Teaching Porn Literacy: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Start

Most teachers handed pornography to teach are clear about why it belongs on the curriculum and stuck on what an hour with a Year 10 class actually contains. This is the lesson I teach, in the order I teach it: how to frame it in the first minute, the working agreement that handles the comment you are dreading, the two analogies that do the real work, and the box by the door that handles disclosures.

What porn literacy means here

Porn literacy asks young people to look at pornography the way they would look at any other manufactured image — made by someone, for someone, to sell something. No pornography is shown in the classroom. The teaching happens entirely in the gap between what pupils have already seen and what they have taken from it without being asked. I have run the same material with adults in a gallery and the underlying questions don’t change; the vocabulary does.

That gap is wide. The Sex Education Forum’s Young People’s RSE Poll 2024 found that 23% of respondents learnt nothing at all about pornography at school, and 49% learnt nothing at all or not enough. Asked where their information about pornography actually comes from, 15% named pornography itself. When school doesn’t fill the gap, something else does.

What the guidance asks for

The updated DfE statutory guidance, effective from September 2026, requires schools to teach about pornography as part of their RSE curriculum, with the emphasis on how pornography can distort attitudes to sex, relationships and body image, and on building the ability to critically evaluate what’s seen online.

Baroness Bertin’s independent pornography review, published in February 2025, concludes that this teaching should sit “as part of a wider curriculum on healthy relationships, consent, misogyny, and media literacy”, and that teachers “often lack the confidence to teach about this topic and do not have specialised training to prepare them”. Take the first half seriously when you plan the year: one porn lesson with no consent teaching either side of it has very little to hold on to.

The lesson

Say what the lesson is before you start it

Open by telling the class what you are doing and what you are not doing: “Today is about media literacy. My goal isn’t to judge you or lecture you about your personal lives; my goal is to break down how a multi-billion pound industry works so you can navigate the online world safely and with your eyes open.”

That does more work than it looks like. It tells a room of fifteen-year-olds that they are not the subject of the lesson, which is the thing most of them walked in braced for.

The working agreement, and why the third rule matters most

Three rules, agreed before anything else:

• No personal stories. We are talking about media, not about ourselves or our peers.
• Right to pass. Nobody will be made to speak.
• Respectful language. Scientific terms, no slang.

Say the reasoning out loud rather than just the rules: “This topic can feel awkward, which is exactly why we have these rules. If you use clinical language, it keeps the space mature. And remember, we are analysing media, so we don’t need to share stories about ourselves or our friends.”

The third rule is also your answer to the moment you are dreading. A pupil who says something graphic has broken an agreement the class made two minutes earlier, so you point at the rule and ask for the same point again in clinical terms. No reprimand, no improvised comeback, and no flinch for the room to read. The work was done in advance.

Define it, then land one word

Any media — video, images, audio, writing — made specifically to cause arousal. For a lesson at this age, focus on video, and include both the professional studio material and the amateur content made by creators on their phones.

The word to land is performance. An amateur clip shot on an iPhone in a messy bedroom has still been staged, angled and uploaded for an audience to watch. It is not a documentary. Everything later in the lesson hangs off that, so it is worth spending a minute on.

Open on the algorithm, not on pornography

Put up a YouTube thumbnail of the kind they scroll past every day — the escalating MrBeast variety, I survived 24 hours inside a magma cake — and ask why YouTubers and TikTokers have to keep making their videos more extreme.

You will have the answer inside fifteen seconds, because they already know it: beat the algorithm, get views, make money. Then make the turn. The adult industry runs the same tactic. Free content isn’t free, you pay with your attention, and the algorithm is built to shock you so that you keep clicking.

This is why the lesson starts here rather than on pornography. The class arrives at the mechanism on ground where they are the experts and nobody has anything to admit.

Two analogies that do the rest

Sixty seconds with the person next to you: how is an influencer’s Instagram feed different from their real life, and what have they deliberately left out? You will get lighting, filters, the fifty failed attempts, the mess just out of frame. A highlight reel, designed to look effortless.

