Teaching the hard topics when you're not a specialist

There are RSE lessons that many teachers can pick up and teach without much anxiety. And then there are the ones that make you look at the timetable and think: I’m supposed to teach that?

Pornography. Sending nudes. FGM. Misogyny. Consent. Abuse and exploitation.

What makes these lessons difficult is not simply that the subject matter is sensitive. Each creates a different problem for the teacher.

Pornography has to be taught without showing the material the lesson is about. Sending nudes sits where criminal law and safeguarding meet, and an oversimplified version of either can leave pupils with the wrong understanding. FGM brings reporting responsibilities that sit on the teacher personally: teachers in England and Wales must report “‘known’ cases of FGM in under 18s which they identify in the course of their professional work” to the police (DfE and Home Office procedural information). A lesson on misogyny may include pupils who openly reject what you are teaching and want to turn the room into an argument. Abuse and exploitation has to be taught without requiring any pupil to recognise themselves in it. Consent can look straightforward until you move beyond “yes means yes” and into pressure, uncertainty, changing your mind and the situations pupils actually have to navigate.

So the useful question is not simply, “How do I teach a sensitive topic?”

It is:

What is going to make this particular lesson difficult to teach well?

Sometimes the problem is knowledge. Sometimes the subject sits very close to pupils’ own experiences. Sometimes there is a real possibility of a safeguarding disclosure. Sometimes it is managing the room. And sometimes the risk is in the teaching itself, where the subject needs specialist preparation rather than more preparation. Often, it is more than one of these.

Work that out first, and the preparation becomes much more manageable.

Most of the examples below are secondary, because that is where most of these lessons land. The method is the same in primary, where the hard ones are more likely to be puberty, naming bodies accurately, and how a lesson about keeping safe handles a child who is not.

The revised RSHE guidance, published in July 2025 and in effect in England since 1 September 2026, expects staff delivering these subjects to have the “knowledge, skills and confidence to create a safe and supportive environment” (paragraph 15f, printed page 5). Those are three different things. Knowledge can be checked. Skills can be practised. Confidence usually follows when the first two are in place and you know what the school has already decided.

Most teachers delivering RSE did not train as RSE specialists. That does not make the classroom craft they already have irrelevant. Sequencing, pace, reading a room and knowing when a quiet class is thinking rather than disappearing still matter.

The additional work is narrower than it can first appear.

If the problem is knowledge, shrink it

You do not need the subject knowledge of a specialist. You need to be right about the specific things that are going to come out of your mouth, which is a much smaller task.

Start with what pupils are actually supposed to learn. Use the curriculum content as the floor rather than trying to become an expert on the whole subject. For clinical information, and for anatomy, use sources such as the NHS or Brook rather than memory.

Take pornography. You do not need to have surveyed the material, and you are not going to describe it. What has to be right are the sentences the lesson actually rests on: that it is performance rather than documentation, that it is made for an audience, and that it is a poor guide to what a real partner wants. Get those exact and the lesson holds, whatever else comes up.

Be particularly careful with the law. The memorable one-line version is tempting, but legal thresholds often have qualifications that disappear when they are simplified. If a pupil could make a decision based on something you tell them, the simplified version needs to hold.

And “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” is a complete answer. It only becomes a deflection if you never come back.

If the subject sits close to pupils’ lives, create distance

Distancing is one of the most useful habits in RSE. It simply means teaching through someone who is not in the room.

Take sending nudes. Instead of asking:

What would you do if your partner kept asking you to send a nude?

give pupils somebody else to think about:

Sam’s partner keeps asking them to send a nude and says, “If you trusted me, you would.” What is happening here? What options does Sam have?

The difference is not cosmetic. A pupil who has lived something similar can now take part without choosing between exposing themselves and saying nothing. A pupil who has not can consider the situation without having to perform a personal opinion for the room.

That scenario is also a consent lesson. It reaches pressure, the gap between agreeing and wanting to, and changing your mind — none of which a definition gets anywhere near.

Good RSE does not depend on getting pupils to open up about themselves. Often, the more distance you create, the more honestly they can think.

The same principle should shape your ground rules. Keep them few enough that pupils can remember them. One deserves a place in almost every sensitive lesson:

Nobody is asked about their own experience, and nobody discusses somebody else’s.

That rule applies to the teacher too. No “Has this ever happened to anyone here?”, however naturally the discussion seems to invite it.

Anonymous questions help for the same reason. They work better when they are planned, not handed out in the final five minutes. Collect them in the previous lesson if you can. That gives you time to check what you do not know, decide what sits outside the lesson and notice anything that needs to reach the safeguarding lead before you teach. There is more on running one well in the post about the question box at the British Museum.

Ask everybody to write something, even if it is only “no question”, so nobody has to reveal that they submitted one.

If a disclosure is possible, plan for it before it happens

A disclosure is not evidence that the lesson went wrong.

A lesson on abuse and exploitation is the obvious candidate, but it is not the only one, and the preparation is the same whichever lesson prompts it.

Sensitive teaching can bring safeguarding concerns to the surface, and the guidance says so plainly: “Discussions about sensitive topics in RSHE can lead to increased safeguarding reports” (paragraph 84, printed page 39).

Pupils therefore need to know the limits of confidentiality before anyone tests them. The guidance asks for this from both directions: staff “should never promise a child that they will not tell anyone about a report of abuse”, and children should “understand how confidentiality will be handled in a lesson and what might happen if they choose to make a report, about themselves or a peer” (paragraph 85, printed pages 39–40).

