One of the most intentional design choices behind Choice and Consent is the positioning of teachers as neutral facilitators in Relationships and Sexual Health Education (RSE), rather than as providers of personal opinion, moral judgement or distributor of knowledge.
This is not about removing the teacher’s voice. It is about carefully defining how that voice is used in a subject where values, identity, culture, and lived experience are deeply intertwined.
Why neutrality matters in RSE
RSE sits in a different category from most school subjects. It is not only concerned with knowledge acquisition, but also with meaning-making: how young people interpret relationships, consent, identity, safety, and responsibility in their own lives.
Research consistently highlights that effective RSE requires safe, non-judgemental learning environments where students feel able to explore ideas without fear of shame or correction based on adult values. UNESCO’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education emphasises that learners should be supported to develop their own attitudes and values through age-appropriate, culturally sensitive, and rights-based education, rather than simply adopting prescribed viewpoints from authority figures. (UNESCO, 2018)
This is reinforced by Setty (2024), who highlights the tension between protection and empowerment in sexual health education, particularly in contexts where adult anxieties about risk can shape how education is delivered. Her work shows that RSE is often influenced by wider cultural “risk narratives,” where teachers and parents may feel pressure to position themselves as protectors of children rather than facilitators of autonomy and critical thinking. This tension can unintentionally limit open discussion and reduce opportunities for young people to develop independent judgement.
In this context, neutrality becomes a pedagogical tool rather than an absence of stance.
Protecting teachers in complex cultural contexts
In international schools, RSE does not exist in a vacuum. Teachers are often navigating multiple cultural frameworks simultaneously—those of host countries, expatriate communities, school governance structures, and parental expectations that may differ significantly.
When teachers are expected to express personal opinions on sensitive topics such as relationships, sexual orientation or even politics, they can unintentionally become positioned as representatives of institutional or cultural ideology. This can increase vulnerability to misinterpretation, complaint, or conflict with parents and stakeholders who may hold different values.
Setty’s wider body of work on school-based sexual health education also highlights how “judgement” and “shame” can emerge in classroom environments when adult perspectives are perceived as authoritative moral positions rather than facilitative dialogue.
A neutral facilitation stance helps reduce this risk by:
- Keeping the focus on learning rather than persuasion of a particular narrative
- Reducing the likelihood of personal beliefs being interpreted as school policy (more on policy another time!)
- Allowing teachers to maintain professional and personal boundaries in sensitive discussions
- Supporting consistency across diverse teaching staff
This is not about avoiding complexity. It is about holding complexity without imposing personal judgement onto it.
Encouraging critical thinking rather than compliance
One of the most important aims of RSE is not behavioural compliance, but critical thinking.
When teachers position themselves as neutral facilitators, students are more likely to:
- Express genuine opinions rather than “expected answers”
- Explore uncertainty without fear of judgement
- Engage with differing peer perspectives
- Reflect on how their values are formed and influenced
This aligns with dialogic approaches to education, which emphasise that learning is deepened through structured dialogue and the exploration of multiple viewpoints rather than one-directional transmission of knowledge (Alexander, 2017).
In RSE, this is particularly important because students are not simply learning abstract content—they are actively forming beliefs and behaviours in relation to real and immediate aspects of their lives.
Asking students about values and beliefs
Neutral facilitation shifts the classroom dynamic from “what should you think?” to “what do you think, and why?”
This allows students to:
- Examine the origins of their beliefs
- Understand that peers may hold different but valid perspectives
- Explore how culture, media, family, and experience shape values
- Develop language to articulate boundaries, identity, and respect
In this model, the teacher’s role is not to provide closure, but to hold space for reflection.
This is not value neutrality
It is important to be clear that neutrality in facilitation does not mean a lack of values.
RSE remains grounded in clear safeguarding principles, including:
- Respect for all individuals
- Promotion of safety and wellbeing
- Prevention of harm and abuse
- Commitment to inclusion and dignity
What changes is not the presence of values, but whose values are centred in classroom discussion. The teacher does not impose personal belief systems as normative outcomes but instead facilitates student exploration within a safe and structured framework.
A deliberate pedagogical choice
At Choice and Consent, this approach is intentional.
It reflects an understanding that in highly sensitive subject areas, the most powerful learning does not come from authority-driven instruction, but from structured opportunities for students to think critically, question assumptions, and articulate their own developing values.
It also reflects the realities of international education, where cultural diversity makes it increasingly difficult—and arguably inappropriate—for individual teachers to act as arbiters of personal morality.
Neutral facilitation is therefore not absence of voice.
It is precision in how that voice is used.
References
- UNESCO (2018). International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education
- Setty, E. (2024). The compromises and contradictions of ‘feminist’ sex and relationships education in the home: empowerment vs protection in digital risk societies. Sex Education
- Alexander, R. (2017). Towards Dialogic Teaching
- Setty, E. et al. (2024). Co-designing guidance for Relationships and Sex Education to transform school cultures