Consulting parents on your RSE policy

Schools must proactively engage and consult parents when they develop and review the RSE policy (paragraph 12 of the July 2025 RSHE guidance). The 2019 guidance already required consultation, so an existing process probably still stands. What’s new is the word proactively, and the expectations about showing parents materials that sit behind it.

Beyond that, the guidance prescribes no method. There’s no vote, no threshold, and nothing about how many parents have to reply. This is how I’d run one. For the wider review this consultation sits inside, there is a step-by-step way to review your RSE against the guidance.

Decide what’s on the table, and say so in the invitation

Write down, before you ask anyone anything, what could change as a result.

Not on the table: relationships education, the statutory content, and anything decided on safeguarding grounds. Parents are not able to veto curriculum content, though schools must consult them on the policy and should respond positively to requests to see material (paragraph 56).

On the table: the term a topic falls in, the notice families get before a sensitive lesson, the resources, who teaches it, the language used with younger children, and the support the school offers parents having the same conversation at home. In primary, the content of any sex education taught beyond the science curriculum is open too.

Primary has an additional duty, and it’s a different one rather than a larger one. Primary schools should consult parents about the content of anything taught within sex education, along with supporting them to talk to their children about it and explaining the right to request withdrawal (paragraph 31). That’s a consultation about specific lessons rather than the policy in general, so settling which of your lessons count as sex education comes first. That split is the opening job in what the guidance changes for primary.

Keep withdrawal out of it. The right to withdraw works differently in primary and secondary, it doesn’t cover relationships education or science, and a parent who takes part in your consultation keeps it either way.

Lead with the teaching rather than the policy

Show parents what the lessons contain before you ask them for views on the document. Year group, topic, what the lesson covers, what it doesn’t, and where it sits in the sequence. A puberty lesson in Year 5 is easier to discuss as a lesson than as a policy paragraph, because a policy is written to be complete rather than to describe a single lesson.

Schools should proactively engage parents and make sure they’re aware of what’s being taught by inviting them in to discuss the curriculum and any concerns, and supporting them in managing conversations at home (paragraph 55). Parents should know about sex education content ahead of the lessons (paragraph 15).

Share the materials two ways

Schools should show parents a representative sample of the resources they plan to use, and should ensure parents can view all curriculum materials on request (paragraph 56). A curriculum overview is not the sample, and the sample does not settle the on-request access.

A viewing session during the consultation, a parent portal login, or the scheme open on a laptop in reception all satisfy the first. The second needs a route that works when a request arrives out of the blue, and someone in the office who knows it exists. If you’ve adapted a published scheme, show the version your classes will see and say which version it is.

Copyright governs how you share, with a portal or a presentation preferred over an open download, and it should never be used as a reason to refuse to share (paragraphs 59 and 60). A provider clause that prevents you showing material to parents is void and unenforceable (paragraphs 57 and 58). Checking your contracts for those clauses has a lead time, so it belongs early in the review alongside the rest of the RSE policy checklist.

Ask questions with somewhere to go

Ask questions that result in answers you can act on:

• At what age do you think children should learn about this, and what sits behind that?
• What would you want to know before a lesson on this takes place?
• What would help you continue the conversation at home?
• Is there anything about your family’s faith or culture we should understand in how we teach this?

Allow uncertainty and a choice not to answer. Offer a private route for anything about an individual child. And don’t record silence as agreement.

Ask pupils something too. Their views sit alongside parents’ in paragraph 12, and they’ll tell you things about sequencing that parents can’t.

Track who you’ve heard from

A survey and an evening meeting reach different parents, so a healthy-looking set of responses can still be missing whole groups: families who need a translation, parents of children with SEND, and families who don’t come to school events.

Worth trying: a translated summary, a question added to a meeting a family already attends, a conversation at collection time, or a call from someone the family knows. Record how many parents you reached and by which route, so the gaps are visible to whoever reads the consultation later.

The letters, questionnaires and classroom events I use are a separate piece, including putting parents through an activity from the planned teaching.

Write back

Publish the themes parents raised, the changes you’ve made, and the things you aren’t changing, with the reason attached. “This is statutory content” is a reason. So is a curriculum decision you can explain.

Keep the record, and set the next date

Keep a dated note of the methods used, how many parents responded, the themes, the changes made, and the governors’ approval of the final policy. The guidance doesn’t ask for this, but it could be useful in the event of a complaint or question a year later.

The duty covers developing and reviewing the policy, so fix the next review date in the governance calendar now. If you’re briefing a board, The Questions Governors Ask covers the ones that tend to come up.

If you’d like help running the consultation, or rewriting the policy afterwards, talk to us about RSE policy and curriculum planning.

Trusted resources

• Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education, DfE, July 2025. The policy duty is at paragraph 12; openness with parents runs from paragraph 55.
• The DfE publication page, which confirms the version in force in England.
• An RSE policy checklist for 2026, for the rest of the review this consultation feeds into.