Teaching and learning Respectful Relationships Education
Structured, age-appropriate resources support schools to teach the knowledge and skills for safe, respectful relationships and prevention of abuse and violence.
Respectful Relationships Education (RRE) is most effective when embedded across the curriculum and supported by the whole-school community. Explicitly teaching foundational RRE knowledge and skills requires more than one lesson. It needs structured, age-appropriate learning that builds over time.
These concepts should be taught explicitly, in safe and inclusive classrooms. This helps students develop the language, confidence and strategies they need to build respectful, caring relationships in the real world.
What does Respectful Relationships Education include?
RRE addresses the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes which children and young people need to build and maintain safe, respectful relationships throughout life.
The research tells us that children and young people may be exposed to the following RRE-related issues throughout their lifetime:
- child protection education (abuse, personal safety, rights and responsibilities)
- bodily autonomy
- coercion, grooming
- consent and privacy
- domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV)
- bullying, discrimination and vilification
- extremism
- nudes or sexting
- pornography
- sexual extortion (sextortion)
- deep fakes and AI companions.
Creating safe, respectful and inclusive learning environments
A number of strategies can be used to create a supportive learning environment enabling students to feel safe to learn and ask questions. Access the RRE teaching strategies resource for pedagogy that involves active participation and interactive learning which are most effective when teaching RRE.
- Make students aware at the beginning of lessons that disclosing personal information that indicates they may be at risk of harm will be reported to the school principal in all instances.
- Be aware that some parts of RRE can be confronting and sensitive for some students.
- Provide opportunities for student to contribute in less public ways.
- Don’t assume students are not engaged in the activities. Some students may find it difficult to contribute to class discussion and may say little in group activities.
- Appreciate and celebrate the diversity of all students within the classroom.
- Provide opportunities for students to reflect on situations and issues in the context of their own life experiences.
- Keep in mind that those students who feel included or valued will most often engage with learning.
- Establish and maintain expectations, guidelines and boundaries for students to encourage mutual respect and allow for positive relationships to develop in the classroom.
- Engage students in the development of a class agreement or expectations.
- Expect and reinforce positive behaviour.
- Model and reinforce the attitudes and behaviours expected of students.
- Use and reinforce inclusive and appropriate language.
- Affirm the diversity in the responses of individual students.
- Maintain a classroom environment free from bullying and harassment.
Teachers may use a range of multimodal methods to support the diverse communication needs of students. These could include:
- written responses
- class discussions or conversations with one or more peers
- drawing or sketching
- audio recording (spoken messages)
- video recording (including sign language or gestures)
- text messaging or typing (using devices or apps)
- use of symbols or picture exchange communication systems (PECS)
- use of communication boards or books
- gestures or body language
- eye-gaze technology or systems
- Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices
- media or online platforms for communication
- interactive whiteboards or digital pens
- storytelling through animation or comics
- using music or rhythm as a communicative tool
- role-play or drama.
Teaching Respectful Relationships Education Curriculum K–12 resources
The RRE-related issues which children and young people are exposed to throughout their lifetime are explicitly addressed through our new Teaching Respectful Relationships Education Curriculum K–12 resources. The resources address the issues in an age-appropriate, evidence-based, trauma-informed way.
We have given additional focus in our curriculum resources to the concepts of respect, power, gender, privacy and consent as these are deeply embedded in the content and central to the issues children and young people are exposed to.
The resources ensure the curriculum is tailored to the developmental stages of students, addressing the drivers of gender-based violence in ways that are accessible and meaningful. It encourages students to reflect on their own beliefs, challenge stereotypes and develop healthy relationship skills.
The Teaching Respectful Relationships Education Curriculum K–12 resources embed:
- Child Protection Education – this addresses concepts of power, abuse and protective strategies. It is designed to increase awareness, knowledge and protective behaviour skills to prevent and reduce child abuse and violence by making children feel safer to disclose inappropriate touch or behaviours from others.
- Consent education – this includes a focus on what it can look or sound like to ask for, give, refuse or withdraw consent. Consent education also focuses on the understanding that consent is permission freely given with full knowledge of a situation and without pressure or manipulation. Consent is fundamental to safe, healthy and pleasurable sexual relationships. Consent is a particularly important concept for young people in their early and formative experiences of dating and relationships, given that they are at heightened risk of sexual violence. (The Commonwealth Consent Policy Framework, Department of Social Services 2024)
Effective RRE programs involve active participation and interactive learning. To have a lasting impact, the teaching should be reinforced by the school's:
- broader culture
- policies
- partnerships.
Effective pedagogy for Respectful Relationships Education
A whole-school approach is unequivocally considered to be the best-practice model for RRE. Schools should ensure that content is explicitly taught in ongoing, incremental and cumulative stages. This approach should be multifaceted, with a range of teaching resources and techniques, and supported by the broader school environment, school policy and cross-curricular links.
Teachers should adopt a rights-based, ethics-based and sex-positive approach.
A rights-based approach is grounded in the idea that all children and young people have inherent human rights to safety, bodily integrity, participation, information, health and education, and that schools have a duty to uphold these rights in policy, curriculum and everyday practice. In RRE this means explicitly teaching that everyone is entitled to be respected, feel safe and be treated fairly, while also ensuring school structures model gender equity, inclusion and non-violence across classrooms, playgrounds and staff culture.
An ethics-based approach frames RRE as moral and civic learning about how to treat others well, exercise power fairly and navigate complex situations with care and integrity. Rather than relying on rules alone, it asks students to reflect on values such as respect, empathy, honesty, justice, responsibility and care, and to consider how gender, power and social norms influence their choices and obligations to others. The Teaching Respectful Relationships Education Curriculum K–12 resources use real-life and age-appropriate dilemmas about friendships, dating, online interactions and conflict to explore ‘What is the right thing to do and why?’ They encourage perspective taking and accountability, including repairing harm and challenging harmful norms. They also link personal relationships to broader issues like gender equality, discrimination and abuse of power.
A sex-positive approach recognises that sexuality is a normal, healthy part of human development and that children and young people benefit from accurate, non-shaming information and skills to make informed, consensual and safe choices as they grow. Within RRE this means moving beyond a narrow focus on risk to also address communication, autonomy, enjoyment, and diversity in bodies and identities. RRE teaches that consent for sexual activity should always be freely given, enthusiastic, respectful and capable of being withdrawn at any time.
Effective approaches for Respectful Relationships Education
The Teaching Respectful Relationships Education Curriculum K–12 resources use an age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate approach which reflects inclusive language and addresses pornography, media, stereotypes and peer pressure critically. The resources support students to align choices with their values and boundaries.
These approaches are deemed to be effective in:
- addressing stigma and building emotional literacy
- providing holistic and preventive messages
- capturing and helping students to understand the nuance of gaining, receiving and refusing consent
- building moral reasoning and responsibility
- guiding students on how to engage in healthy relationships and to behave ethically
- supporting students to recognise, build and maintain healthy, non-violent and mutually satisfying relationships, now and in the future
- empowering young people to make decisions based on a set of values, which is ultimately more sustainable across the lifespan.