Much Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) is still shaped by what we describe as safe certainty: an understandable but limiting impulse to manage young people’s relationships through fixed rules, simplified messages and tightly bounded discussions focused primarily on risk, harm and compliance. While this approach seeks to keep young people safe, it can also close down dialogue, marginalise young people’s lived experiences and leave little room to explore the emotional, relational and ethical complexity that actually characterises adolescent intimacy.
The Safe Uncertainty approach offers an alternative. Rather than positioning adults as holders of correct answers, it invites a shift in mindset toward facilitation grounded in curiosity, open-ended inquiry and ethical reflection. It recognises uncertainty not as a failure of education, but as a developmental condition of growing into intimate, relational and sexual lives, and as a pedagogical resource through which deeper learning, agency and social understanding can emerge.
Safe Uncertainty is not about abandoning safeguarding, nor about relativism. It is about creating structured, supported spaces in which young people can reflect on meaning, power, pleasure, vulnerability, gender, values and fairness, and critically examine how their ideas are shaped by peers, culture, media and wider social norms. In doing so, it supports what we might call personal, interpersonal, social and cultural literacy: young people learn not only what they think, but where those ideas come from, who they benefit, and how they shape relationships and wellbeing.
We are currently developing a draft Safe Uncertainty resource pack designed to support educators, practitioners and youth workers to experiment with this approach in practice. These materials provide structured activities, guiding questions and facilitation prompts to enable reflective, dialogic and ethically grounded learning, while remaining responsive to what young people themselves bring into the room.
In the blog below, Avanti – a member of our Trailblazers group – reflects on her experience using one of these draft activities: the card-sort exercise exploring where young people get their ideas about sex and relationships. Her account offers a vivid illustration of Safe Uncertainty in action, and of what becomes possible when we move from delivering answers to facilitating inquiry.
About the author
I led the PSHE curriculum during my time teaching at a secondary school in South London before moving on to work with a health and wellbeing charity as an external RSE provider. While in this second role, I joined the Reimagining RSE Trailblazers Group and began to make use of the safe uncertainty approach and Reimagining RSE’s draft resource pack in sessions with young people across secondary schools, colleges and youth clubs. Below, I reflect on how the card sort activity in Session 1: Where do we get our ideas about sex and relationships from? opened a space to explore gender norms, expectations, stereotypes and – while not explicitly designed to elicit them – discussions of pleasure (particularly its gendered nature).
My aims delivering RSE sessions to young people have centered around 1) creating a space where young people feel comfortable talking about topics that usually make them feel ashamed, awkward and embarrassed and 2) ensuring that they leave a session with the kind of attitude that I believe to be fair, kind and accepting. My stance might previously have been described as one of ‘safe certainty’ – a more anxiously-than-not-ridden attempt to make sure that young people engage in safe and enjoyable interactions and relationships with a strong sense of right and wrong that leaves no room for exploitation, homophobia, unkindness or uncertainty (all of which I’d witnessed and intervened in as a teacher). Yet as adults can often experience, while we may get better at expressing our needs, clarifying our discomforts, and disengaging from relationships and situations that don’t work for us, certainty cannot ever fully exist even as we leave adolescence behind. Any attempt to try to establish it is one that forecloses space for growth and even compounds anxiety instead of reducing it.
Having previously followed more of a safe certainty approach, I felt an expectation to have all the answers and ensure that they were transmitted to young people through a rule-based framing (Woodley et al., 2025). Moving to a safe uncertainty approach, I as the teacher/facilitator was now put in a position where I was allowed to not know, and was even expected to demonstrate and model my not knowing. From having previously felt the expectation to be an all-knowing, infallible source, I was now trying out an attitude that allowed me to explore ideas of friendships, relationships and interactions alongside students without as much anxiety to ensure they got it right. Supported with guiding questions and prompts, I felt more confident to frame the topic at hand with a critical, questioning lens that, while not directing students towards a strict way of thinking, did get them to reflect on the ethics of what was being discussed. The kinds of questions expected to be asked at every turn: what and who influence the way we think about this? Does this way of thinking benefit some at the expense of others? Are there fairer and more fulfilling alternatives that we could consider?
A brief description of the card sort activity: students are asked to order, from low level to high level, a set of 16 cards displaying a range of intimate and sexual acts. Students may ask what we mean by low level and high level when given the instruction, yet interpretation is left to them. This opens a space to explore how such acts are perceived as involving varying levels of intimacy, vulnerability, risk, commitment and any other factor that responses may elicit.
