Teaching misogyny, masculinity and online influence in PSHE

Lessons that help pupils recognise what they are being sold online, without making boys the problem or handing the influencer the lesson. Taught in your classrooms, or taught to your staff.

Named in the RSHE statutory guidance in force from September 2026. Read the guidance

Built around the 2026 statutory guidance · Direct teaching and staff CPD

The sessions were excellent! You create an atmosphere that is both highly informative and a lot of fun. My students have loved having you answer their - sometimes tricky - questions.

Sara Stafford, Teacher, Highbury Grove School, London

It’s not just about Andrew Tate

Many of us are aware of and concerned about the influence of figures like Andrew Tate on vulnerable boys and young men. The obvious response is a lesson with his name on it, but naming him introduces him to the pupils who had not heard of him, could send some of them searching, and gives him disproportionate weight in the room.

He is not absent from the teaching. He appears where he is useful, in the lesson on why this material is persuasive, because pretending pupils have not heard of him fools nobody. What changes is that he is an example rather than the subject.

Separating the need from the answer

The reason this material reaches boys is that it attaches itself to things that are not wrong to want. Confidence. Money. Fitness. A relationship. A way through rejection. Somewhere to belong.

That distinction runs through every lesson in the sequence. It is also what lets a boy who follows this content stay in the room, because the lesson is not an accusation aimed at him.

Not a unit about boys behaving badly

Restrictive ideas about masculinity harm boys too, including by making it harder to ask for help. A sequence that spends five lessons telling boys what not to be, and never offers a version of themselves worth having, fails the pupils it most needs to reach. Girls in the room need the analytical tools as much as anyone, not a supporting role in someone else’s lesson.

For Year 9 the sequence also stays away from incel terminology. The government guidance on that material is written for Year 10 and above. The ideas underneath it, rejection, entitlement, blame and dehumanisation, are taught here without handing thirteen year olds the vocabulary.

Start from what boys actually think

A staffroom usually arrives at this topic with a picture already formed, in one direction or the other. Correcting it first makes the rest of the planning easier, because a sequence built on the wrong premise about the boys in the room teaches the wrong lesson however well it is delivered.

Masculinity and misogyny: what do boys actually think? is free, and sets out sixteen survey findings with every number sourced to a named survey. The same sixteen run as a quiz, which asks for your number before it shows you the real one and takes about ten minutes. The gap between the guess and the answer is the useful part. Most people underestimate how much pressure boys report, and badly overestimate how much of the material they endorse. The quiz runs as a staff meeting starter, and the article reads just as well alone.

A pupil who learns to recognise the mechanism can apply it to the next person. A pupil who learns that one man is bad has learned almost nothing.

Gender, masculinity and influence for KS3

A worked example of how a sequence on this topic can be built. It is a sample rather than a fixed scheme: take one lesson and run it yourself, book the whole sequence, or use it as the spine of a drop day. Everything adapts to the year group, the prior knowledge in the room and what has already happened in your school.

Notice
Understand
Interrogate
Resist
Replace

Written for: Year 9
Lessons: 6
Each: 55 minutes

Notice

The Rules of Gender

Who decides how boys and girls are supposed to behave?

Recognise gender stereotypes, and how ordinary expectations become restrictive for boys as much as for girls.
Understand

Being a Man

When does an idea about masculinity become harmful?

Separate masculinity from the narrow expectations attached to it: toughness, status, dominance, emotional suppression and asking for help.
Understand

Misogyny: More Than a Joke

When does an attitude towards girls and women become misogynistic?

Recognise misogyny in language, entitlement, objectification and control, including when it arrives as a joke.
Interrogate

Why Would Anyone Believe This?

Why can harmful messages be genuinely attractive?

Understand the pull of confidence, money, belonging and certainty in figures like Andrew Tate, and find the leap from useful advice to unsupported claim.
Resist

Influenced

How does your feed change what feels normal?

Analyse recommendation, repetition and social proof, and question a claim rather than judging a personality.
Replace

What Does Strength Look Like?

What could masculinity look like without domination or misogyny?

Replace the model rather than only attacking it: confidence without dominance, disagreement without contempt, rejection without entitlement.

One activity from Lesson 4

Hook, truth, leap

Pupils take a claim from a composite influencer account and pull it into three parts. The point is not to decide whether he is good or bad, but to find the exact sentence where a reasonable idea stops being reasonable. Once pupils can do that, it works on the next person too.

Hook: What grabs attention? Average men get ignored. Stop being average.
Truth: What part of this is fair enough? Getting fitter, learning a skill and building confidence are things you can actually control.
Leap: Where does it go past the evidence? So if a girl is not interested, that proves she only cares about money and status.

Want this taught in your school?

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RSE delivery in your classrooms

A specialist takes the lessons with your pupils, so the hardest sessions are led by someone who teaches them every week.

Bring this to your pupils

You teach it

Training for your staff

CPD that leaves your team able to teach this themselves, including what to do with the question nobody saw coming.

Train your team to teach it

Tell us the year group and where your pupils are starting from, and we will say what we would do. Not ready for that? The guidance below is free to read and written for the teacher taking the lesson.

Guidance for teaching this

Written for the teacher taking the lesson, not for us. Free to read, and useful whether or not you ever book anything.

These conversations are already happening

Questions pupils handed us anonymously, on paper, in schools we have worked in. Printed as they were written. Every one is answered in full on Okay to Ask.