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
Text Check
Text Check is a practical, conversation-driven activity that helps students recognise when digital communication crosses a line. By analysing real-life text message scenarios, students learn to spot red flags such as pressure, disrespect, secrecy, and emotional manipulation. This builds digital awareness, encourages students to reflect on how messages can make someone feel, and reinforces that consent and boundaries matter just as much online as they do face-to-face. Through collaborative reflection, students begin to understand the difference between healthy digital communication and behaviour that feels unsafe or uncomfortable.
Students then rewrite these problematic messages into respectful, clear, and boundary-aware alternatives, building confidence in their ability to communicate kindly in digital spaces. Whether through class discussions or optional health-promotion posters, students practise modelling positive digital behaviour and consider how tone, timing, and intention shape relationships online. Text Check strengthens empathy, empowers assertiveness, and promotes a culture of safe, respectful communication, helping students navigate the digital world with confidence and care.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students recognise emotional pressure, disrespect, or discomfort in digital messages and understand how these interactions affect feelings.
- Encourages students to interpret tone, intention, and impact in digital spaces, where meaning is often unclear and easily misread.
- Builds empathy by prompting students to consider how a message might make someone feel and how respectful communication strengthens relationships.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to reflect on how personal values, such as honesty, respect, and kindness, should guide their digital communication.
- Encourages students to use strengths like clarity, compassion, and self-awareness when rewriting text messages.
- Helps students develop integrity online by aligning their digital communication with who they are and who they aspire to be.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Teaches students to set healthy boundaries around digital communication, including response expectations, unwanted messaging, and tone.
- Encourages students to practise self-care when digital pressure arises, such as pausing, seeking support, or choosing not to respond immediately.
- Reinforces that it is healthy to request space, to say no, and to communicate preferences about online interactions.
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Strengthens students’ ability to analyse the intent and impact of digital messages and identify when consent or respect is missing.
- Encourages ethical digital decision-making as students evaluate how their rewritten messages promote respect, clarity, and safety.
- Promotes problem-solving through identifying issues in texts and proposing respectful alternatives that align with healthy communication norms.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students recognise how digital pressure, constant messaging, jealousy, or monitoring can increase stress and affect mental well-being.
- Reinforces digital habits that reduce stress, such as setting notifications boundaries, communicating availability, and not feeling obligated to reply instantly.
- Encourages students to choose communication methods that foster well-being, such as calling, clarifying tone, or taking breaks from messaging.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Explores how digital communication expectations may be influenced by gender norms, stereotypes, or power dynamics.
- Helps students understand that coercive digital messages (e.g., “send me a pic”) can reflect broader issues of entitlement, pressure, or control.
- Challenges harmful beliefs about who “should” reply, how quickly, and what kinds of messages are acceptable, promoting fairness and equality.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Teaches students what respectful digital communication looks and feels like, reinforcing trust, clarity, and mutual consent.
- Builds skills in identifying red flags such as pressure, guilt-tripping, monitoring behaviour, or invasion of privacy online.
- Encourages students to practise safe responses that prioritise respect, boundaries, and emotional safety for themselves and others.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Normalises seeking help when digital interactions feel unsafe, pressured, or confusing, reinforcing students’ right to support.
- Helps students identify who they can go to, teachers, well-being staff, family, peers, or helplines, when an online boundary is crossed.
- Reinforces students’ rights to digital privacy, bodily autonomy, and respectful communication, empowering them to advocate for themselves and others.
Healthy or Harmful?
Healthy or Harmful? is an engaging activity that helps students sort through the complex behaviours that show up in friendships and relationships. By examining a wide range of scenarios, students learn to distinguish clearly between healthy behaviours, early warning signs, and harmful patterns that may threaten emotional or physical safety. The activity encourages rich discussion about why some behaviours feel confusing or fall into grey areas, strengthening students’ critical thinking and emotional awareness. Through these conversations, students deepen their understanding of what respectful, supportive relationships look and feel like.
Whether students are sorting cards in small groups or moving between Healthy, Warning, and Harmful zones around the room, the experience builds their confidence in identifying red flags and trusting their instincts when something feels “off.” By reflecting on tricky examples and listening to multiple perspectives, students refine their ability to articulate their boundaries and recognise when help or support is needed. Healthy or Harmful? empowers students to protect their well-being, support their peers, and develop a clear picture of the traits that make relationships safe, respectful, and strong.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students recognise how different relationship behaviours, supportive, confusing, or harmful, impact emotions and well-being.
- Encourages students to tune into early emotional signals such as discomfort, uncertainty, or safety when observing or experiencing behaviours.
