happen to derive their moral conclusions.⁸
Yet from this month Catholic schools in England must also ensure that pupils receive medically and legally accurate information about abortion as one of the available “choices” in relation to pregnancy and are told where further help may be obtained. That statutory requirement does not force a Catholic teacher to describe abortion as morally neutral. Indeed, the same Government guidance expressly permits schools with a religious character to teach their distinctive faith perspective and to discuss contentious questions in that light. The distinction is crucial. A Catholic school can explain that British law permits abortion and describe accurately how the law operates. It cannot present the deliberate killing of an unborn child as merely one morally equivalent item on a menu of reproductive options.
“The Government makes us teach it” is therefore not a sufficient answer.
The Government makes schools teach particular information. It does not require Catholic schools to adopt the moral philosophy in which contemporary sexual-health policy usually places that information. The statutory guidance itself acknowledges faith perspectives. A Catholic institution which fails to supply the Catholic judgement cannot attribute its failure entirely to Whitehall.
There is an even deeper difficulty in the Government’s new formulation. Pupils are to learn that sex, provided those involved feel ready and are over the age of consent, “can and should be enjoyable and positive”. That is not simply biological information. Nor is it merely a statement of criminal law. It proposes a positive understanding of sexual behaviour while leaving marriage outside the criterion by which the behaviour is judged.
Catholic teaching starts somewhere else. Sexual intimacy is good because God created it good; its goodness belongs within the marital covenant for which it was created. Consent is necessary, but consent cannot make every sexual act good. Readiness cannot make fornication chaste. Contraception cannot turn sex outside marriage into responsible sex. Legality does not confer morality. A sixteen-year-old may lawfully consent to acts which remain sinful. Catholic education loses its reason for existence if it becomes incapable of saying so plainly.
This is not a demand for ignorance. Children should understand their bodies. Adolescents should know how conception occurs, what pregnancy means, what the law says, how exploitation works and how to recognise abuse. They need truthful teaching about pornography, coercion, sexually transmitted infection and the manipulation to which young people are subjected online. A Catholic education worthy of the name ought to be exceptionally good at explaining these things because it possesses something richer than risk management with which to explain them: an account of what the body is for.
Nuntiatoria first examined the direction of Catholic RSE and Life to the Full in Nuntiatoria XXIX: Christus Rex. Since then our reporting on schools and safeguarding has repeatedly returned to the same question in different forms: when an institution claims authority over a child, what limits that authority? The answer cannot be that good intentions, professional status or institutional approval are sufficient. In our reporting on parental rights and school secrecy, and later in Auctoritas Veritati Servit, we argued that schools do not own children. The phrase is deliberately stark because the principle has become surprisingly difficult to maintain in practice.⁹
The issue is not resolved by invoking safeguarding. Genuine safeguarding sometimes requires information to be withheld from a dangerous parent. A child being sexually or physically abused at home must have some means of obtaining help outside the family. No sensible doctrine of parental rights denies this. The exceptional case, however, cannot quietly be converted into the ordinary model of childhood, in which confidential professionals stand between parents and children whenever sex, pregnancy or identity becomes difficult.
That brings us to Childline.
Life to the Full refers pupils to Childline in safeguarding contexts, particularly where a child experiencing abuse or serious difficulty may be unable to approach a parent or another trusted adult. Ten Ten expressly says that it does not direct pupils to Childline for contraception, abortion or gender advice. That is the fact. The other fact is that Childline itself provides such information.
A young person following the Childline website can find advice stating that doctors and sexual-health clinics may discuss pregnancy, abortion, contraception and sexually transmitted infections confidentially with children. Its current abortion page tells a young person in England, Scotland or Wales that a doctor ordinarily should not tell parents or carers about an abortion consultation unless there is a safeguarding reason to do so. The site explains abortion procedures and directs young people towards further sexual-health services. It also tells under-sixteens that contraception can be prescribed by doctors and sexual-health clinics.¹⁰
The safeguarding purpose for which Ten Ten refers a child to Childline may therefore be entirely legitimate while the organisation itself offers other material profoundly at odds with Catholic formation. A Catholic school cannot pretend the second fact disappears because its own hyperlink was provided for the first. If children are being introduced to an external organisation as a confidential and authoritative source of help, parents should know what that organisation provides. Governors should know. The school should have considered the implications before the referral is made.
There is also a serious question about what cultural assumptions are absorbed when children are repeatedly taught to think of confidential sexual-health services as part of ordinary adolescent life. Catholicism does not regard the maturing child as an autonomous sexual consumer whose choices are rendered responsible by professional advice. The family is the ordinary setting of protection, moral formation and growth towards adult responsibility. Professional confidentiality can be necessary. It should not become a substitute family.
