Sheffield teens film sexual harassment stories ahead of school curriculum changes

England’s updated Relationships, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education guidance, published by the Department for Education in July 2025 and due to take effect on 1 September 2026, puts consent, healthy relationships, bullying, misogyny and the influence of online manipulation at the centre of classroom teaching. In Sheffield, teenagers’ accounts of sexual harassment show why the gap between policy and daily school life is still under scrutiny.

The pressure on schools did not begin with the 2025 guidance. In June 2022, BBC News recorded Sheffield teenagers sharing sexual harassment stories in a video that girls said was meant to show how harassment makes them feel. Of the 23 teenage girls questioned, 21 said they had experienced sexual harassment. Their testimony has become part of a wider conversation in England about whether schools are teaching enough about harassment before it hardens into accepted behaviour.

Learn Sheffield’s Sexual Harassment in South Yorkshire Schools, published in 2023, gave that concern a local structure. Sue Finnigan’s report described itself as a qualitative study reflecting the voices of a cross section of secondary-school-age young people in South Yorkshire, recording their experiences and their recommendations for how schools could support them further. It sits within Learn Sheffield’s Developing Healthy Attitudes work on violence against women and girls in schools, linking classroom culture to safeguarding rather than treating harassment as a one-off discipline issue.

National policy has since moved in the same direction. The Department for Education says teachers will be trained to spot and tackle misogyny in the classroom, while higher-risk pupils could be sent on behavioural courses under the government’s wider violence-against-women-and-girls strategy. The aim is to halve violence against women and girls over the next decade, but Jess Phillips warned in July 2024 that tackling misogyny in UK schools could take up to 20 years to affect society.

In Sheffield, those policies land in a system where Relationships and Sex Education is already required in secondary schools across England, according to the University of Sheffield. Local support has also grown around that duty. Sheffield Students’ Union runs advice and support on everyday sexism and tackling rape culture, while Safer Streets Sheffield and the Know the Line Campaign bring together local groups and individuals concerned about sexual harassment of women and girls in Sheffield and South Yorkshire.

The test for schools now is not the wording of the guidance but whether girls can feel it in lessons, reporting systems and consequences. In Sheffield, teenage voices have already shown how early harassment is noticed and how clearly students can describe it; the next measure is whether classrooms answer back.