Building ESTEEM
Enabling young people to form healthy relationships
Oasis helps deliver sex and relationship workshops as part of our ESTEEM programme, to over 20,000 young people every year in the UK.
Rather than dictating what a young person should say or do, the workshops are designed to develop the confidence of young people and encourage them to form healthy and positive relationships.
Philippa was 18 when she started threesixty, the Oasis UK GAP year. Here, she talks about her experience on the course and of delivering sex and relationship training to 13-year-old school children...
"To be honest, when I started working in the Oasis youth centres during my threesixty year I was terrified. Walking into a room full of rowdy teenagers not much younger than you is a frightening thing! I thought the ESTEEM training would be about facts and figures, but the course is based around practical learning, so we did lots of role plays and discussions of how things would work out in the classroom.
ESTEEM is all about what relationships are, from friendships, to family relationships, to sexual
relationships. The point of the course is to give young people a deeper grounding in the importance of relationships, and putting sex into the right context rather than teaching on it in isolation.
The young people were in Year 8; 12-13 years old. Initially I thought they would be embarrassed
to talk about sex, but that wasn't the case. However, when we got into the lesson properly, and started talking about where sex should fit into a relationship alongside other things like trust, love and respect, they became much more hesitant.
It began to bring out a lot of personal concerns that they had - parents who had left home after sleeping with other people, or fathers who showed no respect to the female members of the family. They began to ask some very deep questions about their own situations.
I think it's really important that Christians are involved with sex and relationship training. The idea that we're created by God and that relationships and sex have a significant impact on our lives, can make a huge difference to how a young person lives their life.
We want to encourage young people to think about their relationships; to not rush into sex, or think it's the only way of showing care to someone. We want to enable them to have stable and healthy relationships in their own lives."
Philippa is now in her first year of a theology degree.