PSHE
Intent
At Walmley Junior School, we want our children to be life-long, happy learners, who are nurtured towards, and well-prepared, for their next steps into secondary school and adulthood. With only 12.5% of children in school from different ethnic backgrounds, we understand the importance of respecting and celebrating diversity. The children we teach are fortunate to belong to a community where they are well-looked after and protected from many local, national and wider world issues. With the expanding world of the internet, we want them to be educated in how to stay safe online, be critical of what they see and read, and to feel confident to speak out and ask for help for themselves and others should they need to. Building strong and respectful relationships with family, friends and others will help them to feel safe and secure, and will also be instrumental with helping them to make the right choices in challenging situations, and to grow up to be responsible citizens. We want them to have a broad understanding of what it means to be healthy and happy, and to be educated in how to look after their own and others’ mental wellbeing by appreciating themselves, accepting and celebrating the difference in others and to have a good understanding of how other people’s lives may differ to their own.
Implementation
We have looked at commercial schemes to deliver PSHE but we felt that they didn’t allow us the flexible approach that we wanted to achieve. Therefore, we have built a curriculum for PSHE that takes into account the Relationships (RSE) and Health Education statutory guidance, which will be compulsory in all schools from September 2020. PSHE at Walmley Junior School is underpinned by the school’s Walmley Values, which promote respect, honesty, kindness, generosity, perseverance, politeness and conscientiousness. Walmley Junior School is also a Rights Respecting school and are currently on track to be awarded the Silver Award. The children explore their rights from the ‘United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’ through lessons, assemblies and class discussions. The teaching and learning of PSHE is timetabled and is split into three main themes across the academic year: Relationships, Living in the Wider World, and Health and Wellbeing.
As well as being timetabled, the teaching of PSHE can be flexible, allowing teachers to address issues that arise as and when they happen and is also delivered regularly through whole school and class assemblies. Trips and visitors to school are encouraged to provoke thinking and educate the children, for example, Safeside, NSPCC and Foundations (sex education). It is vital to engage children in conversation about a variety of issues that may affect them now or in the future. Therefore, there is no expectation for all PSHE work to be recorded. Each class has a class book where examples of work, photographs and responses from children are recorded as a way to celebrate their learning over a period of time. This allows teachers to be more creative in how they deliver their lessons, such as using drama, art and video etc. and gives all children the opportunity to have their voice heard in a variety of ways. To allow every child the chance to be fully submerged in their learning, adaptive teaching is at the heart of every teachers’ planning. Adaptive teaching is managed through many forms but to deepen children’s thoughts, there is a particular focus on targeted questioning to ensure that all children are being challenged appropriately at their own level. Across the school, PSHE has strong cross curricular links and is referred to in many other subjects: Computing and Online Safety, RE, English, History and Geography.
The PSHE progression map outlines how the children in each year group will grow and develop through a deep and broad curriculum, which makes use of intelligent repetition of core issues including friendships, mental health and online safety. PSHE will be monitored through the moderation of class books to ensure standards are high and consistent across the school; planning trawls to locate evidence of adaptive teaching and to check for a variety of outcomes; end of topic reflections by both staff and pupils; lesson observations and pupil voice. The monitoring of PSHE will create opportunities for CPD to be delivered to all staff throughout the year, reflecting on what has gone well and what can be further improved on to ensure that all staff feel confident with the delivery of PSHE and that as a school, we stay up to date with statutory guidance and topical issues.
Impact
The impact of our PSHE curriculum is that our pupils will leave primary school equipped with the skills required to build life-long, strong and respectful relationships with their friends, family and people they may meet during their lifetime, and be able to deal with conflict appropriately when challenging situations arise. They will be able to recognise how to keep themselves mentally and physically healthy as well as being able to identify some key signs of when others need help but are unable to ask for it. Our pupils will be able to use the internet safely and in a responsible way, whilst maintaining a critical eye over what they see and read when online. They will know how and where they can seek help in different contexts and will be armed with a broad vocabulary to ensure that they can be accurate with their words when speaking up. Our pupils will also leave primary school with a good knowledge of environmental issues and will be prepared to grow up in an ever-changing world where their effect on the environment needs to be carefully considered and acted upon continually.
Progression of Skills