Negotiating relationships and sexuality education in Further Education: a feminist post-structuralist analysis of young people’s and lecturers’ perspectives

This article explores how young people and Further Education (FE) lecturers in Wales construct, negotiate, and resist Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) within a devolved and uneven policy landscape. Drawing on feminist post-structuralist theory and Foucauldian discourse analysis, the study analyses interview and visual-elicitation data from 19 FE learners and 8 FE lecturers across South-East Wales. The analysis identifies three intersecting discursive constructions: risk and regulation, vulnerability and silence, and participation and negotiated voice. Across these constructions, RSE emerged as shaped by institutional, moral, and affective logics that governed what could be said, recognised, or addressed within FE contexts. Young people described previous experiences of risk-focused and often irrelevant RSE, while calling for more dialogic and relational approaches that reflected their digital and everyday realities. Lecturers described tensions between pastoral care, institutional accountability, workload pressures, and limited training or policy direction. The findings highlight FE as a distinctive but overlooked site within Welsh RSE reform, where relational education is constrained by non-statutory provision and wider cultures of performativity. The article contributes to debates on post-16 RSE by positioning sexuality education as a relational and institutional practice shaped by power, care, and participation.