Personal Social and Health Education

New RSHE Guidance: What it means for sex education lessons in schools

Have you seen our great PowerPoint about RSE (Relationships and Sex Education) and how we teach it in school?

Here is some great guidance from Suffolk Local Authority, if you are interested in learning more about RSE.

Busting the myths about RSE

PSHE Curriculum

Intent

PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) is integral to children’s learning at Fressingfield Primary. It permeates our curriculum, as we believe children learn when they feel resilient, happy and confident. We are also aware of our need to prepare our children to be global citizens of the 21^st century, and that this may be very different to the lives of their parents, carers and teachers.

This curriculum provides a context for the school to fulfil our responsibilities to:

Promote the physical, social and emotional well-being of pupils.
Provide sex and relationships education (RSE).
Promote British values.
Provide a safe place for discussion of current, relevant social issues.
Protect our children from radicalisation.

Implementation

Our school Golden Rules provide a framework to help children understand and model positive behaviour. We also have a whole-school behaviour system, including our class rocket, filling up a reward jar and working for house points. Children are familiar with these, and they are part of the positive and caring ethos of Fressingfield Primary. This behaviour system also encourages us to celebrate positive achievement in many ways, from holding a weekly Superstar Assembly to gaining small class prizes through earning points.

We currently use Jigsaw as our main learning scheme, although also use material from other sources. In order to make our themes more meaningful to children, all classes work on the same half-termly theme, which is reinforced through assemblies and songs. We are aware that many issues around children are very important to them, as well as to us, eg global warming, and will often use pupils’ voices to develop learning. Children from Year 1 up have the opportunity to become part of decision-making groups, eg School Council, Junior Road Safety Officers and Eco-Group. Planned school initiatives may often start as small ideas from children, which seem to grow and grow!

An overriding aspect of our PSHE curriculum is encouraging children’s emotional resilience, and so a large proportion of the curriculum deals with this area. From small daily mindfulness activities (eg a class Happiness Pot) to larger blocks on stereotyping and keeping ourselves safe, we use PSHE as an opportunity to talk, listen, record ideas, play games or take part in circle time. All our lessons are inclusive.

To help children in developing self-awareness, we use ELLI (Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory) in all classes. These comprise of a set of learning dimensions (in animal form for younger children). ELLI helps children to understand how they as learners can use their own strengths to develop in their own way as a learner, and how they can work in a team to achieve even more.

We ensure our PSHE curriculum is rigorous by supplementing it with our science, PE and computing curriculums, and may also use outside visitors, eg Suffolk One Life, who come in and help support the teaching of the Healthy Lifestyles block in Key Stage 2.

In Early Years, we plan our provision to ensure development in Physical, Social and Emotional Development (PSED), which occurs daily. Children explore the ideas of relationships, feelings appropriate behaviours. We work hard to build children’s self-confidence, self-awareness and empathy.

We have two trained Thrive therapists in school, who lead our staff development in children’s emotional wellbeing. This means that some children are able to have support in addition to their class’ learning. It also means that some of the good practice of Thrive can be directly applied to the classroom, eg in the way adults speak with children or through the use of ‘safe areas’ in school.

Impact

We assess using Jigsaw’s summative assessment as the end of each teaching block. Class teachers also use a PSHE Log Book to show the breadth and progress of children’s learning. In addition, we use learning walks, book looks and pupil perception questionnaires to assess children’s learning.

As part of your children’s learning experience at Fressingfield Primary, we aim to promote personal wellbeing and development through our Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education programme. This covers a wide variety of topics, providing children with the knowledge, understanding and skills to live healthy, safe and fulfilled lives.

The Department for Education has made changes to relationships and sex education (RSE), following nationwide consultation, which came into effect from September 2020, and all schools are required to comply with the requirements. Guidance can be found below.

Learning focuses on healthy relationships in the modern world, and covers a wide range of topics relating to wellbeing, safeguarding and healthy relationships. We have reviewed our RSE curriculum and, in consultation with parents/carers, governors and other local schools, are confident that we have quality teaching materials and staff who are trained and confident to teach this area of the curriculum.

More information can be found below. The PowerPoint is especially recommended, as it provides detail of what we teach and why.