“‘Queering childhood’ involves not just the queering of sex/gender and sexual binary opposition such as male (masculinity)/female(femininity) and heterosexual/homosexual, but also the generational binaries ‘adult/child’ and ‘sexual/asexual’”
—Prof. EJ Renold
Since 2017, Professor Emma (EJ) Renold has been a key figure in embedding radical queer pedagogy across Welsh education, having been given top roles in education reform and cheerlead by politicians, education professionals and child safeguarding charities alike.
Her influence goes well beyond a simple update to earlier approaches to sex education. Understanding this is key to understanding the profound and destabilising effect the education system may be having on Welsh children through their understanding of themselves and society.
Prior to her involvement with the Welsh Government’s Independent LGBTQ+ Expert Panel and leading the reform of Welsh mandatory Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) for 3-11-year-olds, Prof. Renold had a prolific academic career in the fields of queer theory, posthumanism, new materialism, and feminist theory as Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Education at Cardiff University.
With over ninety publications to her name, some of Renold’s most eye-catching titles include:
Phallic girls? Girls’ negotiations of phallogocentric power (2012)
Horse-girl assemblages (2014)
More than boy, girl, male, female: Exploring young people’s views on gender diversity (2018)
Coming out: Gender, (hetero)sexuality and the primary school (2020)
Queer cwtch: A feminist posthuman and new materialism praxis approach to researching gender and sexual diversity and equity in schools (2025)
Making with the Trouble: Un/Enfolding Posthuman Participants with Young People in Creative Post-Qualitative Research (2026)
Renold was first given responsibility for RSE reform by the then Cabinet Secretary for Education, Kirsty Williams, who appointed her as Chair of the Sex and Relationships Expert Panel in 2017 and gave her the remit of reviewing the existing curriculum and making recommendations for a new one.
The panel published its final report, The Future of the Sex and Relationships Education Curriculum in Wales (alongside another report), in 2017, and by 2018 Williams had accepted the panel’s recommendations, including to:
make RSE a statutory part of the Curriculum for Wales;
change the name from “Sex and Relationships Education” to “Relationships and Sexuality Education”;
broaden the curriculum beyond biological sex education to include relationships, consent, equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion.
The transformation went further in 2020, when Williams confirmed that parents would no longer have a right to withdraw their children from RSE under the new curriculum. The subsequent Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021 made RSE a mandatory element of the Curriculum for Wales, with the new arrangements being phased in from September 2022.
The curriculum is based on Renold’s—and her academic colleague Esther McGeeney’s—ideas that education should actively unsettle what schools treat as normal or natural, particularly binary ideas about sex and gender, heterosexuality, traditional family structures, and fixed identities.
Renold and McGeeney understand gender and sexuality not simply as stable and located within individuals, e.g. as sex and sexual orientation, but as fluid and shaped through relationships, language, culture, bodies, objects and wider power structures. Education should therefore expose and challenge “heteronormative” assumptions, broaden recognition of “diverse identities” (such as trans and non-binary) and relationships, and enable pupils to question restrictive social expectations.
The RSE Code (2022) developed through Renold’s work is broken down into three phases covering ages 3-11 years, seeing the potential for preschool sexuality and relationships curricula as “enormous and necessary”.
Engaging with children at such a young age is crucial for Renold because “the [primary] school could be a key site of prevention, protection and change” by “creating safe and empowering spaces to explore and respond to what children are already learning, thinking, questioning and feeling”.
While Renold is not explicitly saying that we should be talking to three-year-olds about sex, by structuring the curriculum in this way, it creates a conveyor belt along which children travel throughout their academic career, with controversial ideas about sex and gender identity subtly inserted and built upon. Instead of simply introducing biological facts and the basics of what a healthy relationship might look like, queer ideology is embedded by authority figures during some of the most formative years of a child’s life.