This activity allowed me to engage in discussions the way I have always aimed to: with a sense of openness and curiosity that invites discussion rather than shuts it down. Even with more of the safe certainty mindset with which I had delivered sessions in the past, I felt I had been able to effectively create a space where young people could ask questions and explore attitudes in a nonjudgmental environment. However, when facilitating open-ended discussions rather than activity-based ones, I’d find our conversations veering from nude image sharing and slut-shaming to friendship challenges at a fast pace. My mind would be left buzzing with points to be addressed in the next session as with such rapid turns in conversation, we would not be able to unpack and address in depth the various points that arose. With this previous safe certainty perspective came my well-intentioned attempts to minimise risk and harm, especially when it came to topics such as consent, which I would introduce and discuss largely in relation to legal frameworks. The messages students would take from sessions, especially when taught in a classroom following a PSHE curriculum, were often oversimplified (yes/no, right/wrong, do/don’t do) and misleading, as is usually the case when the topic of consent, especially in complex situations such as where alcohol is involved, is taught to young people (Woodley et al., 2025).
The card sort activity allowed for a different dynamic. Alongside the activities that preceded and followed it (which I delivered over a series of 4–6 sessions), the card sort activity allowed for a more structured and holistic method of discussing topics. It also provided an opportunity for young people to be more active than in previous discussion-only sessions. Huddled with their cards on the floor or around a table rather than in their seats, they had more opportunity for free-flowing discussion amongst themselves, which I as the facilitator could weave in and out of, picking up comments that could guide later discussion. For example, a student kept commenting “this is worse” with a card in hand while sorting with her group, which was then explored in the follow-up discussion (‘when this group commented that higher-level acts are worse, what did you mean by this?’). Prompts like these opened up a discussion of risk where ‘worse’ was then reframed as ‘more than’which was equated with involving greater risk (“vaginal sex can lead to pregnancy whereas handholding cannot”). Worse than/more than was also perceived as involving greater intimacy and vulnerability (“you’d hug a friend, but you’d have sex with someone you feel more deeply about and only when you know they’re serious”).
Example of students’ card sort allowing for the question of why going down on her was placed as higher level than for him.
Shifting to a position where I was expected to not know and to model not knowing created a little anxiety about what and the extent to which I should know in any situation. As a teacher/facilitator, while I understood that modelling not knowing could be effective in promoting curiosity and young people’s confidence to ask questions, I also felt a pressure to ensure that young people left the classroom with a fixed idea of right and wrong. My aim now became to ensure that I was encouraging students’ ethical reasoning skills and their process of thinking rather than needing them to leave the class having showed that they got it through a simplistic response to a complex question or situation. One big help here was the inclusion of suggestions in the resource pack alongside each activity as to what students might say (based on past experiences) and the prompts the facilitator could respond with. The resource pack noted that students tended to place ‘going down on her’ as higher level than ‘going down on him’ with suggested responses to evoke discussion. This proved to be the case with most groups aside from a couple of groups at the secondary school which placed them on equal levels, and a group at a youth club which placed them inversely. With the set of suggested prompts from the resource pack, I felt better equipped to facilitate a discussion that seemed to quite effortlessly emerge about sex, gender, expectations and stereotypes. From here, a discussion around pleasure arose in a way that felt natural and unintimidating.
The topic of pleasure has historically been excluded from formal sex education programmes, whether this be due to constraints with curricula, time, training, and/or environments that are not conducive to facilitating and holding such conversations. Michelle Fine’s writing in the 80s about desire as a missing discourse in sex education identifies how a failure to discuss pleasure results in a situation where, “young women continue to be taught to fear and defend in isolation from exploring desire, and in this context there is little possibility of their developing a critique of gender or sexual arrangements’” (Michelle Fine, 1988, p. 31). Not just young women, but queer-identified students also remain most at risk of harassment and/or violence. What emerged from this activity and the discussions that followed was a space to explore gender and sexual arrangements, which highlighted inequalities that were reinforced by stereotypes and misconceptions that surrounded students and influenced their thinking.
