The new RSHE statutory guidance comes into force on 1 September. Almost all the coverage has been about the curriculum, and understandably so. AI generated images, misogyny and incel culture at secondary. Correct terminology for body parts at primary. A significant rewrite of what schools teach about gender. That is where the argument has been, and it is where most of the training has gone.
The part I keep seeing schools underestimate is smaller and a lot more procedural. The guidance requires an up to date written policy in place, and it requires you to consult parents on it. Not inform them. Consult them. Those are two different duties, and they leave two very different kinds of evidence behind.
What actually changes next week
The Department for Education published the revised guidance in July 2025, replacing a version last updated in 2019, with a deliberately long lead in so schools had a full academic year to prepare. From 1 September every school must follow it unless there is good reason not to.
In practice that means three things. Your curriculum has to reflect the new content. You need a current written policy for relationships education, or relationships and sex education where that applies. And that policy has to be published to parents, alongside clear information about what is taught, what materials are used, which external providers are involved, and the right to request that a child is withdrawn from sex education.
Running through the whole document are new guiding principles, and two of them are engagement with pupils and parents, and transparency with parents. They are not tucked away in an annex. They are the frame the rest of the guidance sits in.
Consultation has a legal shape
This is the bit worth slowing down on. Education lawyers have been fairly direct that the ordinary principles of lawful consultation apply here, and those principles are not vague. There are four of them, and they are easy to check yourself against.
The consultation has to happen while the proposals are still at a formative stage, which means before the policy is finished. Those consulted need enough information to respond meaningfully, which means the draft itself and a plain explanation of what is changing, not a summary. They need adequate time to respond. And the responses have to be conscientiously considered before the final decision is made.
Consultation is not a communications exercise. It is a decision making process, and it has to leave a trail.
Most schools that get this wrong fail on the first test and the last one. The policy was written in July, the consultation went out in September, and nobody can point to a single thing that changed as a result. That is publication with a comment box attached, and if it is ever challenged it will be described that way.
It is worth saying what consultation is not, because this causes real anxiety in schools. Consulting parents does not mean parents get a veto. They cannot vote the curriculum down. The guidance is clear that schools decide what is taught, in line with the needs of their pupils. What parents are entitled to is to be asked properly, to see the materials if they want to, and to have their views genuinely weighed. Being confident about that distinction makes the conversation easier, not harder.
A line in the Friday newsletter is not a consultation
Here is the pattern I see most often. A paragraph goes in the weekly newsletter with a link to a PDF, and an invitation to send any comments to the office by the end of term. Eleven parents open it. Two reply. The policy goes to the board in October and is approved without discussion.
Now imagine a parent challenges the policy in eighteen months. Who did you send it to? How many opened it? How many responded? What did they say? What changed as a result, and what did not change, and why? For most schools the honest answer is that it would have to be reconstructed from someone's inbox, assuming that person still works there.
RSHE raises the stakes on this more than most policies, because it is one of the few areas where a genuinely unhappy parent has a formal route. The right to request withdrawal from sex education is unchanged. When a school can show it consulted properly, published clearly, and considered what came back, those conversations tend to stay conversations. When it cannot, they escalate.
The questions your board should be asking this term
The National Governance Association makes a point that is easy to skip past. Part of a school leader's job here is explaining to the governing board how stakeholder feedback has shaped the RSHE provision. Not that consultation happened. How it changed things.
So if you are a governor or a trustee, these are the five questions worth putting on the agenda before you approve the policy.
- Who was consulted, how were they reached, and how many responded?
- What did they actually say, in summary?
- What changed in the policy as a result?
- What was raised and deliberately not changed, and what is our reasoning?
- Where is the record of all this kept, and could we produce it in two years?
If the answer to the last question is a folder on somebody's laptop, you do not have a record. You have a memory.
If you have not started yet, start narrow
There is a week left before the guidance bites, and a policy consultation is not the sort of thing to rush in August. The good news is that nothing stops you consulting in the autumn term and taking a revised policy to the board later in the year. What matters is that the process is real.
Keep it tight. Publish the draft policy so parents can read it. Ask a small number of specific questions rather than inviting general comment, because general comment gets you very little and specific questions get you something you can act on. Give a real deadline and stick to it. Keep every response in one place. Then take a short summary to the board setting out what came back, what you changed, and what you did not.
Do the same with pupils and with staff while you are at it. The guidance encourages it, and the whole point of the new principles is that RSHE works better when the people on the receiving end have been asked.
The record is the easy part to fix
Most schools I speak to are doing the right things already. They talk to parents. They listen. The gap is almost never willingness, it is that the listening happens by email, in the playground, and at a poorly attended evening meeting, and none of it ends up anywhere a governing board or an inspector could look at.
That is the problem we built the consultation side of Choice Voting to solve. A parent consultation runs the same way an election does. Everyone on your list gets their own link, responses are recorded as they come in, and at the end you have a result you can download and hand to the board rather than a story you have to tell them.
If RSHE is on your agenda this term and the consultation is the part you are least sure about, have a look at choicevoting.co.uk or send me a note. Happy to talk it through, whether or not you end up using us.