What Young People Actually Want to Know About Sex and Relationships

We run a platform called Okay to Ask where young people submit questions about sex and relationships anonymously, with no teacher watching over their shoulder. More than 150 are now published with answers, and reading through them is one of the most useful things I do, because the questions young people ask when nobody is watching are not the ones they ask in class.

They ask about virginity. About whether their body is normal. About whether it’s all right not to want sex. About what happens the first time. About feelings they don’t have a name for. About things they’ve seen online that confused or worried them.

Almost every one of those maps onto content the 2026 statutory guidance already requires secondary schools to cover. The problem isn’t permission. It’s that a curriculum organised around risk answers the question “what could go wrong” very thoroughly and leaves “am I all right” to whoever gets there first.

The three things they ask about

The first cluster is normality. Am I normal? Is my body normal? Is it normal to feel this way? Is it normal not to? These arrive from anxiety rather than curiosity, and a lesson built around what can go wrong has no slot for a pupil who wants to be told that nothing is going wrong.

The second is readiness. How do you know when you’re ready. What intimacy actually involves once you get past the biology. What it feels like to want something and not be sure you want it yet. This is the content most likely to make a teacher uncomfortable and the content young people ask for most directly.

The third is digital life. What they’ve seen online, whether it’s normal, whether what happens in pornography happens in life. These carry shame with them. Pupils worry that having seen something means something about them.

Where each cluster already sits in the statutory content

None of it is extracurricular, which is worth knowing before you take it to a senior team.

Normality is the “Developing bodies” content at printed page 31 — the facts about puberty and the changing adolescent body, what an average period is, period problems including PMS, heavy bleeding, endometriosis and PCOS. The online strand carries the other half of it, asking schools to teach about “the impact of unhealthy or obsessive comparison with others online (including through setting unrealistic expectations for body image)” at printed page 28.

Readiness is the first two curriculum points under “Intimate and sexual relationships, including sexual health” at printed page 19. Schools should teach “that sex, for people who feel ready and are over the age of consent, can and should be enjoyable and positive”, and “that many young people wait until they are older, and that people of all ages can enjoy intimate and romantic relationships without sex”. Those two sentences are the readiness cluster, written into statutory content, and they are the ones most often skipped.

Digital life is the pornography and media literacy content, which has its own lesson and its own reasons for being hard to start.

Which clusters young people report getting least of

The Sex Education Forum’s Young People’s RSE Poll 2024 asked 1,001 sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in England about the RSE they received at school. Fifty per cent rated it good or very good, the highest since polling began, and coverage improved on all seventeen topics compared with the previous poll. Only 43% agreed they had felt personally represented and included in it.

Sort those seventeen topics by how many said they learnt nothing at all or not enough, and the pattern is legible. Best covered: how babies are conceived and born (17% short), puberty (23%), understanding sexual consent (24%), sexual harassment (33%). Least covered: sexual pleasure (60%), power imbalances in relationships (49%), pornography (49%), how to access local sexual health services (46%), gender identity (44%), how to tell if a relationship is healthy (40%), HIV (40%), sexual orientation (38%).

The mechanics get taught. The subjective and relational material doesn’t, and that’s the readiness cluster almost exactly. Pornography sits in the same half of the table: 23% of respondents learnt nothing at all about it at school, and 49% learnt nothing at all or not enough. Asked where their information about pornography actually came from, 15% named pornography itself. For LGBT+ information, 30% named social media as their main source, ahead of school at 25%.

Schools should handle questions that go beyond the curriculum with an emphasis on supporting the child, “recognising that children whose questions go unanswered might instead turn to inappropriate sources of information, including online” (paragraph 87, printed page 40).

Turning the questions into a scheme of work

Run a question box across a year group for half a term and you have your own version of this data, specific to your pupils. Sort what comes back into themes, then take each theme to your scheme of work and find the week it’s answered in. The themes with no week are the gap, and they will not be the same as ours.

That is an intervention young people themselves ask for. When the 2024 poll asked which government actions would most improve RSE, “schools to ask students for feedback on their RSE lessons and use their suggestions to improve them” came third of seven, picked by 51% of respondents. Thirty-nine per cent agreed their school had asked their opinions about RSE and 28% disagreed.

Where a theme has no week, the fix is usually sequencing rather than new content. A Year 8 lesson on healthy relationships that has already been preceded by boundary-setting in Year 6 can afford to spend its time on the harder question of how you tell. The Sex Education Forum’s Curriculum Design Tool is the most direct way to audit that progression without rebuilding the programme.

The question box is in the guidance too, which is more useful than any recommendation from me. Teaching sensitive topics “can use approaches such as distancing techniques, setting ground rules with the class to help manage sensitive discussion, and using question boxes to allow pupils to raise issues anonymously” (paragraph 36, printed page 12). The mechanic that makes it work is that everybody posts. Hand out slips at the start, and at the end every pupil folds theirs and puts it in the box whether or not they wrote anything, so that posting nothing looks exactly like posting something. Running one in a room where half the class visibly doesn’t post tells you who the quiet pupils are and nothing else. There’s a longer account of the format from running it with adults.

The question you can’t answer in the room

Most of what comes out of a box can be answered next lesson. Some of it can’t, and the sorting is worth doing before you open the first slip rather than while thirty people watch you read it.

A question that’s a curriculum gap gets answered, just not immediately. Say so out loud: this one’s a good question, it’s coming up in three weeks, and I’ll answer it then. A pupil who hears that learns the box works.

A question that’s individual or clinical doesn’t get answered by you at all. Contraception for a specific body, a symptom, a medication, whether something is normal for this particular person — those go to the school nurse, a GP, or a service like Brook, and saying so is the answer rather than a deflection. The guidance asks schools to signpost to support services for exactly this.

A question that’s a safeguarding concern doesn’t wait for the end of the lesson, and it doesn’t come back to the class at all. It goes to your designated safeguarding lead, and you never promise a pupil that you won’t tell anyone (paragraph 85). The same paragraph carries the step that’s easiest to miss: pupils “understand how confidentiality will be handled in a lesson and what might happen if they choose to make a report”. Say that before the box goes round, not after something lands in it. Thirty seconds, and it’s the difference between a pupil making an informed decision to tell you and a pupil discovering afterwards what they set in motion.

Then there’s the policy job, which is the PSHE lead’s rather than the classroom teacher’s. Paragraph 87 requires that the school’s RSE policy explains how teachers will handle questions going beyond the curriculum. Plenty of policies don’t say anything on it, and the person who finds out is a teacher holding a slip of paper in front of a class. Adding two or three sentences is a small piece of work with a date on it.

If you want to talk through what your own question box turns up, or what to put around it, get in touch.

Trusted resources

• Young People’s RSE Poll 2024, Sex Education Forum, April 2024. The topic-coverage tables cited above are Tables 10 and 11 in the appendix of the full report.
• Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education, DfE, July 2025, in force from 1 September 2026. Question boxes and ground rules at printed page 12; intimate and sexual relationships content at printed page 19; managing difficult questions at printed page 40.
• Curriculum Design Tool, Sex Education Forum. For auditing progression across key stages once you know which themes have no week.