You Can’t Ask That! Primary school leaders’ and teachers’ perspectives to inform Relationships and Sexuality Education

An exploratory project, evaluating the landscape of existing Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) programs in ACT ED Primary schools in response to key changes to the Personal, social and community health strand in Version 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum for Health and Physical Education. Similar to other jurisdictions, RSE program delivery in the ACT is inconsistent. It is sometimes delivered by best practice external providers, such as Sexual Health and Family Planning ACT (SHFPACT) or implemented internally by key school stakeholders. However, aside from anecdotal evidence, whether health literacy student outcomes are achieved, aligned to curriculum learning intentions is largely unknown. Further, such empirical work has yet to be explored in ACT Primary schools. Given the sensitivity of RSE it will be important to establish trust with participating school executive leaders and educators responsible for delivering RSE content, first, before seeking other community members to participate in future research. This approach is based on feedback from the proposed project’s recruited schools who have provided their in-principle support to participate in the project. This pilot project therefore aims to begin this consultation with school executive leaders and Year 5/6 teachers on what constitutes ‘best practice’ RSE (what’s going well?) and how it is reinforced for the whole-school community (what are their hopes for RSE at their school?). We therefore seek to explore how these perspectives may review and inform external providers of RSE, like SHFPACT, which reflect Primary students’ learning and developmental needs.