In This Together – How SCEGGS is continuing to champion consent education
Last year saw the issue of consent education raised at a national and international level by activist and girls’ school alumna Chanel Contos with her movement “Teach us Consent”. Amid the year-long campaign, the New South Wales government had already agreed to make consent education mandatory, but earlier this year it was announced that all Australian schools, including independent schools, will be bound by the new curriculum after education ministers from around the country unanimously agreed to implement a holistic and age-appropriate consent curriculum.
As we planned for the school year in 2022, consent education was one of the key focus areas for the senior staff, wellbeing and PDHPE teams. This focus saw us initially joining an online and important conversation between award winning author, speaker and journalist Madonna King and Chanel Contos as they explored what schools need to know about the consent movement, why consent education is so crucial for young people, and how schools can champion change in their own communities. This platform set into motion several key commitments across the School from K -12, and we thought it timely to share with you where we are up to and where we are moving towards with this commitment.
Across the whole school, supporting the girls’ understanding of consent underpins many aspects of our wellbeing programs. Topics and ideas relating to consent are explicitly taught within our Form Time and PDHPE programs and are also embedded within numerous other subject areas, where foundational aspects of consent including emotional literacy, body awareness, boundaries, and self-advocacy are explored. In addition, the social and emotional programs such as Kimochi or URSTRONG that are implemented across the Primary School help the girls to unpack the complexities of healthy relationships and positive and negative feelings, which build solid foundations for when topics related to sexual consent are explored as they enter Secondary School.
Jane McGowan has partnered with the Primary school for two years now, facilitating parent information sessions and in class workshops for girls in Years 5 and 6. Jane is a leader in her field of consent education, having worked in this space for 20 years. She has vast experience as a counsellor and crisis counsellor across various areas including child protection, protective behaviours, trauma support and preventative education. Within the parent sessions, Jane recommends ways for parents to model consent and healthy relationships as well as family safety rules and conversation starters and prompts. Within her workshops, Jane uses practical and creative exercises to reinforce messages with practical scenarios and role play. She develops and sustains a relationship with the girls, visiting twice throughout the year, to support the ongoing conversation and education around consent.In the mandatory PDHPE lessons, we have adopted the educative approach to the lessons and learning experiences. In those early years, our programs focus on foundational learning where we define relationships, progressing to integrated learning in the middle years where look closely at the nature of the relationships that young people are involved in and finally, turn to specific learning where our senior students are taught more explicitly about specific situations such as sexual relationships and what skills are needed to successfully navigate these situations and the help seeking behaviours that will support them.
What is key here for our students is that teachers provide learning experiences that support them in developing their sense of identity and the values and expectations they have when being part of a relationship. Students begin to learn to recognise the factors that impact upon their relationships and recognise what positive relationships look like, feel like and sound like. We develop each student’s health literacy so that they can question and challenge the main areas that impact upon their relationships so that they understand what they should expect to experience in positive relationships; and challenge the times when this may not be occurring. We would always encourage that you continue these conversations at home as by talking to your children about respectful relationships, you will be empowering them to make informed decisions regarding respectful relationships.
As we settle into Term 2, we have collaborated with the team from Consent Labs once again to design and create a specific program for the students across Years 7-12. Last year they delivered a lecture style information session around consent foundations, however with feedback from the student body, we have changed the delivery of the program this year. In Week 7 during an allocated lesson time with the support of the PDHPE staff, students will participate in a series of workshops that we have created. These workshops will be modelled on age-appropriate topics such consolidating the foundations we have already established while in the senior years, students will explore consent in the context of living in a world of technology, alcohol and drugs and learning how to recognise sexual harassment and assault. We will share in due course more details about these workshops in the coming weeks.
We do hope this reflection provides you with insight into the direction we are taking on this matter as a school community. Every young person deserves to feel safe and respected in relationships and as they say, “it does take a village to raise a child”, so please do reach out to the wellbeing team and let us know if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback. We will continue to empower your daughters with a strength-based approach to their decision making and health literacy and your support is invaluable in this journey.
Laura Connolly (Director of Student Wellbeing), Amelia McAllan (Head of PDHPE) and Rebecca Woodcock (Acting Head of Primary Student wellbeing)
