Five steps to comprehensive Relationships and Sexuality Education

Relationships and sexuality education (RSE) is a required area of learning in the New Zealand Curriculum from Years 1 to 10. It provides ākonga with the knowledge and skills they need to develop healthy relationships and make informed choices that support their mental and physical health and wellbeing.

We recommend taking a whole school approach to relationships and sexuality education. This includes curriculum-aligned lessons, with messages reinforced across other subjects and in other parts of school life.

Our Community Health Promoters across the motū are available to work with you to develop your whole school approach and can provide training and support to deliver RSE as part of the health curriculum. Our team works flexibly and can work with you to identify your needs and assist you to find the best support, which may be providing some of the services discussed below, or connecting you with a separate specialist service. We offer the following resources and services to support you and your school community with integrating RSE.

We’ve produced two webinars that give an overview of relationships and sexuality education within the NZ curriculum and our teaching resource – Navigating the Journey. One webinar is for teachers, and the other is for parents.

If you are delivering Navigating the Journey to your students, we encourage you to share the teachers webinar with all teachers in the school so they can support the students' learning. And we encourage you to distribute the parents webinar to your parent community so they can understand what their young people are learning.

We have a number of curriculum-aligned teaching resources available on our website either free of charge or to purchase for a small fee. This includes Navigating the Journey (NtJ), which contains lesson plans for years 1-10 and costs just $5.

You can also find a range of free to access written, downloadable and video resources that can be used either as part of Navigating the Journey, or as part of your own lesson plans.

Check out our No Silly Questions video that answers some questions young people might have about accessing our clinical services. Or share our “How to” videos for demonstrations of how to use a condom, oral dam and internal condom and our Just About Periods pamphlet – as well as many more.

You can purchase Keep Safe Kits and condom demonstrators to enable you to show physical examples of contraception and pregnancy testing, and STI prevention and testing items to your class.

We are releasing a series of online learning options for teachers and other professionals supporting young people.

Two foundation courses will be available from November 2024. Course 1 Talking about sexual wellbeing: foundation course 1 explores what sexual health and wellbeing is and looks at different stages of sexuality across age groups.

Foundation course 2 covers why learning about sexual wellbeing is important for young people, topics to include, and ensuring our personal opinions and values don’t enter the conversation.

These can be used as stand-alone courses and are also a prerequisite to our full-day Supporting Young People with Sexual Wellbeing course, which will also be available soon.

We provide training on how to deliver Navigating the Journey. This three-hour course focuses on utilising the Years 1-10 NTJ resources to deliver RSE to students.

Our full day course Supporting Young People with Sexual Wellbeing provides foundational knowledge and skills for professionals, including educators, working with young people. This course does not provide curriculum-aligned materials to use in lessons but equips professionals with the skills to navigate conversations with young people.

From Term One, join your peers in a forum online to discuss your plans to deliver RSE or your experiences thus far. Facilitated by Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa Community Health Promoters these one-hour online sessions provide the opportunity to connect with other school leaders or teachers nationally to share ideas, tips and tricks and find out more about what is available to you.

Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa is in the process of refreshing its RSE offerings and we will be releasing more content including videos, webinars, training and other resources over the next year. Keep up to date by watching our website and signing up to our Resources Newsletter.