The School of Play Curriculum
Secondary School
Respectful Relationships
Year 9–10 Introduction
Deepening self-awareness, challenging assumptions, and strengthening respectful connections
Students in Years 9 and 10 are navigating a transformative stage of adolescence. Identity becomes more complex, friendships become more influential, and young people begin to make independent choices that shape their well-being, relationships, and future pathways. Social pressures, online interactions, and emerging romantic relationships all become more significant during this time.
This curriculum supports students in developing the critical thinking, emotional skills, and respectful relationship behaviours they need to thrive with confidence, empathy, and integrity.
Core Learning Objectives
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
Deepen emotional awareness by recognising complex feelings and understanding their impact on decision-making.
Explore how thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions shape emotional responses.
Develop empathy through interpreting emotions in peers, communities, and real-world contexts.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
Support students to explore who they are becoming and how their values shape choices and relationships.
Use strengths-based reflection to build confidence, resilience, and a strong sense of self.
Encourage students to consider how their strengths contribute to collaboration, leadership, and well-being.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
Promote healthy strategies for managing stress, pressure, conflict, and emotional overwhelm.
Explore realistic self-care, personal limits, and the importance of boundaries in friendships, family relationships, and early dating.
Help students evaluate which coping strategies are helpful and which may be harmful.
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
Teach frameworks that help students analyse complex social situations with clarity and responsibility.
Explore long-term consequences, personal values, consent, and ethical considerations in their decision-making.
Engage students in scenarios relating to digital behaviour, group dynamics, relationships, and social justice.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
Identify personal stress triggers and patterns that emerge in school, relationships, identity exploration, and daily life.
Understand how lifestyle choices, sleep, exercise, and social environments influence well-being.
Practise habits and routines that cultivate long-term mental and emotional health.
Gender, Power & Identity
Critically examine the impact of gender norms, stereotypes, and social expectations on relationships and opportunities.
Explore intersectionality, how multiple identities (culture, gender, sexuality, ability, socioeconomic background) shape experiences.
Challenge bias and promote inclusive behaviours that strengthen safe, respectful school communities.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
Analyse the qualities of healthy, unhealthy, and unsafe relationships across face-to-face and digital settings.
Understand power imbalances, coercion, consent, communication, and trust.
Develop skills in assertiveness, boundary-setting, conflict resolution, and navigating early romantic relationships safely.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
Normalise accessing support for mental health, relationships, identity concerns, and safety.
Identify trusted adults, peers, and external services, and practise approaching them with confidence.
Strengthen students’ understanding of their rights to safety, respect, and equitable treatment, and how to advocate for themselves and others.
Years 9–10 is all about:
- Deepening emotional intelligence and self-understanding
- Exploring identity, personal values, and strengths
- Practising healthy coping, boundaries, and self-care
- Thinking critically, ethically, and calmly under pressure
- Challenging stereotypes, inequality, and harmful norms
- Building healthy, safe friendships and early relationships
- Knowing their rights, and seeking help when needed
Weekly Lessons
Truth or Norm?
Truth or Norm? is an interactive movement-based activity that helps students identify and unpack gender stereotypes that often go unnoticed in everyday life. By responding to bold statements and choosing whether they believe each one is true, false, or a stereotype, students begin to recognise how powerful social messages shape thoughts, expectations, and behaviour. Through open discussion and reasoning, they learn to distinguish facts from opinions and stereotypes, building critical thinking skills while exploring how these beliefs influence people’s experiences and identities.
As students listen to diverse viewpoints and practise sharing their own respectfully, they strengthen their ability to challenge limiting norms and suggest more inclusive alternatives. This activity encourages empathy, respectful communication, and confidence to question harmful social expectations. Truth or Norm? creates a safe and thought-provoking space for students to examine gender norms, broaden their understanding of equality, and grow as positive change makers in their friendships, families, and communities.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students recognise the emotional impact of stereotypes on themselves and others, deepening awareness of how biased messages shape feelings and behaviour.
- Encourages students to interpret how complex emotions, such as shame, pressure, or confusion, arise from gendered expectations.
