respectful relationships

In 2016 Respectful Relationships education became a core component of the Victorian Curriculum. Respectful Relationships is an initiative to support schools and early childhood education settings to promote and model respect and equality. It also supports educators to teach our children how to build healthy relationships, resilience, and confidence. 

Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships
The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships learning materials have been designed for teachers in primary and secondary schools to develop students’ social, emotional and positive relationship skills. Efforts to promote social and emotional skills and positive gender norms in children and young people has been shown to improve health-related outcomes and subjective well-being. It also reduces antisocial behaviours including engagement in gender-related violence.

Each year level covers the same topics at the same time over a two-year period, with the exception of Prep who cover all the topics in one year. The topics are listed below and these are the same at each year level. The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships program is assessed in the Victorian Curriculum areas of Personal and Social Capability and Health and Physical Education.

The classroom Program will focus on 8 key areas:

Emotional Literacy: This helps students develop the ability to be aware of, understand and use vocabulary about the emotional states of themselves and others with competence.

Personal Strengths: Students develop a vocabulary to help them recognise and understand various strengths and positive qualities in themselves and others. They identify the strengths they admire in others and those they need to draw on to engage with the challenges and opportunities that life presents.

Positive Coping: Students develop language around coping, critically reflect on their coping strategies and extend their repertoire of positive coping strategies.

Problem-solving: Students learn a range of problem-solving techniques that can be applied when confronting

personal, social and ethical dilemmas. They engage in applied learning tasks in which they apply their problem-solving skills to be realistic.

Stress management: This teaches students to learn a range of problem-solving skills through applied learning tasks, so that they are able to cope with challenges as they arise.

Help-seeking: Help seeking is a coping strategy that involves seeking technical, instrumental, social or emotional support from other people.

Gender and identity: These are age-appropriate learning activities that assist students to understand and critique the influence of gender norms on attitudes and behaviours.

Positive gender relationships: This teaches students to build positive gender relationships and the importance of acceptance of difference and diversity.

The best relationships are respectful ones. By working together, we can create real and lasting change and help to address gender inequality and prevent family violence.

What is Respectful Relationships education?