Learning for life: staying healthy, staying safe, and managing relationships. For our students this is not a side subject.

Personal, social, health, citizenship and economic education runs through the week in dedicated sessions. It is where students build self-esteem and resilience, and where they can ask the questions they might not ask anywhere else.

Many of the young people we teach have had experiences that make these topics more urgent than they would be elsewhere — friendships that went badly wrong, time spent isolated, or relationships online with people they never met. Teaching this well matters more here, not less.

Relationships and sex education

We start with relationships of every kind, not only romantic ones: what it means to be a good friend, how to recognise when a friendship has become unhealthy, and what respect actually looks like day to day. Intimate relationships are covered later, when it is age appropriate, so that students can make safe and informed choices as they move towards adulthood.

By the end of secondary school, students will have covered:

• Families — different family structures, and what makes a relationship stable
• Respectful relationships — mutual respect, boundaries, and how to be a good friend
• Online relationships — how relationships work online, and the risks that come with them
• Being safe — consent, recognising abuse or exploitation, and how to get help
• Intimate and sexual relationships — sexual health, contraception and emotional readiness

Parents and carers have the right to request that their child is withdrawn from sex education within RSE. There is no right to withdraw from relationships education or health education. From three terms before a student’s sixteenth birthday, the student can choose to receive sex education themselves. How this works, and the form to use, is set out in our Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) Policy 2026–27 (PDF), also in the policy library.

Health education

Students learn to look after their own physical and mental health, to notice when they or someone else is struggling, and to ask for help early rather than late.

• Mental wellbeing — managing stress, building resilience, and talking about mental health without shame
• Internet safety — online harms, screen time and looking after personal data
• Physical health and fitness — and why being active helps with more than fitness
• Food and eating — building a healthy relationship with food, alongside our cooking lessons
• Drugs, alcohol and tobacco — the risks, in plain terms
• Health and prevention — immunisation, self-care and sleep
• Basic first aid — what to do in a common emergency
• The changing adolescent body — the physical and emotional changes of growing up

Citizenship

Citizenship covers rights and responsibilities, how decisions get made, money and work, and the fundamental British values we are required to promote. More on that on our British values and Prevent page.