Then the car chase, which is where the consent teaching actually happens. In GTA or a film chase, how are the other drivers and pedestrians treated? As props and obstacles — and real life requires empathy from you that a game doesn’t. What driving steps do action films edit out because they are boring to watch? Seatbelts, mirrors, indicating — and media skips communication and consent for exactly the same reason. Last, who is a stunt designed for: the person in the car, or the person on the sofa with the popcorn? It’s for the viewer. Real intimacy is an experience between two people rather than a performance for a camera.

The class reaches consent through driving. That is what distancing means as a technique, rather than as a word in a scheme of work.

Think, pair, share

Three questions, all in the third person so that nobody has to own an answer.

If someone’s idea of normal comes from pornography, and that means one body type, professionally lit and often surgically enhanced, how might that affect their confidence in the real world? Pornography never includes awkwardness, consent or communication, so how might using it as a blueprint affect someone’s ideas about sex, in and out of a relationship? And the algorithm again: if it is feeding someone increasingly aggressive material, how could that leak into how they treat or talk about the people around them?

This is the point to slow the pacing right down and put two quotes on the screen. Read them aloud, or ask for a volunteer.

It can make a boy not look for love just look for sex and it can pressure us girls to act and look and behave in a certain way before we might be ready for it.

I’m always watching porn, and some of it is quite aggressive. I didn’t think it was affecting me at first but I’ve started to view girls a bit differently recently and it’s making me worried. I would like to get married in the future but I’m scared it might never happen if I carry on thinking about girls the way I do.

The first is a 13-year-old girl, from I wasn’t sure it was normal to watch it, the 2016 study of 11 to 16 year olds by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, the NSPCC and Middlesex University. The second is a boy who contacted ChildLine during the NSPCC’s 2015 campaign on pornography.

Validate rather than analyse. The room has just heard two people their own age say the thing several of them were worried might only be true of themselves.

Planet Porn

The sorting game from BISH, Justin Hancock’s site, and the part of the lesson that most reliably wakes a tired class. A statement goes up and the room calls out whether it belongs to Planet Porn or Planet Earth. Where women have big boobs and thin tummies. Where sex is always very loud. Where women only exist to give men pleasure. Then the Earth ones, which are the actual curriculum: where people talk about their feelings, where everyone’s boundaries are agreed in advance, where people don’t always wear make-up or dress up for sex, where most women don’t usually orgasm from penetrative sex.

It is fast and it is funny, and it does the body-image and consent work a second time in a form where nobody is answering for themselves.

What to leave them with

Pornography is entertainment rather than real life. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it rarely promotes healthy relationships, sexual health or progressive gender roles, and the performers are hired to fit a fantasy image of the male and female body. The danger was never the existence of the material; it’s using a fantasy performance as a manual.

Then the legal point that protects them, stated plainly: making, saving or sharing explicit images of anyone under 18 is illegal, including images of peers and including images of themselves. If someone pressures you for an image, that is coercion, and “everyone is doing it” is not a legal defence. Finish on control — you can close the tab, and SafeSearch, ad-blockers and privacy settings all reduce what the algorithm can push at you.

The disclosure route is a box, not a response

Hand out Post-it notes at the start. At the end, every pupil folds theirs and drops it in a box at the front, whether or not they wrote anything on it. That last detail is what makes it work: posting nothing looks exactly like posting something, so a pupil who needs to tell you something doesn’t have to be seen needing to. You read them after the room has emptied.

Say the rest out loud at the sign-off. Your door is open, here is the name of the safeguarding lead, and Childline is free and confidential.

When something does come to you in person, the move is the one you already know. Acknowledge it, don’t take the details in front of the class, say plainly that you will help, and go to your designated safeguarding lead. Never promise a pupil you won’t tell anyone (paragraph 85). A pupil saying they were shown something by someone older is a child protection concern rather than a curriculum one, and it doesn’t wait for the end of the lesson. A pupil saying an image of them exists has its own procedure, which shouldn’t be improvised.

A first attempt at this will be a single well-planned session rather than a scheme of work, and that is the right size to start at.

Trusted resources

• BBFC and PSHE Association: Free KS4/5 pornography teaching resource (bbfc.co.uk)
• Baroness Bertin Pornography Review (Feb 2025): Independent review of online pornography regulation and impact (gov.uk)
• DfE 2026 statutory guidance: Pornography curriculum content points (gov.uk)

If your team wants to practise the responsive parts — the explicit comment, the disclosure — before standing in front of a class, get in touch.