When asked why ‘going down on her’ was placed as higher-level, students’ responses included: oral sex on women being ‘unhygienic’ and ‘gross’ (discharge, taste, pregnancy, periods); oral sex on women not being as pleasurable as for men; and that ‘it’s just something men don’t do’. The follow-up questions (what and who influence the way we think about this? Does this way of thinking benefit some at the expense of others? Are there fairer and more fulfilling alternatives that we could consider?) allowed the groups to explore gender and sexual arrangements that are reinforced by stereotypes and myths. Discussions started to become more complex with students noting that oral sex for men is normalised and less stigmatised than it is for women. Some students talked about how a man will be congratulated, celebrated, “gassed up” when telling his friends that a woman went down on him, whereas a woman would be slut-shamed and “have poor mental health” as a result of the judgment they would face. When asked where such ideas have come from, students cited music videos, social media and family members (male role models particularly). We were able to explore ideas of gender norms and masculinity with some discussing power: “men gain power by getting oral sex and lose power when giving oral sex”, according to one student. He referred to a “God-posture” where a man would be above/in a more dominant position, commenting that to lower oneself would be a form of losing power. Alternative ideas of what it means to be masculine then arose, with another staff member involved in the session interjecting that “to me, being a man actually means taking care of my partner” which allowed a discussion to reconsider fixed ideas of masculinity, reciprocity and fairness. This activity also opened a space to de-center cisgender, heteronormative ideas of sex and sexuality. Popular ideas of masculinity that present men as always desiring or expecting sex restricts possibilities for young men to experience their sexuality in ways that do not fit these prescriptions, which Allen (2012) notes can even make it difficult for them to refuse sexual advances or report sexual assault.In the discussion, we were also able to explore whether the same dynamics and expectations would exist in the case of two women, two men or gender-diverse people engaging in these intimate acts.
Fine (1988) writes about the need to provide a space for young people to discuss “what feels good and bad, desirable and undesirable, grounded in experiences, needs, and limits” (p. 33). This is important to enable discussion and critique of gender and sexualities. Without this, she notes, we risk dis-abling young women (as well as queer-identified young people) in their negotiations as sexual subjects. That such a space opened with this activity allowed students to explore misconceptions about pleasure, stereotypes about gender, myths about masculinity and femininity, and center questions of fairness in intimate relationships.
With a space to understand themselves as sexual subjects, young people could be supported to resist dominant femininities/masculinities that prescribe sexual roles and behaviours (Allen, 2012), especially when these do not serve their best interests. One student who placed ‘going down on him’ as higher-level said she made this decision because in instances where women feel pressured into giving men oral sex, it becomes a more intense or higher-level act. This comment allowed for another opportunity to explore gendered expectations, with students talking about fears around the risk of not pleasing and, therefore, losing a partner. Follow-up activities in later sessions allowed us to revisit this topic with questions such as “when it comes to consent, is a willingness to please your partner problematic?’” Such questions prompted students to reflect on the complicated nature of consent in practice and how values, expectations and pressures shape decision-making, as per the objectives in the resource pack. The activities allowed young people to critically reflect on social expectations and gendered dynamics that remain implicit, unquestioned and affect their sense of agency.
One student from the group who had placed the ‘going down on him’ and ‘going down on her’ cards beside each other voiced that “if I’m doing that to you it’s only right that you do that to me” to which other girls nodded their heads in agreement. Hirst (2013) discusses how sexuality education should affirm the importance of negotiation in sexual practices to maximise opportunities for pleasure and reciprocity in relationships, which was what such a comment opened space for. Yet, there was an interesting blurring of reciprocity and obligation, which would have to be explored to ensure that a sense of reciprocity does not overflow into a senseof pressure, whichever end of the interaction one might be on.
Example of students’ card sort which allowed a discussion of fairness and reciprocity with cards placed beside each other
With a different group, a Y12 student commented that many women feel self-conscious about their bodies, especially when it comes to allowing a partner to go down on them and that many therefore opt to not allow partners to do this. Discomfort with sexual selves, power imbalances, body esteem and (a lack of) expectations of pleasure have been noted as factors that affect sexual autonomy and sexual and reproductive health (Higgins and Hirsch, 2007; Horne and Zimmer-Gembeck, 2006). Following the student’s comment about self-esteem and self-consciousness, the group engaged in a discussion about vulnerability and stereotypes about bodies and appearance which are reinforced by the same sources cited before (music videos, social media, family/friends/role models). This allowed us to explore how such influences, especially lifestyle influencers on social media who create seemingly unachievable ideals of beauty, might heighten girls’ sense of insecurity.
