Mr. Matthew Ryan:

RSE has been in the spotlight lately. From our experience, if students receive RSE at all, it is very inconsistent regarding when and how they receive it. It is very heteronormative and exclusive. It focuses on the average white straight couple and does not include anything about intimacy or maintaining relationships. A lot of students would say that they learn more about sexuality and sexuality education from the biology course than from the RSE course. There is a big fear of language and the stigmatisation around it in RSE. It is difficult for a teacher to stand up in front of a class of 30 students and talk about pleasure, orgasms and things like that without there being that natural fear of what they might hear back. However, we need to remember that if we are not giving students this adequate RSE, every year, a massive cohort of students graduate from sixth year and move on to third level without any education in this area. The only education they have received regarding RSE is from third party sources and the Internet, which oftentimes can be very inconsistent and dangerous. So the lack of a RSE curriculum leads to a lack of understanding, which leads to animosity and a lack of inclusion. It leads to a very negative school environment so I would encourage us engaging with the NCCA to reform the RSE curriculum, roll it out and get it working properly so that we can educate students on what they need to know because they are learning it themselves. The age of consent is 17 but students are becoming sexually active long before that and are learning these things as they go by trial and error, which is a dangerous precedent to be setting for young people. We need to listen to young people on that issue and hear what they want as opposed to telling them "this is what you need from an RSE curriculum" as opposed to them saying "well this is what we actually would benefit from in an RSE curriculum".