Gareth’s RSE newsletter – September 2026

TLDR summary of each section

• New RSE guidance in England comes into force this month
  Every school should be doing high quality student consultations about their RSE this term.

• Children selling their own images?
  Some young people are selling sexual material of themselves, RSE should include their needs.

• Should English teachers be asked to teach sex education?
  Yes, maybe, it depends. Are we missing opportunities for cross curriculum RSE learning.

• Future girl? Exploring girls’ digital sexual cultures through speculative fabrications
  Creativity unlocks RSE learning for some young people. 

• Did the US legal system just rule some forms of Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM) legal?
  Yes due to a combination of precedents, but the UK legal system is different.

• Why is it 35p?
  🍫🐸

New RSE guidance in England comes into force this month

We have known the content of the new guidance for over a year and schools and outside educators have been busy preparing for it for a while. There are loads of new bits in this guidance and charities like the SEF, Brook and PSHE association have all released supporting materials. However, I have been surprised by the lack of attention paid to one specific addition. The first new guiding principle for RSE states.

a. Engagement with pupils. An inclusive and well-sequenced RSHE curriculum should be informed by meaningful engagement with pupils to ensure that the curriculum is relevant and engaging.

Meaningful engagement is a key term for this principle. Every good school and organisation I know completes some level of monitoring and evaluation of the RS(H)E they provide. But I would not say this is enough to satisfy the need for meaningful engagement. We know from the DfE’s own 2024 report into implementing a RSE curriculum that “Few schools reported formally consulting pupils ahead of designing the curriculum”.

Reviewing a programme to improve it for future years is great! But it doesn’t mean young people are empowered to make a real impact on the programme they receive. They are always proving feedback to help the next year group get a better programme in the future. I think meaningful engagement, is asking more of schools.

I think it is asking for evidence that a school’s program is not only evaluated at the end but a programme where students are meaningfully consulted on before it is provided. Such work will take effort but will improve the quality of RS(H)E young people receive. I think the way to make RS(H)E better requires the end of rigid multiyear curriculums that have no flexibility.

From a school’s perspective a completely understand the desire to develop a high quality, sequenced, spiral and fixed curriculum they can run across multiple years. Set programmes give staff a better chance to become confident in the lessons they are responsible for. They simplify parent and carer consultations. They help senior staff feel confident they are meeting minimum requirements from the government. Set, predictable and rigid programmes help adults.

Young people benefit from being consulted and having their programmes adapted to their cohorts needs. And whilst some trends follow predictable patterns, no two school years are the same and what is needed for one group of year 9 students might be different 12 months later. If 100% bespoke and co-created RS(H)E programmes are the best fit for young people but functionally implausible for most schools I hope we can meet in the middle with planned programmes with built in room to adapt and change.

•  DfE (27th September 2024) Relationships, sex and health education Implementation of the 2020 curriculum guidance

Children selling their own images?

The majority of incidents involving self-generated sexually explicit images of children seem to be originally created and shared by young people (voluntary or involuntary) with and around peers. Most RSE resources start from this position and explore the topic from various perspectives, including how images created for a peer can end up being viewed by predatory adults and circulating online. There are many good resources looking at patterns of grooming by adult perpetrators. Other resources focus on gender discrimination dynamics, internet safety principles, impact on relationships or potential legal consequences.

But I have not seen an educational resource that is directly aimed at addressing the concept of individuals under 18, deliberately making, marketing and selling sexualised content of themselves. A few reports into online trends have started to identify this as a small but growing part of the picture (Thorn 2025, Turner 2025, Thiel 2023). The data is suggesting that this is not always because a buyer has solicited the child for the image. Sometimes the under 18 year old is the one initiating the exchange of sexualised content for direct money, gift cards or digital currencies and gifts. (There is a huge question about how much agency the child felt when making this choice, if they feel life circumstances force them into this behaviour by giving them no other options, does it make it any less coercive just because they feel like they initiated it. They may not be groomed by an individual but are groomed by the society they are in)

This blog post shares details from on the ground experience in South Africa with children reporting the behaviour. With financial hardship being a significant motivating factor. However, this post suggests that there are other factors influencing a young person to consider offering this content. Specifically, “the digital economy has trained them to monetise attention and influencer culture has made selling sexual content look like a career path.”

I don’t think RSE need to change all their online safety work to take account of this small but potentially growing trend. All our messages about how to report things, the law, intimacy, choice, privacy, empowerment and risk perception remain true. But maybe when talking about motivation we need to start deliberately including that some people are motivated by financial gain.  

As a RSE field the question might be how do we teach about self-generated sexually explicit content in a way that

·       Includes people who have sold content

·       Doesn’t act as a catalyst for more under 18 to try it

·       Doesn’t shame people who make content (because shame isn’t a good foundation for positive change)

These are not insurmountable problems but they are worth considering before rushing into bringing this up in a lesson unprompted by students. I would love to hear from you if a student has talked to you about themselves or a friend selling sexualised content online.  

• Thorn (2025) Commodified Sexual Interactions Involving Minors 

• Thiel, D., DiResta, R., and Stamos, A. (2023). Cross-Platform Dynamics of Self-Generated CSAM. 