- Builds empathy by prompting students to consider how harmful or disrespectful behaviours may affect someone’s sense of security and confidence.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to reflect on how their values, like honesty, kindness, and equality, inform what they expect and accept in relationships.
- Encourages recognition of personal strengths such as intuition, assertiveness, and fairness when evaluating relationship dynamics.
- Helps students develop a clearer sense of identity by understanding what healthy relationships look like and how they contribute to well-being.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Teaches students to identify warning signs early and use boundaries to protect their emotional and physical safety.
- Reinforces positive coping strategies, such as talking to trusted adults, distancing themselves from harmful situations, or expressing concerns assertively.
- Encourages students to honour their own needs and practise self-care when relationship behaviours feel confusing or “off.”
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Strengthens analytical skills as students assess behaviours, reflect on context, and recognise that some actions fall into “grey areas.”
- Encourages ethical decision-making through discussions about impact, intention, consent, and fairness.
- Promotes problem-solving by having students sort behaviours, justify their choices, and consider how context or frequency might shift meaning.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students identify how harmful or controlling behaviours contribute to stress, anxiety, or emotional fatigue.
- Encourages students to practise stress-reducing relationship habits such as honest conversations, boundary-setting, and checking in with themselves.
- Reinforces that healthy relationships support well-being by promoting trust, balance, safety, and positive communication.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Guides students to examine how gender stereotypes or power dynamics can influence whether behaviours become warning signs or harmful patterns.
- Encourages reflection on how identity factors (gender, culture, ability, sexuality) may shape experiences of relationship harm or safety.
- Challenges normalised behaviours that might excuse jealousy, control, or unequal treatment, promoting fairness and respect.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Builds understanding of the traits that underpin respectful relationships, such as trust, honesty, equality, boundaries, and communication.
- Teaches students to recognise red flags, early signs of unhealthy behaviour, and patterns that may escalate over time.
- Encourages respectful dialogue and value-driven decision-making, helping students clarify what they want in healthy relationships.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Reinforces that students have the right to safe, respectful relationships and the ability to access help if something feels harmful.
- Encourages students to identify trusted people and services they can turn to when concerned about their own or a friend’s situation.
- Normalises seeking support early and empowers students to advocate for themselves or others experiencing harmful behaviours.
52 Shades of Consent Snap
52 Shades of Consent Snap transforms an ordinary deck of cards into a powerful learning tool, helping students explore the meaning of consent across physical, digital, emotional, and relational contexts. Each suit represents a different type of boundary, and every matched pair sparks a guided scenario discussion that deepens students’ understanding of where consent is present, or missing. By unpacking real-life examples, students practise recognising healthy communication, identifying unsafe or unclear situations, and reflecting on how consent shapes respectful relationships.
Through playful rounds of Snap followed by meaningful conversation, students learn to communicate their boundaries clearly, respond thoughtfully when something feels wrong, and recognise when support is needed. The structure of the game encourages honest reflection while keeping the atmosphere open and engaging. In every discussion, students build confidence in their ability to navigate challenging moments with respect, self-awareness, and care for others, skills that strengthen both their personal relationships and their overall sense of safety.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students recognise the feelings that arise when consent is present or absent, including discomfort, pressure, uncertainty, or safety.
- Encourages students to tune into emotional cues, both their own and others, when boundaries are crossed or respected.
- Builds empathy by prompting students to consider how consent impacts emotional well-being in physical, digital, and relational contexts.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to reflect on how their values (respect, autonomy, honesty, kindness) shape how they give, receive, and communicate consent.
- Encourages students to draw on their strengths, such as assertiveness, clarity, and self-awareness, when discussing or setting boundaries.
- Helps students understand that honouring their boundaries is central to self-worth and forming healthy relationships that support identity development.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Teaches students to recognise when their boundaries feel crossed and practise setting them respectfully and confidently.
- Encourages healthy coping strategies, such as pausing, saying no, walking away, or seeking help when situations feel uncomfortable.
- Reinforces self-care by helping students differentiate between situations that feel respectful and those that require assertive action or support.
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Strengthens students’ ability to analyse consent-related scenarios across physical, digital, emotional, and power-based interactions.
- Encourages ethical decision-making by prompting students to consider fairness, autonomy, and respect in each scenario.
- Builds problem-solving skills as students identify missing consent, develop clearer communication options, and explore safe, respectful alternatives.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students understand how unclear boundaries, pressure, or coercive behaviour can increase stress and emotional tension.
- Encourages habits that reduce relationship stress, such as seeking clarification, practising honest communication, and prioritising comfort.