- Builds empathy as students listen to differing viewpoints and reflect on the emotional experiences of those affected by stereotypes.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to examine how gender norms influence their emerging identity and the choices they feel pressured to make.
- Encourages reflection on personal values such as fairness, inclusion, and courage when challenging harmful or outdated beliefs.
- Helps students understand how their uniqueness and strengths contribute to breaking limiting norms and promoting equality.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Promotes healthy coping by teaching students to challenge stereotypes that create stress, restriction, or emotional suppression.
- Allows students to practise boundary-setting as they assert their perspective respectfully within group discussions.
- Highlights self-care by addressing harmful norms like “don’t cry” or “boys must be tough,” encouraging students to normalise expression, vulnerability, and help-seeking.
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Strengthens students’ ability to analyse where social norms originate and who benefits or is harmed by them.
- Encourages ethical decision-making as students evaluate the fairness, accuracy, and consequences of stereotype-driven behaviour.
- Promotes problem-solving by guiding students to propose more respectful and inclusive alternatives to commonly accepted norms.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students identify how societal expectations contribute to stress, performance pressure, or internalised self-doubt.
- Supports students in recognising patterns of emotional strain when trying to meet stereotypes that don’t align with their true selves.
- Encourages practices that promote emotional balance and well-being, such as rejecting harmful norms and embracing authentic behaviour.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Directly examines how gender stereotypes reinforce unequal power dynamics in relationships, opportunities, and social roles.
- Helps students explore intersectionality by recognising how gender expectations combine with culture, ability, sexuality, or socioeconomic background.
- Challenges harmful norms like “boys should lead” or “girls are emotional,” promoting more inclusive understandings of capability and identity.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Builds understanding of how stereotypes can negatively affect communication, trust, and equality in friendships and early relationships.
- Reinforces the importance of consent and mutual respect by analysing how gendered expectations can pressure or limit personal choice.
- Helps students practise assertiveness and respectful disagreement, essential skills for navigating safe and healthy relationships.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Normalises help-seeking by challenging stereotypes that discourage vulnerability or emotional openness, especially for boys.
- Helps students identify trusted support networks when harmful norms or pressures affect their well-being.
- Reinforces students’ rights to equality, inclusion, and self-expression, empowering them to advocate for themselves and others when stereotypes create unfair treatment.
Power Play Scenarios
Power Play Scenarios is a guided group activity that helps students recognise early signs of power imbalance, control, and unhealthy behaviours in relationships. Through realistic scenario cards, students explore how subtle patterns, like constant checking, guilt-tripping, or social isolation, can affect a person’s confidence, independence, and sense of safety. As students unpack these situations together, they build awareness of the difference between respectful behaviour and controlling dynamics, strengthening their understanding of what healthy relationships should feel like.
By brainstorming and rehearsing assertive, safe responses, students learn how to set boundaries, communicate clearly, and seek support when a situation feels uncomfortable or unsafe. Optional role-plays allow them to practise using confident body language and respectful communication in a supportive environment. Power Play Scenarios empowers students to identify red flags early, trust their instincts, and navigate relationships with greater autonomy and resilience, while also learning how to support peers who may be facing similar challenges.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students recognise the emotional impact of control, jealousy, guilt, or pressure within relationships and how these feelings affect decision-making.
- Encourages students to identify and articulate complex emotions, such as fear, anxiety, or confusion, when boundaries are crossed or respect is missing.
- Builds empathy as students reflect on how power imbalances affect a person’s sense of safety, confidence, and autonomy.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to reflect on how their personal values (e.g., respect, fairness, independence) guide the relationships they want to build.
- Encourages students to recognise their strengths, such as assertiveness, courage, and self-advocacy, when responding to unsafe dynamics.
- Helps students understand how healthy relationships contribute positively to identity formation, while controlling behaviours can undermine self-worth.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Builds students’ capacity to set clear boundaries and respond respectfully but firmly when those boundaries are ignored.
- Supports students in identifying safe coping strategies such as talking to trusted adults, distancing themselves from unsafe relationships, or seeking peer support.
- Reinforces the importance of self-care by encouraging students to recognise when a situation feels wrong and to prioritise their emotional and physical safety.
