Rachel Maunder has won funding to support her work on a collaborative project between the University of Greenwich and the University of Northampton. The project is looking at the recently introduced statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in schools (Department for Education, 2019), which intends to provide children and young people with the foundations needed to form safe and healthy relationships.
The sensitivity of RSE topics makes them challenging to teach in the classroom, so preparing teachers appropriately is important. Therefore, the research explores the attitudes of trainee teachers at 2 institutions towards delivering RSE in primary schools and assesses the impact of training on their knowledge and confidence.
Rachel will be working with Professor Claire Monks (University of Greenwich), Sarah Cave (Professional Lead for QTS at UON) and Andrew Debenham (Senior Lecturer in Education at UON) to deliver training on effective relationships education to trainee primary school teachers at both Greenwich and Northampton, and measuring the impact of this training on their attitudes towards delivering the new curriculum in school.