Transgressive quest/ions? Navigating religion, institutional expectations, and sexuality education in modern Britain

All secondary schools in England have been required to teach Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) since 2019, which has raised particular challenges for – and confrontations with – religious minorities. This paper draws on ethnographic research to centre analysis on the fraught moral binds felt by Jewish parents and educators as they struggle to decide when and how to equip children with knowledge while needing to conform to institutional positions on what protection means. Bodily knowledge is redacted across religious/state models of education, which propagates the maintenance of social boundaries and definitions of sexual transgression, but do not stop the quests and questions that adolescents harbour during puberty and development. The paper draws attention to the use of bracketed words in feminist scholarship to convey how terms are projected as having universal meanings or connotations, which are, in reality, socially situated or at least used in socially sanctioned ways.