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Guides students to analyse scenarios for signs of coercion, manipulation, or imbalance and understand their ethical implications.
- Encourages students to evaluate the possible consequences of different responses and choose a strategy aligned with respect, safety, and personal values.
- Strengthens problem-solving as students brainstorm multiple ways to respond, weighing short-term discomfort against long-term well-being.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students identify stress responses triggered by controlling or unhealthy relationship patterns and understand their effects on well-being.
- Encourages students to practise habits that reduce relational stress, such as seeking space, connecting with supportive peers, and using calming communication strategies.
- Highlights how healthy relationships contribute to emotional balance, while controlling dynamics increase stress and confusion.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Encourages students to explore how gender stereotypes may influence controlling behaviours, expectations, or imbalance within relationships.
- Helps students examine how identity factors (gender, culture, sexuality, ability, socioeconomic background) may affect experiences of power or vulnerability.
- Challenges harmful norms that normalise jealousy, possessiveness, or dominance, promoting fairer and more respectful dynamics.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Provides clear examples of early warning signs in unhealthy relationships, supporting students to recognise unsafe patterns in real life.
- Reinforces essential skills such as assertiveness, boundary-setting, respectful disagreement, and help-seeking.
- Deepens understanding of what healthy relationships look and feel like, emphasising trust, autonomy, communication, and mutual respect.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Normalises asking for help when faced with controlling or unsafe behaviours, reinforcing the message that everyone deserves respect and safety.
- Helps students identify trusted adults, support services, and peer allies who can offer guidance, protection, or intervention when needed.
- Strengthens students’ understanding of their rights: the right to privacy, autonomy, emotional safety, and to be free from coercion and manipulation.
The Gaslight Game
The Gaslight Game is a reflective and empowering activity that helps students recognise the subtle, confusing, and often harmful signs of emotional manipulation. Through realistic scenario cards and group discussion, students unpack commonly used gaslighting phrases and tactics, such as denying someone’s reality, shifting blame, guilt-tripping, and shaming. By exploring how these behaviours affect confidence, emotional safety, and self-esteem, students build awareness of the impact of toxic communication and learn to trust their own feelings and experiences.
Students are then guided to rewrite harmful interactions using assertive language, clear boundaries, and help-seeking strategies, before optionally role-playing healthier versions of the scenarios. This practice builds confidence, emotional insight, and protective behaviours that help students respond safely if they encounter manipulation in real life. The Gaslight Game ultimately strengthens students’ understanding of respectful relationships by reinforcing self-trust, empathy, and the importance of seeking support when something doesn’t feel right.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students identify emotionally manipulative language and recognise how gaslighting distorts feelings, memories, and self-trust.
- Encourages students to interpret the emotional impact of being dismissed, blamed, or shamed in relationships.
- Builds empathy as students explore how emotional abuse affects confidence, mental health, and a person’s sense of reality.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to reflect on how gaslighting attempts to undermine identity and confidence, and how personal values can anchor self-belief.
- Encourages young people to identify strengths such as self-trust, assertiveness, and resilience when responding to manipulation.
- Helps students understand that healthy relationships support identity formation, whereas manipulative behaviours erode self-worth.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Teaches students to set and verbalise boundaries when faced with dismissive or manipulative comments.
- Promotes self-care through strategies such as seeking support, trusting intuition, and distancing from emotionally unsafe situations.
- Helps students evaluate coping responses, distinguishing helpful strategies (talking to a trusted adult) from harmful ones (self-blame, isolation).
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Builds students’ ability to analyse relationship dynamics, identify manipulative tactics, and recognise when behaviour crosses ethical lines.
- Encourages ethical decision-making as students consider respectful alternatives to harmful communication and rehearse safe responses.
- Supports problem-solving by guiding students to rewrite harmful scenarios using truth, assertiveness, and help-seeking strategies.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students understand the stress, confusion, and emotional exhaustion caused by being repeatedly dismissed or invalidated.
- Encourages habits that protect mental health, such as emotional check-ins, seeking clarity, and reaching out for support.
- Reinforces that healthy relationships reduce stress, while gaslighting significantly increases anxiety and undermines emotional well-being.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Encourages exploration of how gaslighting can be used to gain power and control, particularly within gendered relationships or societal power structures.