- Reinforces that healthy relationships reduce stress by ensuring interactions are consensual, respectful, and mutually understood.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Encourages students to explore how gender norms and power dynamics can influence whether consent is freely given or pressured.
- Highlights how identity factors (gender, sexuality, culture, ability) may affect a person’s comfort or confidence in expressing boundaries.
- Challenges harmful assumptions or stereotypes that undermine consent, promoting fairness, equality, and autonomy.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Teaches students that consent is a central feature of all healthy relationships, physical, emotional, digital, and social.
- Reinforces key relationship traits such as clear communication, mutual respect, personal autonomy, and shared decision-making.
- Helps students identify red flags where consent is not given freely, is pressured, or is ignored, and practise safer responses.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Normalises seeking help when consent is violated or when students feel unsure, unsafe, or pressured.
- Helps students identify trusted adults, peers, and professional services they could contact for guidance or support.
- Reinforces students’ rights to bodily autonomy, digital privacy, emotional safety, and respectful communication, empowering them to advocate for themselves and others.
Deal or No Deal – Relationship Edition
Deal or No Deal – Relationship Edition is a movement-based decision-making game that helps students explore peer pressure, personal boundaries, and values in a safe and engaging way. Each scenario challenges students to decide whether a behaviour is something they would “accept” or “reject,” prompting them to think critically about influence, safety, and respect. By physically choosing a side of the room, students gain a clearer understanding of their own boundaries while developing awareness of the pressures that can shape decisions in friendships and social groups.
Through open discussion and assertive communication practice, students learn how to stand firm in their choices, explain their reasoning, and recognise when a situation doesn’t feel right. The activity encourages independence, confidence, and reflection, especially when students make bold choices that differ from their peers. With every scenario, they build real-world skills in saying “no” respectfully, supporting friends who feel pressured, and navigating social situations with integrity and self-awareness.
Respectful Relationships
Emotional Literacy & Awareness
- Helps students recognise the emotional experience of peer pressure, including discomfort, hesitation, fear of judgment, or uncertainty.
- Encourages students to reflect on their internal reactions, such as gut instincts or values, when deciding whether a behaviour feels safe or unsafe.
- Builds empathy by exploring how peer pressure affects confidence, decision-making, and emotional well-being for themselves and others.
Identity, Strengths & Personal Values
- Supports students to reflect on their personal values and how these shape the choices they make in social and relational situations.
- Encourages students to draw upon strengths such as courage, integrity, and self-awareness when standing firm in their decisions.
- Helps students develop a clearer sense of identity by practising decisions that align with who they are and what they believe in.
Positive Coping, Boundaries & Self-Care
- Teaches students to recognise when a boundary is being crossed and practise expressing that boundary respectfully and confidently.
- Encourages healthy coping strategies when facing pressure, such as using assertive language, seeking support, or walking away.
- Reinforces self-care by showing students how protecting their values and safety contributes to long-term well-being.
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Ethical Decision-Making
- Strengthens analysis as students evaluate scenarios, identify the presence of pressure, and determine whether the behaviour is acceptable.
- Encourages ethical decision-making by prompting students to consider fairness, respect, and consequences before making a choice.
- Builds problem-solving skills through discussions about alternate choices, safer responses, and how to maintain relationships while disagreeing.
Stress Management & Healthy Habits
- Helps students identify stress responses that arise in pressured situations and understand how peer influence can increase anxiety.
- Encourages habits that reduce stress, such as pausing, checking in with personal values, and practising assertive refusal.
- Reinforces that managing stress involves choosing safe environments, healthy friendships, and behaviours that align with personal boundaries.
Gender, Power & Identity
- Prompts students to explore how gender expectations or social dynamics can heighten or shape peer pressure in relationships.
- Helps students understand that certain pressures (e.g., risk-taking, dominance, conformity) may be reinforced by harmful norms.
- Challenges stereotypes that equate going along with the group to belonging, instead promoting fairness, equality, and autonomy.
Healthy, Respectful & Safe Relationships
- Builds understanding of how healthy peer interactions support autonomy, respect, and individual choice.
- Teaches students to recognise red flags in friendships or early relationships where pressure, coercion, or manipulation is used.
- Reinforces the importance of assertiveness, mutual respect, and communication as foundations for safe and positive connections.
Help-Seeking, Support Networks & Rights
- Normalises seeking support from trusted adults or peers when pressure becomes unsafe, uncomfortable, or confusing.
- Helps students identify where they can go for help, well-being staff, teachers, parents, helplines, or friends who respect boundaries.
- Reinforces students’ rights to make their own decisions without pressure, and to feel safe and respected in all social interactions.
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