From subject leaders to teaching assistants, business managers to headteachers, everyone in the education sector is constantly having to perform a balancing act; providing the best possible learning experiences, while managing workloads, with limited time and resources - and making the right procurement decisions.

I am guessing many of us remember at least one teacher who really stood out from the others, someone who has made a real impact on our lives. I am often tempted to define a brilliant teacher as one who passes the thirty year test: when you catch up with them thirty years later, you want to go up and talk to them, because they made such a difference to your life. The thing about making a difference is that you can never unmake that difference. Once you are "that" teacher for a child, you will retain a special place in their hall of fame for ever.

The government has announced that ALL schools will, from September 2020, have to teach RSE (Secondary) and Relationships Education (Primary) and health education. This may seem quite a long way ahead, but now is the time to ensure that your school is ready to implement the key elements of the reforms. First of all, we’d like to encourage you to respond to the consultation on statutory SRE and Health Education, which is open now here.

The statutory areas include:

• Features of healthy friendships, family relationships and other relationships.
• How relationships can affect physical and mental health.
• Staying safe online.
• How to use technology safely, responsibly and respectfully.
• How to keep personal information private.
• Healthy eating.
• Keeping fit.
• Prevention of health problems such as drugs, tobacco and alcohol.
• Recognition of mental health and ways to support good mental health.
• Understanding consent.
• Development of qualities such as confidence, resilience, self-respect.
• Wider social and economic issues.

Here at The Alcohol Education Trust, we can help you with all elements needed to deliver comprehensive lessons covering consent, building resilience and resisting peer pressure, as well as fact files on the law, units, alcohol and its social and physical effects for Years 7 through 13. Nearly everything is free to access by both year group and topic, with plenty of online learning resources for children via www.talkaboutalcohol.com.

You can also access the free 100-page teacher workbook packed with games, activities and lesson plans, named national runner-up for The Education Resource Award for best Secondary school resource in 2017. If you’d like tailor-made powerpoints that are ready to deliver with accompanying guidance and notes, or specialist lessons for children with moderate learning difficulties, then you can access our store here.

Alcohol is often the first substance of experimentation among our pupils. Children who drink regularly before the age of 15 are then significantly more likely to engage in other negative risk-taking, such as taking cannabis, novel psychoactive substances (designer drugs), smoking and engaging in risky sex. Academic results suffer, with weekly drinking being linked to a drop in GCSE predictions of 20 points. Attendance falls too, and so life chances are significantly affected. With all of this in mind, ensuring staff in your school are confident in delivering alcohol education is key.

We know that specialist knowledge in school can be an issue in teaching PSHE topics, so we are here to help. Want face-to-face training, or a chat with schools coordinator Kate Hooper? Get in touch via 01300 320869 / [email protected]! Over 1,200 schools across the UK use Alcohol Education Trust resources. Read some of their testimonials here: alcoholeducationtrust.org/about-aet/testimonials.

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I must be feeling my age to start with the cliché that “when I was a kid…”, but the modern environment for millennials has vastly evolved from a simpler time of the internet in its infancy, mobile phones the size of bricks (which appear to be back in fashion) topped with an antennae and when buying music was a ritual of sourcing enough change to walk into a store and physically buy a CD with all its glory. Notwithstanding the nostalgia, this period of time still came cloaked with issues of self-esteem, concerns over image, bullying in all its forms, and anxiety to achieve well in school threading all ages together.

The importance of sex and relationship education (SRE) cannot be underestimated. When we think about the multiple domains where SRE becomes relevant for young people, there is a clear overlap across healthy relationships, sexual exploitation, domestic abuse and peer dating violence.