Esteem

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Rachel has also been working with Michelle on our new racial identity project, by developing sessions and materials for the Primary part of this.

Rachel has been busy creating materials  and piloting sessions for our new Esteem Primary Relationships Education programme. One very rewarding part of this has been the work she has done with a group of children in a Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) unit.

Rachel ran one session on emotions, self-control and managing conflict in the unit that went so well the SEND leader asked her to come back to do more!

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In the 2021/2022 school year, our own Esteem team Paul, Michelle, Rachel and Gareth delivered multiple Esteem relationships and sex education sessions to 4,060 young people across London and Cheshire. Our schools' work serves as a model of best practice to the Esteem network.

Although we have returned to in-person sessions in most schools, some preferred us to continue with sessions conducted by live video link.

We are delighted with the expansion we saw in the 2021/2022 school year in our Esteem training, network membership, and the number of young people reached.

We ran 9 accredited relationships and sex education courses, training 108 people, 101 of whom completed the level 4 accreditation in ‘Teaching RSE.’

During the academic year, our Esteem Network membership grew from 253 to 291 trained educators, exceeding our year-end target of 280.

We know that in the past couple of years many things such as the pandemic, rising living costs and exam uncertainty have added to the mental health challenges young people were already facing.

So there has never been a more important time to facilitate conversation around how they are really feeling.

Prior to the pandemic, 1 in 6 young people ages 5-16 were already diagnosed with a mental health disorder, and this number may now be even higher, given the increase in depression and anxiety-related disorders experienced by many during the pandemic.

The development of our racial identity project is now well underway. Michelle conducted further focus groups in 3 schools earlier this year to inform the creation of a set of lessons, meeting with students from years 7 to 10.

The groups were of mixed gender and ethnicity and we kept the groups small so that the young people could talk and share more easily.

We also used anonymous questionaries to enable the young people to say things they may not have felt comfortable saying during the sessions.

Since Relationships Education became statutory in primary schools in 2020, we have often been asked to expand our Esteem program to include sessions for Primary-aged children – so this is what we are doing!

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