Supporting her work on the RSE Curriculum and Code of Practice, Renold produced two key resources: AGENDA and Crush
Renold is explicit about the role of political activism as a core component of education, which conflicts with the Education Act’s requirement to be non-partisan. In a video introducing her AGENDA toolkit (a resource funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and endorsed by Cardiff University, The NSPCC, Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Welsh Women’s Aid, Welsh Government, and the National Education Union), Renold explains that:
“The aim was to address difficult issues like violence against girls and women, transphobia and homophobia, through gender equality, social justice and children’s rights….” with AGENDA offering “…an affirmative, inclusive and rights-based approach to engage with a range of issues, from feminism to slut-shaming.”
Renold’s Crush: Transforming Relationships and Sexuality Education resource is a proudly radical departure from what might previously been considered appropriate sex education for primary and secondary school children. The introduction to the resource asks “Why Crush?” and answers the question with:
“Crush as FEELING: attuning to the diversity, unpredictability and intensity of emotions that ebb and flow throughout all RSE learning and experience.
Crush as FORCE: developing an affirmative praxis for addressing injustice, inequity and violence, and working with the forces that make change and empowerment possible.
Crush as FOLD: recognising the messiness of experience and the potential of RSE, as a trans-disciplinary field, to explore how categories and concepts (e.g. identity, consent, body image) entangle and fold into one another.”
The resource emphasises the importance of gender identity with no exploration of gender-critical or sex-realist views. It claims that previous iterations of sex education were “too straight” and that “RSE will be realised in a way that is inclusive in accordance with the principles of equality….this of course includes gender equity and LGBTQ+ inclusivity”.
The workshops informing Crush show how much of the development of Welsh RSE is ‘child-led’. Feedback from students involved suggests just how selective Renold has been, presenting quotes which support what is clearly her pre-determined queered approach:
According to Crush, children want:
“teaching about pleasure and oral sex, specifically female masturbation”,
“being sex positive!”
“queer sex ed – not just existence but how sex works for different relationships and people.”
In a primary-school case study, one teacher says: “I focused on relationships, gender identity and gender expression”; the next page describes work with Year 6 children, including discussion in which pupils used the term “transgender”.
“Developmentally appropriate pedagogy is being responsive and flexible to the issues that may arise when curriculum content creates an interactive platform that welcomes children’s own curiosity and knowledge”
— Renold and McGeeney (2017)
While developmental psychology recognises that self-touch, curiosity about bodies and interest in differences can be normal in early childhood, this does not mean that children possess adult-like sexual intentions, understanding or capacity. Safeguarding approaches distinguish ordinary exploration from concerning behaviour by considering cognitive ability, age differences, coercion, persistence, distress and harm.
If children are seen as “sexual beings from birth”, Renold’s approach may sexualise ordinary behaviour or interpret inappropriate behaviour as legitimate ‘sexual expression’. The term “developmentally appropriate” RSE therefore becomes a moot term, by potentially making all sexualised behaviour appropriate, regardless of age.
Nowhere throughout the RSE Code or associated guidance is ‘developmentally appropriate’ defined. And, when considered alongside Renold’s body of work and the RSE Code’s assertion that “RSE must be developmentally appropriate for each learner, meaning that learners’ needs of similar ages may differ”, it places responsibility for the content and pace of lessons back into the hands of the child, and may create a race to the bottom.
If, for example, a twelve-year-old boy reported having sex with another twelve-year-old girl at his school, under Renold’s ‘developmentally appropriate’ approach, one might argue that, as that child is a sexual being, is not distressed, and is expressing an interest in learning more, it would be developmentally appropriate to explore this and teach him about it, rather than to report it as a safeguarding issue.
Further highlighting this concern, in the development workshops used to inform supporting resources, Renold undertook an activity with students introducing “Crush cards”, aimed at “Crushing age-appropriateness” and bringing children’s experiences of “relationships, gender and sexualities to the forefront”. The idea is “to challenge and overturn teachers’ assumptions about children’s lives and experiences.” Using the feedback from this activity, teachers were asked to consider “How do notions of childhood innocence shape notions of age or developmental appropriateness?’ helping them to conclude that developmentally appropriate RSE “Is fluid” and “Is not age-specific”. The potential safeguarding issues with such an approach should be clear to any parent or adult working in a school.