Parents in England now possess a particularly important means of testing what their school is doing. The revised statutory guidance says schools should show parents representative samples of RSHE resources and must enable them to view all curriculum materials on request. Schools should not agree contracts preventing materials from being shown to parents, and any contractual clause seeking to prohibit all parental access is described by the Government as void and unenforceable. Copyright may govern how material is shared. It may not be used as an excuse for refusing access.¹¹
Ten Ten itself says that full access to Life to the Full content is available to parents on request through the school RSE lead. It provides consultation tools and a parent portal. There is consequently no good reason for a Catholic parent to settle for a curriculum map, a reassuring leaflet or a statement that “the diocese has approved it”. The actual lesson can be seen.
Parents should see it.
They should see the teacher guidance as well as the pupil-facing video. They should ask which external organisations are named. They should know how contraception is taught, how abortion is explained, what happens when pupils ask about sex outside marriage, and whether Catholic teaching governs the lesson or appears as a discrete religious contribution within it. They should ask what is statutory, what is the provider’s choice and what has been decided locally by the school. They should know exactly which material falls within sex education from which withdrawal may be requested and which material is taught elsewhere in the curriculum.
Under the English regime parents retain a statutory right to request withdrawal from some or all sex education delivered as part of RSE. In primary schools such a request must ordinarily be granted for sex education outside the science curriculum. In secondary schools a headteacher may refuse in exceptional circumstances, and pupils may themselves opt back into sex education from three terms before their sixteenth birthday. Relationships education, health education and relevant science content are not subject to parental withdrawal.¹²
Wales now goes further. Relationships and Sexuality Education is a mandatory element of the Curriculum for Wales from ages three to sixteen. The new system has been introduced year by year, and from September 2026 the removal of the parental right of withdrawal reaches Year 11. Every compulsory-school-age cohort is therefore now within the new settlement.¹³
For Catholic parents in Wales this makes transparency more important, not less. Where withdrawal is unavailable, Catholic authorities carry a still greater responsibility to demonstrate how compulsory RSE has been brought into conformity with Catholic teaching. Ten Ten has worked with Catholic educational structures in Wales to provide its programme within that framework. The resulting lessons cannot be treated as a technical matter for curriculum specialists. When parents have no exit from the statutory subject, they are entitled to exceptional clarity about what the Catholic school is putting in its place.
This is where episcopal responsibility becomes unavoidable. A bishop is not merely another stakeholder in Catholic education. He possesses real authority and a grave obligation towards the teaching of the faith in his diocese. Diocesan education offices act beneath that responsibility. Approval therefore means something. It should mean that competent people have examined the material closely enough to know what is being taught in the bishop’s name.
It cannot mean that parents should stop looking.
Authority within the Church does not operate by displacement, as though the bishop’s responsibility cancels the parent’s or the parent’s responsibility cancels the bishop’s. Each will answer for his own office. Parents cannot stand before God and say that they never examined what their children were taught because a diocesan logo reassured them. A bishop cannot escape responsibility for Catholic formation because individual schools purchased the subscription. A governor cannot assume that a commercial provider has already made every difficult moral judgement on his behalf.
Nuntiatoria has encountered this habit of institutional displacement repeatedly. In A Mandate Is Not an Answer, the immediate subject was political and safeguarding accountability in Brighton, but the principle was wider: possession of an office does not answer the substantive question put to the office-holder. In Auctoritas Veritati Servit, we returned to the same point more directly. Authority serves truth; it does not manufacture it. Neither the State nor the Church may alter human nature by administrative decision.¹⁴
The point also belongs with the argument made this week in Christianity Is Right ~ Not Right Wing. Marriage as the union of man and woman, the moral significance of sexual acts, the reality of biological sex, the sanctity of unborn life and the prior responsibility of parents were not devised by a modern political movement. They are not “right-wing” additions to Christianity. They belong to a Christian account of creation, nature and moral order which long predates our current political divisions. A Catholic school is not importing a culture war when it teaches them. It is doing what the adjective Catholic requires.¹⁵
The danger is subtler than outright repudiation of doctrine. Catholic institutions are rarely likely to announce that contraception has become morally good or that abortion no longer kills an innocent human being. The greater danger is one of structure. The vocabulary, assumptions and questions of secular sexual ethics are admitted first; Catholic propositions are then inserted into them. Pupils learn to think about sexuality through consent, identity, risk, contraception, confidentiality and choice, while marriage, chastity, procreation, sin, virtue and the final end of man appear later as religious commentary.
That reverses the order.
Catholic education should begin with what man is.
He is created, not self-invented. He is male or female. His body is not raw material awaiting an identity. Sexual difference has meaning. Marriage precedes the State and is not created by it. The marital act belongs to husband and wife and is ordered by nature towards their union and the generation of life. Chastity is the virtue by which sexuality is integrated within the person. The unborn child is already one of us. Freedom does not mean the ability to make any desire morally good. The good of the human person reaches beyond physical health, emotional comfort or autonomous choice to his supernatural end in God.
Only within that account can contraceptive methods, abortion law, consent, sexual-health services and the rest be taught without allowing the surrounding culture to determine the terms of Catholic thought.
Our Lord’s warning belongs here: “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Spiritual injury is not imaginary because it cannot be plotted on a safeguarding dashboard. A child can be physically secure, academically successful and impeccably informed about modern sexual-health services while being badly formed about the purpose of his own body and the commandments of God.¹⁶
Catholic schools ought to understand that better than anyone.
