On the 15th of July, the Government published its updated guidance for Relationships, Health and Sex Education (RHSE) lessons, laying out the scope of discussions that will take place in primary and secondary school classrooms throughout the UK from September 2026.
In the updated guidance, there is a specific provision for schools to ensure that pupils are given the opportunity to learn ‘That change and loss, including bereavement, can provoke a range of feelings, that grief is a natural response to bereavement, and that everyone grieves differently.’
Also highlighted in the guidance is ‘How families and relationships change over time, including through birth, death, separation and new relationships.’
As the UK’s first children and young people’s bereavement charity, Winston’s Wish is keenly interested in the updated guidance and is pleased to see the inclusion of death and grief in RHSE lesson plans.
Letizia Perna, Winston’s Wish’s Deputy CEO and Director of Services, comments:
It is encouraging to hear that topics like death and grief will be addressed in the classroom. Here at Winston’s Wish, we encourage open and honest conversation surrounding death, dying and bereavement and the impact that grief can have on young people.
The organisation keenly advocates for effective grief support in schools, providing specialist training to education professionals when there is a death in the school community and crafting PHSE lesson plans and discussion points to help both teachers and pupils to start honest and safe conversations about the realities of death and the emotions surrounding bereavement.
As a charity which has worked with bereaved young people for more than 30 years, it is important to Winston’s Wish and its service users that this subject is both acknowledged and addressed at a Government level and we welcome the recently published guidance.
However, it is also imperative that grief support in schools is underpinned by a robust infrastructure, ensuring that teachers and education professionals have both the confidence and easy access to high-quality resources as an integral part of their training.
Many teachers are on the front line of bereavement support and during their career may have any number of grieving children in their classroom.
Death is a sad fact of life and many children and young people face that reality much sooner than others or else will have to cope with it as they grow into adults. Bereaved young people deserve grief support throughout their education.
As encouraging as this recently published guidance is, we urge for more action. To truly support bereaved children, schools must go beyond simply including grief in the curriculum and take meaningful, practical steps to embed support into the fabric of school life.
Letizia Perna, Winston’s Wish’s Deputy CEO and Director of Services
Winston’s Wish continues to offer support and training to education professionals as well as to bereaved children and young people. The charity is keenly interested in the outworking of this recently published guidance and looks forward to working directly with schools and young people to improve grief support in the classroom in an upcoming initiative.
Further information, advice and resources for education providers: