Consent workshops for teens going to Boardmasters

The workshop aims to educate students about consent

A festival based in Cornwall has part-funded workshops for teenagers about relationships and consent issues.

The Boardmasters Festival, held near Newquay, has partnered with the Schools Consent Project ahead of its event in August to host the workshops to Year 12 students in Cornwall.

It said the talks would "tackle tricky topics" to "equip young people with the information they need" before arriving at the festival.

Led by trained legal professionals, the festival said its aim was to help change social behaviour "by tackling these issues at the root".

Boardmasters takes place in Newquay in August and can have up to 50,000 people attending

Georgina Stein-Hemmings, from the Schools Consents Project, said the work aimed to clarify what consent was.

She said: "A lot of PSHE [personal, social, health and economic] lessons are focused on emotions, feelings, which is incredibly valid.

"But a lot of students aren't confronted with the reality of what the law might actually do to them should something happen or should there be an issue."

Sixth-former Anna said it was "really useful to see the law side of this because we've had PSHE lessons on consent before, but we've never really understood the law behind it".

'Lot of laws'

BTEC student Ollie said the workshop was "a lot more eye-opening than I was expecting it to be".

Sixth-former Emily said it was "really interesting because there's a lot of laws that I didn't know about".

Boardmasters director Gaby Williams said festival staff hoped the conversations had during the presentations empowered the students.

She said: "Boardmasters does have a young festival audience that come to the festival, so it was important for us to empower them to have the conversations before they get to us and give them an education."