End Sexism in Schools was pleased to be asked by the newly formed Youth Select Committee to send in evidence about the current state of the Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) curriculum in England and Wales, as part of their inquiry into its content and delivery in secondary schools. This blog post outlines the findings we sent to the Committee.
RSHE is not a panacea
End Sexism in Schools has always maintained that educating children about sexism and misogyny should be an essential component of schools’ RSHE curricula. We also strongly advocate for the teaching of consent and healthy, respectful relationships between men and women. However, we are alarmed by the persistent narrative, from all sectors of the Government, that lessons on consent and misogyny as part of RSHE are THE solution to tackling the epidemic of sexism and misogyny among young people, both within and outside of school.
Merely a partial solution
We think this is an ineffectual ‘solution’ for a number of reasons. On a practical level, RSHE provision across England and Wales is like the Wild West, with government guidance not mandating any minimum requirement of curriculum hours, or even stipulating that it should be taught as discrete or regular lessons. Essentially, schools are allowed to teach as much or as little as they like, as often or as sporadically as they like. In practice, this means that RSHE provision is often inconsistent and inadequate, with many teachers telling us that it is squeezed into tutor time, with sometimes as little as 15 minutes for teachers to tackle such sensitive topics as sexual abuse.
There are no trained specialist teachers of RSHE in England and Wales, as there are no Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses in RSHE, given that it is not a formal curriculum subject. This means that all teachers of RSHE are specialists in other subjects, teaching beyond the scope of their own academic training and potentially their own cultural and social experiences.
It is no surprise that a recent NSPCC survey found that 47% of teachers lacked confidence in teaching RSHE. If almost 50% of teachers in any other curriculum area (such as Maths or English) stated they lacked confidence in teaching their subject, there would be a national outcry at the poor quality of educational provision in our schools, but it is considered acceptable for RSHE to be routinely taught by teachers without appropriate subject knowledge.
Currently, the only area of the school curriculum that provides any mandatory provision for teaching young people about sexism and misogyny is RSHE, and yet this provision is woefully unregulated, often inadequately resourced and delivered by untrained and unconfident teachers. No wonder this so-called ‘solution’ to misogyny in schools has so far failed to do anything to reduce the scale of the problem.
Expecting RSHE alone to fix the widespread problem of misogyny when it is (a) not addressed anywhere else in school life, (b) inadequately taught, and (c) inadequately provisioned, is fantasy.
Issues with the wider curriculum
We think there is a clear link between the invisibility of women in the academic curriculum, and the misogyny exhibited by boys and young men. Why should they respect women if they are never given any reasons to value them? Our research has demonstrated the extent to which women are absent from the taught curriculum, making them effectively invisible in our classrooms.
Only 5% of students at GCSE are taught a whole text by a female author in English Literature (End Sexism in Schools, 2025), only 12% of History lessons feature a female figure as the main focus (The Great History Heist, End Sexism in Schools, 2025), and 0% of the Science curriculum at GCSE features a female scientist (Stemettes, 2023).
In a school landscape where students are not taught about women and are not discussing women’s achievements and perspectives in our classrooms as a result, it is no surprise that, according to Ofsted’s 2021 report into sexism and misogyny in schools (Department for Education, 2021), over 90% of girls had experienced sexist name-calling and 80% had experienced unwanted comments of a sexual nature during the school day. We maintain that the only ‘solution’ to sexism and misogyny in schools is equality in the taught curriculum.
While RSHE remains the only subject where misogyny is explicitly tackled in schools, its provision must be urgently improved, as it is currently not fit for purpose. The Children’s Commissioner has said that, ‘a strong curriculum is only as good as those who teach it… badly taught RSHE can be even more damaging than no RSHE at all’ (The Telegraph, 15 July 2025), and we agree.
Our recommendations for effective RSHE teaching in schools would therefore be:
- A mandated minimum amount of curriculum time to be spent on the delivery of RSHE in secondary schools.
- Formalising RSHE as a mandatory curriculum subject for all Key Stages.
- More explicit content guidance for each separate Key Stage, particularly around online misogyny, with resources provided for schools.
- Incorporation of explicit RSHE training into all ITT programmes.
- The introduction of specialist Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) or School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) courses in RSHE.
- Mandatory annual training for all teachers of RSHE in updated subject content, e.g. online misogyny, provided by the Department for Education.
- The one-sided teaching of only men’s lives, experience and achievements needs redressing and is misleading and inaccurate. Women and girls should have equivalent representation within the curriculum as men and boys.