- Helps students understand that manipulation can intersect with identity factors like gender, culture, sexuality, and ability.
- Challenges harmful norms that normalise emotional control or excuse abusive tactics, promoting fairness, equality, and respect.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Clarifies the difference between respectful communication and manipulative behaviour that erodes trust and safety.
- Strengthens skills in assertiveness, boundary-setting, and recognising when a relationship dynamic becomes unsafe.
- Reinforces that healthy relationships involve honesty, validation, support, and mutual respect, not control, denial, or shaming.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Normalises reaching out for help when someone feels confused, undermined, or unsafe in a relationship.
- Helps students identify trusted adults, supportive peers, and professional services that can offer guidance and protection.
- Reinforces students’ rights to emotional safety, respect, and autonomy, empowering them to advocate for themselves and others experiencing manipulation.
Support System Shuffle
Support System Shuffle is a dynamic, movement-based activity that helps students recognise when someone may be experiencing an unsafe or unhealthy relationship situation. As they rotate through a series of Support Stations, each featuring a different tricky scenario, students learn to identify red flags, discuss what a caring friend might do, and explore early warning signs that someone may need support. Through these conversations, students build empathy, sharpen their awareness of real-life relationship challenges, and begin to understand the importance of seeking help when something doesn’t feel right.
At each station, students also brainstorm safe responses and match each scenario with an appropriate support option, gradually building a class-wide “Help-Seeking Wall” filled with strategies, services, and ideas contributed by their peers. This creates a visual network of support while giving students the chance to practise help-seeking language in a safe, collaborative setting. Support System Shuffle empowers students with confidence, clarity, and compassion, reinforcing that help is always available and that supporting others is a shared responsibility within a respectful community.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students recognise emotional warning signs, such as fear, confusion, isolation, or discomfort, that indicate someone may need help.
- Encourages students to interpret emotional cues in scenarios and consider how relationship stress impacts well-being.
- Builds empathy by prompting students to imagine what a struggling peer may be feeling and what support they might need.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to reflect on how their own values, such as kindness, loyalty, and fairness, guide how they support peers.
- Encourages students to draw on personal strengths like empathy, responsibility, and confidence when responding to challenging situations.
- Helps students understand that reaching out for help demonstrates strength, not weakness, and aligns with maintaining personal safety and well-being.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Teaches students to identify situations where personal or peer boundaries are being crossed and recognise when to seek support.
- Encourages healthy coping strategies such as talking to trusted adults, accessing services, or encouraging a friend to seek help.
- Reinforces self-care by helping students understand that supporting others does not mean taking on unsafe burdens alone.
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Guides students to analyse complex relationship dilemmas and determine whether a scenario shows concerning or unsafe behaviour.
- Encourages ethical decision-making by prompting students to choose safe, responsible, and respectful support strategies.
- Strengthens problem-solving skills as students discuss what a caring friend might do and compare multiple support options.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students recognise how relationship stress affects emotional and physical well-being and why timely support matters.
- Encourages habits that reduce stress, such as reaching out early, sharing concerns, and using formal support networks.
- Reinforces that accessing help is a healthy and proactive behaviour that protects both personal and peer well-being.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Encourages students to consider how relational struggles can be influenced by gender norms, stereotypes, or power imbalances.
- Helps students understand that experiences of relationship harm can differ based on identity factors including culture, gender, and ability.
- Challenges harmful assumptions that minimise relationship concerns, promoting fairness, respect, and accountability.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Builds understanding of what unsafe dynamics look like and how to recognise red flags in friendships and early relationships.
- Reinforces key skills such as supportive communication, active listening, and encouraging peers to seek help.
- Promotes a class culture where care, respect, and safety are prioritised over secrecy, pressure, or silence.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Normalising help-seeking by exposing students to a wide range of support options, from trusted adults to professional services.
- Helps students develop confidence in naming appropriate support strategies and encourages them to expand their personal help-seeking network.
- Reinforces students' rights to safety, respect, and support, empowering them to advocate for themselves and others experiencing difficulties.
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