God’s Loving Plan provides guidance to Primary school teachers on how children can be helped to develop healthy and respectful attitudes to their bodies and to relationships with families and friends.  This important resource connects children’s learning about who they are and how they relate to others, to their learning about God and their relationship in faith.   It helps children to understand how love can be at the heart of their lives and what the Church’s vision is of Marriage as the ultimate expression of love between man and woman. Catholic schools in Scotland are enabled by the Scottish Government and required by the Church to follow Church guidance, provided via the Scottish Catholic Education Service, to give witness to the Catholic faith and to uphold the traditions of Catholic Education.

Within this tradition, Catholic schools deliver education about sexual health and relationships in a holistic way which is not confined to learning only about how our bodies develop biologically, or about how our emotions can affect our behaviour. Across the range of experiences which Catholic schools provide, teachers help children and young people to learn about themselves as God’s children, about the beauty and dignity of their bodies, their gender and their sexuality which God has gifted to them, about the care which they should take to protect their health, about personal relationships which are respectful, responsible and loving towards others, about understanding moral truth and about their capacity for creating new life as parents. They also learn about why the Catholic Church teaches that marriage is the ideal context for sexual intimacy and self-giving between a man and a woman.