Sherborne Developmental Movement

"Through my experience of teaching and observing human movement, and of learning through trial and error, I have come to the conclusion that all children have two basic needs; they need to feel at home in their own bodies and so to gain mastery, and they need to be able to form relationships”       

Veronica Sherborne, 1990    

                                                                                                              
 To feel at ‘home in one’s own body’ and to be ‘able to form relationships’ must surely be two outcomes vital in any successful comprehensive Sex and Relationships Education curriculum. 

 As a theatre practitioner and teacher it has been my privilege to spend a great deal of time running workshops and classes in primary schools with a core focus on developmental movement. I was lucky enough to come across the work of Veronica Sherborne in the early 90s and around the same time was excited by the work of Augusto Boaland Sue Jennings, all of whom were profoundly concerned with the possibilities of personal and social transformation through direct engagement with movement and theatre.

During these movement sessions it is always fascinating to observe the variability in the quality of relationships that children are able to demonstrate.  Some children are clearly initially uncomfortable with any form of physical contact with their classmates or partners.  Others are fine with contact as long as it is fairly robust or ‘rough’ – they might struggle with creating shapes which involve trust or balance or slow motion.  In some individuals and groups of children a rich working vocabulary of qualities of touch, movement and shape are evident.

 Whatever their starting point, engaging with developmental movement almost invariably brings an increased sense of well-being and calm among participants and facilitators. They are working together and building a visceral, an ‘embodied’, sense of what a positive relationship feels like.

What has all this got to do with SRE in the primary school?  Well, there is so much energy invested in the debate surrounding the nature and content of the ‘sex’ part of curriculum that experts seem to have overlooked the fundamental idea that children experience and learn about relationships through their bodies, through touch and movement, indeed through all their senses.

Sexual relationships are, by definition, a highly specific way two people relate to each other through their bodies.  But the quality of sexual relationships and what people come to expect in terms of trust, respectfulness, tenderness, responsiveness etc from their partners may have already been learned in early childhood. I would argue that the appreciation and understandings of these qualities may well have been determined by developmentally much earlier forms of non-sexual but none-the-less physical experiences.

I will conveniently avoid mapping out a whole primary SRE curriculum.  I will tentatively suggest, however,  that without creating  a context within which to reference the qualities of sexual relationships and intimacy against the very concrete experiences of developmentally appropriate movement experiences, SRE is a rather too abstract subject,  ‘disconnected’ from any meaningful forms of physical relationship.

Many primary aged children are already experiencing the onset of puberty, trying to cope with the bewildering changes in their bodies, their feelings and understandings.  This fact alone argues a strong case for age appropriate SRE in the primary curriculum.  Given that it is virtually impossible to protect young people against exposure to social and media-led pressures towards sexualisation, it would seem that the kinds of SRE resources they encounter hardly represent a further erosion of childhood innocence.  I would suggest  young people who are already ‘at home in their own bodies’  and are ‘able to form relationships’  might enjoy some degree of immunity, be more discerning, and better able to judge for themselves whether the  relationships they experience are ‘wholesome’. 

If, as adults and educators, we want our young people to grow up to have intimate relationships involving such qualities as trust, respectfulness and responsiveness, then surely it behoves us to create those specific kinds of learning experiences which enable them to recognise and be familiar with these qualities from an early age.  

David Evans  - Chief Executive SRE Project.