A plain explanation at the beginning is enough:

“I’m not going to ask anyone to share personal experiences today. If you choose to tell me something that makes me worried that you or somebody else is not safe, I may need to pass that on to the safeguarding team. If I can, I’ll explain what happens next.”

That is much easier to say while it is still a general rule than to introduce it halfway through a pupil telling you something difficult.

If a disclosure happens, let the pupil speak. Do not start investigating and do not ask questions that shape the account. Record what was said in the pupil’s own words as soon as you reasonably can and follow the school’s safeguarding procedure. Keeping children safe in education sets out the wider responsibilities.

One duty does not work that way. If a girl under 18 tells you that FGM has been carried out on her, or you see physical signs that appear to show it, the report goes to the police and it is yours to make. “The duty is a personal duty which requires the individual professional who becomes aware of the case to make a report; the responsibility cannot be transferred” (DfE and Home Office procedural information). Tell your designated safeguarding lead as well, not instead. Where you suspect rather than know, or you think a girl is at risk, the duty does not apply and the school’s safeguarding procedure is the right route.

There is also a practical question no policy can solve for you:

How could a pupil speak to you without the rest of the class watching?

Work that out beforehand, then work out what the other pupils will be doing for those two minutes. That bit of planning may be more useful than another five slides.

If the problem is the room, rehearse the awkward parts

Read the lesson aloud before you teach it, especially the bits containing words you do not normally say in a professional setting.

The first time you discover whether you can say an anatomical term without rushing it, apologising for it or visibly bracing yourself should not be in front of thirty thirteen-year-olds.

The same applies to language around pornography, sexual health, abuse, exploitation and harmful practices. Say it beforehand.

Decide what you will do with laughter too. You do not need to stop every laugh dead, and joining in can make the embarrassment worse. Have a calm line ready so you are not inventing your response while the room waits to see whether you are embarrassed as well.

And if the difficulty is disagreement, as it often is in a lesson on misogyny, remember that not every challenge requires a debate. Your job is not to win an argument with a fourteen-year-old. It is to keep the lesson moving, make the learning clear and create enough room for pupils to examine an idea properly.

Then there is the question you cannot answer in the room. Some are more explicit than the lesson, some are personal, about you or about a pupil, and some sit outside what the school has agreed to teach.

The guidance expects this to have been decided before you get there: “The school’s policy should explain how teachers will handle such questions, with an emphasis on supporting the child” (paragraph 87, printed page 40). Find out what yours says, then have the sentence ready:

“That’s a fair question, and it’s not one I’m going to answer in front of everybody. Put it in the box and I’ll come back to it, or come and find me afterwards.”

Deferring a question is not the same as refusing it, and the guidance is clear about why that distinction matters: children “whose questions go unanswered might instead turn to inappropriate sources of information, including online”. Coming back to it is the part that does the work.

Know when the answer is not better preparation

There is a limit to “you’ll be fine”.

Some topics become safer when the teacher knows the facts, uses good distancing and has thought through the safeguarding. Others require more.

The topics this applies to are not RSE at all. They sit in health education, and the revised guidance describes eating disorders and self-harm as topics that “can be taught about in secondary schools in a safe and sensitive way but are specialised areas”, where schools “should use qualified support or advice” (paragraph 42, printed page 25). On suicide it goes further: schools “should consult mental health professionals and put in place high quality, evidence-based staff training before addressing suicide directly with secondary aged pupils” (paragraph 44, printed page 25). Mental health and wellbeing sits alongside these without requiring you to teach them cold.

Read that as protection rather than a hurdle.

If a topic requiring specialist preparation has been handed to you without it, the answer is not a longer evening making resources. It is a conversation with whoever put the lesson on the timetable, and it is easier to have in writing:

“I’m timetabled to teach a lesson on self-harm to Year 9 next half term. The RSHE guidance treats this as a specialised area and says schools should use qualified support or advice, and put staff training in place first. I haven’t had that training. Can we look at what support is available, or whether this should sit with someone else?”

That is a reasonable professional request with the guidance behind it, and it is the kind of thing a PSHE lead would rather receive in September than in the week of the lesson.

Some topics need better preparation. Some need specialist preparation. Those are not the same thing.

Ask for what good teaching requires

If a school expects staff to teach RSE with knowledge, skills and confidence, then asking for the things that make that possible is part of doing the job properly.

Ask for the scheme of work and the resources rather than a topic title. Ask what pupils have already covered. Ask to observe the lesson or teach alongside somebody the first time. Ask what training is planned and when. Ask where difficult questions are meant to go. Ask what happens if a pupil stays behind afterwards.

A teacher who has read the policy, understands where the lesson sits in the curriculum and knows what to do with a disclosure is better placed than a specialist who has done none of those things.

The aim is not to become impossible to surprise. You will not. It is to remove the surprises you can remove.

And know when the right professional response is not prepare harder, but get more support.

Hard topics do not become easy.

They become teachable.

We run RSE training for teaching staff, including practical work on sensitive topics, managing disclosures and handling the questions staff most dread. If that would be useful for your school, get in touch.

Trusted resources

• Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education, DfE, July 2025. Teaching sensitive topics at printed page 12; specialised mental-health topics at printed pages 25–26; safeguarding and disclosure at printed pages 39–40; managing difficult questions at printed page 40.
• DfE publication page: current guidance and commencement date.
• Keeping children safe in education, DfE.
• Mandatory reporting of female genital mutilation: procedural information, DfE and Home Office, 2016.
• PSHE Association Programme of Study for PSHE education, key stages 1–5.
• Sex Education Forum curriculum design tool.
• NSPCC Learning: safeguarding and child protection.
• Brook and the NHS for clinical information.