What Is Respectful Relationships Education? A Plain-English Guide for Australian Schools
If you work in a school, you have heard the term respectful relationships education more times than you can count. It is in curriculum documents, department memos, staff meetings and parent emails. But when a colleague or a parent asks you to explain what it actually is, the answer can get fuzzy fast.
So here it is in plain English.
What is respectful relationships education?
Respectful relationships education (RRE) is teaching and learning that helps young people build healthy, safe and respectful relationships. It covers empathy, communication, boundaries, consent, gender and power, and how to treat others well both in person and online. In Australia, it sits within the curriculum and is backed by every state and territory.
That is the short version. The longer version is that RRE is not one lesson, one poster campaign or one guest speaker. Done properly, it is a planned approach that builds year on year, so that what a Year 5 student learns about friendship and kindness becomes what a Year 10 student understands about consent, power and respect in intimate relationships.
Why is RRE now a priority in every state?
Two reasons: the evidence and the mandate.
The evidence first. Our Watch, Australia’s national organisation for preventing violence against women, has gathered the research showing that well-delivered RRE can shift the attitudes that sit underneath disrespect and, over time, gendered violence. Their evidence paper is clear that schools are one of the most effective places to do this work, because that is where young people form so many of their ideas about themselves and each other.
Then the mandate. In 2022, every Australian education minister agreed to make consent education compulsory, and from 2023 it has been embedded in the Australian Curriculum from Foundation to Year 10. Version 9 of the curriculum weaves respectful relationships content through Health and Physical Education at every year level. States have added their own layers on top, like Victoria’s Respectful Relationships whole-school initiative and similar frameworks in Queensland and New South Wales.
In other words, this is no longer optional, and schools are asked to do it well, not just tick it off.
What does RRE actually cover?
The content changes with age, which is exactly how it should work. In upper primary, it looks like friendship, inclusion, emotions and treating others fairly. In Years 7 to 9, it grows into communication, peer pressure, online behaviour and what respect looks like in the group chat as much as the classroom. By Years 10 to 12, it covers consent, boundaries, power in relationships, and the influences (including social media and p*rnography) shaping young people’s expectations.
The thread running through all of it is the same: helping young people understand who they are, how they treat others, and what they will and will not accept in how others treat them.
What does a good RRE program look like?
I have sat in the audience for enough guest speakers to know the difference between a session students endure and one they still talk about at lunch. I remember delivering a Year 9 session at a Brisbane College where a student put his hand up halfway through a scenario and said, “Wait, so if she goes quiet, but looks interested, how do you know if it’s a no or a yes?” The room went still. His mate answered before I could. That moment, a student having the courage to teach his own peer (in front of a whole cohort) is what good RRE looks like. It was not a lecture landing. It was a young person thinking out loud and getting it.
From the research and from years in rooms like that one, good programs share a few things. They are
Age-specific, because a Year 7 session recycled for Year 11 insults everyone in the room.
They use real-life scenarios rather than lectures, because young people switch off the moment they feel preached at.
They are strengths-based, focusing on getting relationships right rather than only warning about getting them wrong.
And they connect to a whole-school approach, so the conversation continues after the program ends.
Does one session make a difference?
An honest answer: one session alone will not transform a culture, and any provider who says otherwise is selling something. What a well-designed session does is open the conversation in a way that teachers can build on, give students shared language, and surface the questions young people will not ask in front of their regular classroom teacher. The Our Watch evidence is firm on this: RRE works best when external programs feed into an ongoing, whole-school effort rather than replacing it.
That is why the best partnerships I have with schools are the ones where we plan together, where the program matches the school’s wellbeing framework, and where staff walk away with threads to pull on for the rest of the term.
Where to from here?
If your school is reviewing how it teaches respectful relationships, start with three questions.
What are we already doing at each year level?
Where are the gaps between what the curriculum expects and what students actually experience?
And who is helping us fill them?
Empowerment-Ed delivers respectful relationships programs for upper primary through to Year 12 in schools across Australia, and is endorsed as a Trusted eSafety Provider by the eSafety Commissioner. If you would like to talk through what RRE could look like at your school, visit our Empowering Relationships page or get in touch for a chat.