The range of discussions that emerged from the card sort activity allowed us to unpack pleasure as it was tied to ideas of gender, power, (in)equality, and stereotypes around sex. Rather than presenting pleasure as compulsory, these discussions allowed pleasure to be recognised as legitimate (Wood et al., 2019) especially for women, which discussions with the groups show might not have been the case beforehand. When giving feedback, students tended to say that what they enjoyed most about the sessions was that there was “no right or wrong answer” and many noted that they had learned to see things in a different way and to listen to other perspectives (even if they haven’t necessarily changed their initial opinions). This feels like a positive step in the right direction. Led by a safe uncertainty approach, I’ve reframed how I perceive my role when delivering RSE sessions to young people. Rather than attempting to fix understandings with rule-based framings, my aim is more about promoting critical thinking and ethical reasoning skills, which do not require me to have all the answers (always a heavy pressure), more the right questions.
What Avanti’s reflections show us
Avanti’s account powerfully demonstrates what a shift to Safe Uncertainty can unlock in practice.
First, we see how RSE can move beyond a narrow harm-prevention model toward a holistic exploration of intimacy and relationships that holds space not only for safety and consent, but also for pleasure, reciprocity, vulnerability, gender norms, power and emotional meaning. These are not ‘extra’ topics; they are central to how young people actually experience relationships.
Second, her reflections show the value of treating relationships and intimacy in the round, rather than as isolated or siloed issues. Discussions of image-sharing, gender, body confidence, masculinity, consent, fairness and pleasure did not appear as disconnected themes, but as interwoven parts of young people’s lived relational worlds.
Third, Avanti’s experience illustrates what genuinely youth-led learning can look like. Rather than adults pre-selecting priority topics and directing discussion toward predetermined conclusions, young people themselves raised what mattered, made connections across ideas and shaped the direction of inquiry, while still being supported to reflect ethically and critically.
Fourth, we see Safe Uncertainty allowing for multi-layered literacy: young people engaged not only with personal feelings and peer dynamics, but with wider cultural messages, media influences and social inequalities. This kind of learning plants seeds for longer-term growth, not as something ‘tidied up’ within a single session, but as part of an ongoing developmental process.
Finally, Avanti’s reflections highlight the importance of a spiral curriculum. The ideas, questions and tensions that emerged were not closed down; they were revisited, deepened and reframed across later sessions, allowing understanding, confidence and ethical reasoning to develop over time.
Join us in experimenting
We are currently inviting educators, youth workers and practitioners to join us in experimenting with the draft Safe Uncertainty resource pack. We are particularly keen to hear reflections, adaptations, challenges and insights from practice, so that these materials can continue to evolve in dialogue with those working directly with young people.
If you would like access to the draft resources – or are interested in joining our Trailblazers community – please get in touch. We would warmly welcome your reflections as part of this growing, collaborative effort to re-imagine RSE.
References
Allen, L. (2012). Pleasure’s perils? Critically reflecting on pleasure’s inclusion in sexuality education. Sexualities, 15(3–4), 455–471.
Fine, M. (1988). Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire. Harvard Educational Review, 58(1), 29–54.
Higgins, J. A., & Hirsch, J. S. (2007). The pleasure deficit: Revisiting the “sexuality connection” in reproductive health. International Family Planning Perspectives, 33(3), 133–139.
Hirst, J. (2013). ‘It’s got to be about enjoying yourself’: young people, sexual pleasure, and sex and relationships education. Sex Education, 13(4), 423–436.
Horne, S., & Zimmer-Gembeck, M. J. (2006). The female sexual subjectivity inventory: Development and validation of a multidimensional inventory for late adolescents and emerging adults. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30(2), 125–138.
Wood, R., Hirst, J., Wilson, L., & Burns-O’Connell, G. (2019). The pleasure imperative? Reflecting on sexual pleasure’s inclusion in sex education and sexual health. Sex Education, 19(1), 1–14.
Woodley, G., Setty, E., & Hunt, J. (2025). Sex, consent and intoxication: Navigating the grey areas with kindness and care. Reimagining RSE. https://re-imagining-rse.org/blog/sex-consent-and-intoxication-navigating-the-grey-areas-with-kindness-and-care/