Personal, Social Health and Citizenship Education
Our PSHCE curriculum is designed to cover all of the knowledge and understanding as set out in national and local guidance. The scheme of work covers the Relationships and Health Education statutory guidance (as set out by the Department for Education), including the non-statutory sex education. To ensure that children develop a secure knowledge that they can build on, our PSHCE curriculum is organised into a progression model that outlines the knowledge, skills and vocabulary to be taught in a sequentially coherent way, reflects the needs of their children, equips them with a sound understanding of risk and with the knowledge and skills necessary to make safe and informed decisions.
The teaching of PSHCE at our school is based around six themes:
- Being Responsible (rules, rights and responsibilities & learning to learn)
- Staying Safe (staying safe & getting out and about)
- Let’s Work (the world of work & looking forward)
- Relationships (relationships & my friends and family)
- You & Me (similarities and differences)
- Healthy Body, Healthy Mind (staying healthy & healthy lifestyles)
At our school, PSHCE is considered across the curriculum and is a fundamental part of the children’s school experience. PSHCE is taught implicitly through school values and policy, through cross curricular subject links and taught explicitly through discrete lessons.
Core Elements of PSHCE Teaching
- Engaging and inspiring lessons that promote critical thinking and curiosity.
- High quality instruction and questioning with teachers providing carefully planned sequenced lessons that build on knowledge, skills and understanding.
- Retrieval of previous learning and explicit links through concepts that connect new learning with what the children already know.
- Using artefacts/objects/image to stimulate conversation.
- Facilitated discussion supported by brainstorming/thought showering ideas, paired/group discussion, categorising/grouping statements, conscience corridor/role play/hot seating, scenarios and videos/texts/storyboards
- High quality talk providing children with opportunities to discuss, debate, and learn how to challenge and disagree respectfully.
- Enriching learning experiences through artefacts, trips, workshops, visitors and high quality texts.
- A focus on ambitious vocabulary used in context.
- Carefully chosen and planned lessons and activities that are scaffold and adapted to ensure all children meet the intent of the PSHCE curriculum.
Curriculum
Our EYFS follows the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. Children learn through the prime areas of self-regulation, managing self and building relationships. These skills are taught through a combination of focus teaching and opportunities to learn through play. This supports interactions with peers and adults and in understanding important routines of the day.
In Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, our long term overview sets out learning opportunities for each year group. Each core theme is organised into subtopics to ensure core knowledge is clear and explicit links are made to the main theme. The teaching of PSHCE and RSE includes sufficient and well-chosen opportunities and contexts for children to embed new knowledge so that it can be used confidently in real-life situations. In order to develop confident, active and informed citizens, talk is placed at the heart of PSHCE lessons with children appropriately sharing their opinions and reflections during whole class debates and discussions.
Cultural Capital
Children are offered a wide range of enriching and engaging experiences which are designed to develop their knowledge and understanding of the world around them and the concepts taught within PSHCE. Opportunities for PSHCE-linked visits are planned for, as well as visits from guest speakers and organisations in the local community. This also includes themed days/events, such as Anti-Bullying Week, Children’s Mental Health Week, Families’ Week, Democracy Day and Work & Enterprise Week. Cross-curricular learning experiences provide a variety of opportunities to practise and explore knowledge further and understanding in different subject areas including staying safe online (computing) and health / sex education (science).
Wider enrichment opportunities including gardening, cycling and Walk to School and Keeping Healthy Week provide opportunity to practise learning in other contexts.
Encouraging children to be confident speakers, understand their rights and play an active part in school life are a key aim in our school. We believe that the views, experiences and influence of our children are an integral part of our drive to continuously improve our provision. We seek ways to listen to the views of our children and involve them in decision-making so that they are engaged as partners in the life of the school through inclusive, curriculum and environmental pupil voice roles.
Accessibility for all children
Our expectation is that the majority of children will move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace through supporting children with additional inputs, interventions, peer support and resources.
The ambitious and inclusive nature of the curriculum allows a range of access points that ensure all children, including those with special educational needs, succeed, regardless of their circumstances, with high expectations set for everyone.
For more information on our approach to teaching PSHCE, please look at our coffee morning timetable for the next available session or make an appointment in the school office to speak with our PSHCE subject leader.
