RSHE 2025 Guidance: Key Changes and What They Mean for Schools
Coram Life Education & SCARF welcomes the release of the 2025 RSHE guidance, which builds on five years of progress in ensuring children and young people receive the Relationships, Health (including Puberty), and Sex Education they need and want. This comprehensive update aims to support their mental health and wellbeing, prepare them for the changes they will experience as they grow up, help them make healthy choices, recognise and manage feelings, and be safe from harm, both online and offline.
A key positive change is the inclusion of guiding principles to ensure curriculum updates are effective, inclusive, and developmentally supportive. Curricula should reflect pupil voice, local context, and parental transparency. It must foster healthy attitudes and relationships using age-appropriate, non-stigmatising language, and sequenced topics. Delivery should be participative, led by trained staff or trusted providers, and embedded within a whole-school approach to wellbeing, safeguarding, and positive relationships.
We are pleased that the statutory guidance reinforces a skills-based, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, and that flexibility helps schools meet the needs of their pupils. This approach acknowledges that building children's understanding and skills at primary level is essential for preparing them for more complex content at secondary school.
Key Positive Changes
- Enhanced Focus on Positive Masculinity: Supports boys in developing a healthy sense of masculinity by challenging harmful stereotypes, promoting emotional expression and respectful boundaries.
- Strengthened Online Safety and Behaviours: Strengthens digital awareness and citizenship, with expanded content at both primary and secondary levels.
- Inclusive Family Recognition: Reinforces that healthy relationships include same-sex parents and diverse family structures.
- Safeguarding: Emphasises early understanding of abusive behaviour and correct anatomical terms.
- Practical Health Education: Covers periods from age eight and introduces pelvic floor health at secondary level.
Areas of Concern
- Curriculum Complexity: The secondary requirements are lengthy and may lead to a less obvious spiral curriculum structure. Additionally, while "being safe" has expanded from 3 to 16 requirements in secondary education, there's no mention of protected time on the timetable to deliver this content effectively.
- Ambiguous Accountability: The requirement for Governors to ensure these subjects are resourced, staffed and timetabled in a way that ensures the school can fulfil its legal obligations, which was in the 2019 version, no longer appears in the 2025 version, with no indication of who is required to ensure this.
- Primary Education Gaps: No mention of consent or permission-seeking in primary education, and while the guidance doesn't use the LGBT acronym, it strongly encourages inclusion of same-sex families but not attraction. However, it expects children to know that bullying related to sexual orientation is wrong, but without any acknowledgment in the primary phase that children may develop same sex, as well as opposite sex attraction during puberty.
Moving Forward
Schools remain bound by the 2019 statutory guidance until September 2026, but may adopt the new guidance from September 2025. We will review the updated guidance in detail to ensure that SCARF remains fully compliant and continues to support schools with high-quality, trusted resources. We'll also be holding briefing updates in the Autumn to share key information and next steps regarding RSHE, and our RSE 1-Day training will be revised to ensure you'll be provided with up-to-date guidance on what you're expected to deliver in Relationships Education and the RSE aspects of Health Education.
The 2025 RSHE guidance marks a significant step forward in delivering inclusive, age-appropriate education that prioritises safety, wellbeing, and life skills. While some areas need clarification, the overall direction is encouraging. Flexibility allows schools to tailor content to their pupils’ needs, and ongoing collaboration between educators, parents, and providers will be key to successful implementation.