My campaign has always been about changing the national curriculum, by trying to get peer on peer teaching into sex and relationship education, as a part of the PSHE (personal, social, health and economics education) syllabus.
Recently I have been fortunate enough to be in contact with Dr John Lloyd, who is a Policy Advisor for the PSHE Association.
The government explanation of the benefits of PSHE reads: "children can benefit enormously from PSHE education which helps them make safe and informed choices; it also can play a role in helping to tackle public health issues such as substance misuse and supporting young people with the financial decisions they must make."
Meeting him now was brilliant timing as recently the government have called for a review of PSHE, basically it just means they want to change it and make it better.
When I met up with Dr John Lloyd he was very welcoming of my idea. He gave me a very clear idea of what I could do to contribute to the review of PSHE, to have it my way so to speak. He said he was more than welcome to accept some research from me, proving my research is of a high enough standard to be used officially.
To ensure my research is of an amazing quality, I am getting help from Shahbaz and Kayleigh from the RESPECT team (where I work as a peer educator). They will be helping me create my evaluation forms to make sure they cover the importance of what we do and how we do it.
Also we will be getting help from Jocelyn Bailey, who works for Policy Connect. She will be reviewing the evaluation forms to make sure they include all the information that is useful to the government.
I am in the process of planning how to gather the research. We know for certain we will be running classes and getting students to evaluate how much they learnt and how comfortable they felt being taught in the peer to peer way, with one evaluation before the lesson and one after.
We aim to spread our research over the nation, visiting students in year 9 and 10, so roughly young people aged 14 to 15.
We are aiming to teach and receive evaluation from around 1,000 young people, which we have been informed is a good number to prove our points.
If the research is successful then it will be included in the PSHE review and submitted to the Government, who might just listen to it and in turn change the curriculum to include peer to peer as part of Sex and Relationship Education.
If that happened, my dream would have totally come true... Amaze!!!
And how can you help? Well, it never hurts to have more supporters, so please, if you appreciate what I'm doing, sign up to my campaign (or come and say 'hello' on Facebook or Twitter).