This is why the present moment calls for more than reassurance. The new English statutory guidance came into force only days ago. Every Catholic diocese should now be able to explain publicly how the RSE programmes used in its schools have been examined against the revised requirements. Where Life to the Full is approved or widely used, parents should be told which version has been reviewed, what doctrinal criteria have been applied, what external organisations appear in the material, what has changed as the programme has developed and how schools are expected to distinguish civil information from Catholic moral judgement.
Governors should undertake the same exercise locally. Parish priests sitting on governing bodies should not assume that RSE belongs to educational specialists and therefore lies beyond their competence. Few parts of the curriculum touch more directly upon natural law, marriage, family life, mortal sin, the sanctity of human life and the moral formation of the young. If a priest-governor is not concerned with those matters, it is difficult to know what precisely would qualify as his concern.
Parents, meanwhile, need not begin with accusations. They should begin with the material.
Ask to see it.
See what the thirteen-year-old sees. Read what the teacher is instructed to say. Look at the links. Examine the sequence. Ask why a particular organisation is recommended. Ask whether Church teaching is stated before or after pupils have been invited to discuss their personal opinions. Ask whether marriage supplies the framework for sexual intimacy. Ask what happens when the statutory curriculum and Catholic moral doctrine speak in different registers. Ask how the school expects a Catholic child to understand the difference.
A Catholic school confident in its own Catholicity should welcome such scrutiny.
Blessed Clemens August von Galen understood the parental duty with formidable clarity when he preached at Münster on 20 July 1941. Confronting a political order whose circumstances were vastly different from our own, he nevertheless stated a principle which does not depend upon the regime confronting the parent. He told Christian fathers and mothers to look at what their children were reading and being taught. Otherwise, he warned, they would neglect their “most sacred duty” before the One who had entrusted those children to them so that they might show them the way to Heaven.¹⁷
The circumstances change. The duty does not.
Parents have every reason to respect teachers who labour conscientiously in Catholic schools. They should value faithful priests and good governors. They should recognise the genuine difficulties created when Catholic institutions must satisfy detailed statutory requirements inside a culture which no longer shares Catholic premises about sex, marriage or human life.
But trust is not abdication.
The State did not give parents their children. The school did not give parents their children. The diocese did not give parents their children.
God did.
And when Catholic parents entrust a son or daughter to a Catholic school, they entrust the school with a share in their work. They do not surrender the work itself.
The word Catholic over the gate must therefore mean more than prayers, saints’ names, crucifixes and an occasional quotation from the Catechism. It must mean that the school sees the human person, his body, his sexuality, his freedom and his final destiny as the Church sees them.
Anything less may still be education.
It is not enough to call it Catholic.
¹ Department for Education, Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education: Statutory Guidance, in force from 1 September 2026, especially the secondary curriculum content on intimate and sexual relationships; see also the provisions permitting schools with a religious character to teach their distinctive faith perspective.
² Ten Ten Resources, Life to the Full Secondary; Ten Ten Resources, Secondary School Programmes 2026–27; Ten Ten Resources, Primary School Programmes 2026–27.
³ Code of Canon Law, Canons 226 §2, 793 and 796, Holy See, Code of Canon Law: The Obligations and Rights of the Lay Christian Faithful and Catholic Education, Canons 793–821.
⁴ Saint John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, §§36–37.
⁵ Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, especially §§31–45.
⁶ Catholic Education Service, Relationship and Sex Education, updated March 2026.
⁷ Ten Ten Resources, Life to the Full: Response and Report, section “Contraception”.
⁸ Ten Ten Resources, Life to the Full: Response and Report, sections “Abortion” and “The Humanity of the Unborn Brought Into Question”.
⁹ Nuntiatoria, Nuntiatoria XXIX: Christus Rex, 25 October 2024; Nuntiatoria, Supreme Court Rebukes School Secrecy: The Battle for Parental Rights in Education, 5 March 2026; Nuntiatoria, Auctoritas Veritati Servit, 28 June 2026.
¹⁰ Childline, Understanding Abortion: Information for Young People and Your Rights.
¹¹ Department for Education, Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education: Statutory Guidance, §§56–60.
¹² Department for Education, Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education: Statutory Guidance, §§16–23; GOV.UK, The National Curriculum: Other Compulsory Subjects.
¹³ Welsh Government/Hwb, Curriculum for Wales: Summary of Legislation and Relationships and Sexuality Education: Statutory Guidance.
¹⁴ Nuntiatoria, A Mandate Is Not an Answer, 26 June 2026; Nuntiatoria, Auctoritas Veritati Servit, 28 June 2026.
¹⁵ Nuntiatoria, Christianity Is Right ~ Not Right Wing, 8 September 2026.
¹⁶ Douay-Rheims Bible, Matthew 10:28.
¹⁷ Clemens August Graf von Galen, Sermon of 20 July 1941, Liebfrauenkirche, Münster; Clemens August Graf von Galen Archive, Sermons in Defiance of the Nazis.
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