• Turner, H. A., Finkelhor, D., & Colburn, D. (2025). Contexts and Characteristics of Imaged-Based Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Children. 

Should English teachers be asked to teach sex education?
https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/secondary/should-english-teachers-teach-sex-education

This article is an interesting discussion looking at how cross curricula learning in RSE can work, specifically in English Literature lessons. I think this method is often underutilised by many schools for the simple reasons that no one has told them they can and they have not got the confidence to pivot a core subject lesson into a RSE section. This lack of confidence might be based on the perceived attitude towards RSE of other staff, a lack of sufficient training or personal levels of comfort with RSE issues. This last one is often hard for a staff member to talk about in a work environment. For example, it is very reasonable that some teachers might not wants to tell their work mates they have previously been sexually assaulted and therefore don’t want to teach a lesson on sexual violence. So any push to get more teachers bring RSE topics into their primary subject needs to be paired with sufficient support and voluntary opt-in from teachers.

I have seen this method of cross curricula RSE work in schools; I know one school who did a huge amount of RSE within drama lessons by dedicating one term to the students learning about, writing and then performing short scenes of “challenges teenagers face”. This gave the school plenty of flexibility to explore everything from sending nude to STIs and drug use.

With this in mind I tried to think of as many ways RSE topics could be taught within other subjects.

·       History = STI’s impact on soldiers in world war 1 and 2, the suffragettes and gender discrimination and violence, King Henry the 8th and the UK national laws about sex.

·       Geography = the social impact of HIV pandemic on workforce and community

·       Biology = Reproduction is obvious, but we can go deeper with exploring the science of nerves and the clitoris and penis, or brain structure to understand phones and digital attention

·       Modern foreign languages = correct names for genitals in English and chosen language  (definitely one I would have made an effort to learn growing up)

·       Chemistry = the chemical formula for latex and condoms. The science behind hormone-based contraceptives

·       Physics = Pressure, specifically how a small amount of force applied to a small area can result in significant pressure as a way to bring home how dangerous choking and strangulation is during sex. Or for a lighter topic, use the averages of human ejaculation as a way to calculate the speed of sperm.

·       Media studies = how sex, sexuality, gender and youth are portrayed in film. How media shapes our growing understanding or RSE issues.

·       Maths = So many statistics we can use as case studies in maths, % effectiveness of contraceptives, % of rape cases that get to court, average age for 1st sexual experience or marriage or becoming a parent

·       RE = How marriage is understand as a personal, family, community and social action. How ethics around sex are constructed with a mix of causes, including for some people their faith

·       Art = there are so many options in creativity, I am going to hold off saying anything as I hope to have some more news for you about this in the future

I am sure I am missing loads and the list could be expanded so many different ways. What is needed to make this work is a change in attitude. Firstly, that relationships and sex are not dirty words, that RSE is not an add on and that we can all contribute to this. If we want young people to believe we are safe adults who they can ask for help with around sex, we should be looking for opportunities to showcase that we are not embarrassed to appropriately talk about relationships and sex when relevant to other topics.

Future girl? Exploring girls’ digital sexual cultures through speculative fabrications
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681811.2024.2429304

Above the TES article was talking about bring RSE into other subjects, this journal article is more focused on bringing creativity (creative writing and collaging) into RSE. It describes a multi-week project with a small group of students where creativity is promoted as not only  an engaging option to RSE but a core methodology. 

The finding I found most interesting was how the creative methods gave space for the young women to voice some of their thoughts and fears about the future of bodies and technology. Imagining ways that tech can be a force for good and ill. Such ways of working can take extra preparation time and they are not always the quickest way to reach a key point. But maybe we all need to start thinking about ways to make our RSE more creative.

Did the US legal system just rule some forms of Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM) legal?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/fact-check-federal-judge-ruled-230000725.html

Kind of, but not as an active change to law. In the US a federal judge recently reached a conclusion that under current US legislation (as of August 2026) possession of AI-generated child sex abuse material is protected by the First Amendment. The judge wrote “Given the relentless advancement in artificial intelligence models, we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves”.

The background is a person being tried for production, possession and distribution and this ruling was made as the defendant claimed that under US legal precedent because the images where 100% ai generated (not deep fake manipulated photos of real children) the possession of them was not illegal under US law. The US has case law about specific definitions of what is legal to possess compared to produce or distribute. This is a defendant trying to reduce the criminal charges they are facing based on technical definitions. It was not an active strategic choice by the legal system to try and say AI generated CSAM are ok. But the genuine concern is that this ruling sets a precedent that will lead to a new legal framework that might decriminalise such AI generated materials.

The UK has a very different legal system and I am confident all AI generated CSAM is illegal and would be considered under the term “pseudo-photograph”. A term originally introduced into the law due to people using tracing paper to copy images and now a helpful backstop that shuts downs such attempts to justify CSAM.

Thank you for reading this first newsletter written as a freelance solo worker. I hope you found it useful. If you have any feedback, please let me know. What is the most useful things to hear about in a newsletter like this?

Gareth

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