Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of including information on endometriosis in the RSE curriculum.
Answered by Robin Walker
From September 2020, relationships education became compulsory for all primary school-aged pupils, relationships and sex education compulsory for all secondary school-aged pupils, and health education compulsory for all pupils in state-funded schools in England.
Statutory guidance on the new curriculum has been published and is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/relationships-education-relationships-and-sex-education-rse-and-health-education. This guidance states that pupils should be taught key facts about the menstrual cycle, including what is an average period, the range of menstrual products and implications for emotional and physical health.
To support schools further the department developed teacher training modules which are freely available to download from GOV.UK. We worked closely with Endometriosis UK when drawing up the ‘changing adolescent body’ module which references endometriosis.