Personal Social and Health Education
Intent
Our PSHE curriculum is designed to ensure that all pupils leave St Gabriel’s CofE Academy with the skills, knowledge and understanding to flourish in all aspects of their life. The curriculum is designed to positively shape our children into happy, safe and fulfilled people who will make a positive contribution to Modern Britain both within their local community and the wider world. In addition, learning in PSHE aims to support the principles of Safeguarding, Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural (SMSC) development and understanding fundamental British Values. Our curriculum is designed to meet the needs of our children in their current context and to also prepare them to flourish in other contexts as they change and develop throughout their lives. Our PSHE curriculum also incorporates an age-appropriate understanding of RSE, as set out in the statutory guidance, enabling all children to be safe and to understand and develop healthy relationships both now and in their future lives.
Implementation
PSHE is taught discreetly across a series of weekly lessons. The school has selected the scheme of learning produced by Jigsaw PSHE which ensures the school has a comprehensive, whole-school approach to teaching PSHE as well as supporting children’s physical and mental wellbeing.
Our curriculum is a spiral curriculum with progression built in year on year. Each half-term, there is a focus on a different aspect of the PSHE curriculum. These units are: ‘Being Me in My World’, ‘Celebrating Difference’, ‘Dreams and Goals’, ‘Healthy Me’, ‘Relationships’, and ‘Changing Me’. Each unit focuses on a key aspect of the PSHE curriculum:
- Being Me in My World: supports children with their transition into new classes and helps them to manage change and understand the positive impact new opportunities and experiences can have.
- Celebrating Difference: centres on the importance of promoting respect and appreciation of people’s differences including talents, gender, race, faith etc.
- Dreams and Goals: children explore their ambitions and goals and learn how this can be best achieved.
- Healthy Me: children learn about keeping themselves physically and mentally healthy.
- Relationships: learning how to build positive relationships with friends, family, adults in school and those in wider society.
- Changing Me: lessons focus on how humans change over time including physically, mentally and emotionally. Children also learn about how their interests change over time.
Lessons have a clear structure which guides the learning and understanding of children. Children learn through a variety of engaging activities including through discussing given scenario; creating information posters; role-playing etc. Content in lessons is depersonalised to enable children to fully participate safely. This is done through the use of fictional characters, imagined situations and puppets. Agreed rules are also shared regularly with children to maintain a depersonalised experience to learning.
Impact
Assessment for learning strategies are employed to enable teachers to identify the strength of understanding of the children. Teachers will use this information to make adaptations to their planning to meet the needs of the children. Teachers may also change the focus of learning during a lesson to ensure children are supported and challenged. Children regularly complete self-assessments reflecting on their learning in the lesson. School leaders monitor pupil’s books termly and hold individual termly meetings with all teachers to ensure they are supported to provide a high-quality PSHE curriculum. In addition, children’s views and understanding are ascertained through pupil interviews/surveys.