While consent and healthy relationships also form a core component of the curriculum, Renold’s project of queering education undermines the ability of adults to define healthy relationships for children, and largely ignores the potential for a snowballing effect.
Children who are exposed to increasingly graphic sexual content and controversial ideas about gender identity online might be encouraged to discuss these with teachers. Teachers in turn are increasingly encouraged to celebrate all expressions of sexuality and gender identity, leading to more exploration and celebration of sexuality and gender identity and the normalisation of highly controversial ideas and potentially risky, age-inappropriate behaviours.
As the range of experiences, behaviours and concepts deemed child-appropriate expands under the seemingly limitless LGBTQ+ umbrella, the limits of a child’s understanding becomes less clear than it was. Therefore, the concept of consent is further blurred, and child safeguarding is made increasingly difficult for hard-pressed teachers.
Over the past year, Renold has remained active in relationships and sexuality education, gender research and youth participation around the world, leading sexuality education initiatives in Chile and Australia and using the Welsh experience as a model for RSE development and practice. Her recent academic work has also focused on masculinity and on queer, posthuman and arts-based approaches to education and policy.
Renold no longer works at Cardiff University—she is now Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University—but chaired a major RSE conference in Cardiff in March 2026. It is unclear what, if any, role she holds as a Welsh government advisor. This is partly because, while the previous Independent LGBTQ+ Expert Panel published its membership, the membership of the existing LGBTQ+ Action Plan Advisory Group, which replaced it in 2024, has not been published.
Whatever Renold’s official and unofficial influence on Welsh education is currently, her previous involvement was profound and is legally embedded throughout the whole of Wales’ education system.
Her intention to queer Welsh education has been realised and its impact on Welsh children’s attitudes towards topics of sexuality, gender identity, and progressive political activism continues to play out, with many parents and teachers challenging the content of Welsh RSE.
There is no sign that the new Plaid Cymru-led administration wishes to review the curriculum that Renold has been so central to, and some signs that things could get more radical yet.
Ben Sears is a registered counsellor, former teacher and policy officer based in South Wales, UK.
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References
AGENDA Online (n.d.). AGENDA: Supporting Children and Young People in Making Positive Relationships Matter.
Education Act 1996, sections 406–407: political indoctrination and the balanced treatment of political issues.
Policy Insight Wales (2026). Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) Conference, Cardiff, 17 March 2026.
Renold, E. (2005). Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities: Exploring Children’s Gender and Sexual Relations in the Primary School. Routledge.
Renold, E. (2016). AGENDA: A Young People’s Guide to Making Positive Relationships Matter. Cardiff.
Renold, E. and McGeeney, E. (2017). Informing the Future Sex and Relationships Education Curriculum in Wales. Cardiff University. ISBN 978-1-908469-12-0.
Renold, E., McGeeney, E. and Ashton, M.R. (2020). CRUSH: Transforming Relationships and Sexuality Education. Cardiff: Cardiff University. ISBN 978-1-908469-23-6.
Renold, E.J. and Timperley, V. (2023). ‘Once upon a crush story: transforming relationships and sexuality education with a post-qualitative art-ful praxis’, Sex Education, 23(3), pp. 304–314.
Safe Schools Alliance UK (2022). A Review of the Relationships and Sexuality Education Curriculum in Wales.
Welsh Government (2017). The Future of the Sex and Relationships Education Curriculum in Wales: Report of the Sex and Relationships Education Expert Panel.
Welsh Government (2021). Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021.
Welsh Government (2021). Recommendations of the Independent LGBTQ+ Expert Panel.
Welsh Government (2022). Curriculum for Wales: Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) Code and Statutory Guidance.
Welsh Government (2023). LGBTQ+ Action Plan for Wales.
Welsh Government (2024). LGBTQ+ Action Plan Advisory Group: Terms of Reference.
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