PSHE | St Mary's Catholic Primary Academy

Curriculum Statement and Implementation

PSHE – Personal, Social, Health and Economic education is an essential area of learning, vital for our children at St Mary’s. It covers all the essential aspect of Relationships and Health Education (RHE) made statutory by the DFE in 2020.

Relationships Education puts in place the building blocks needed for positive and safe relationships, including with family, friends and online. Children are also taught who can support them and how to treat each other with kindness, consideration and respect.

Health Education provides the information children need to make good decisions about their own health and wellbeing. It includes:

Mental wellbeing
Internet safety and harms
Physical health and fitness
Healthy eating
Health and prevention
Basic first aid
Changing adolescent bodies
Facts and risks associated with drugs, alcohol and tobacco

We also include teaching on:

Fundamental British Values,
Racism,
Environmental issues,
How to look after money.

At St Mary’s we understand, academic subjects are very important but we also know that children are able to achieve far better if they have the resilience, the right mind set and the self-esteem to want to do well and know they can achieve. It is our PSHE lessons that help provide these skills as well as so much more that will help our children deal with their lives now, growing up in Wolverhampton and for their future lives in such changing times in modern Britain. At St Mary’s we want to prepare our pupils for success in their ongoing education, career, family and for life in modern Britain. We believe that merely knowing facts about the wider world is not enough. It is resilience, confidence and independence to live in it that also needs to be developed in our pupils.

Our PSHE Curriculum

When designing our PSHE Curriculum at St Mary’s, we thought about the needs of our particular children, living in this area of Wolverhampton and made sure it was specific to their needs. We looked at the context of the school, Local data, School nurse data and Wolverhampton’s Health related behaviour survey.

We wanted our children to be taught how to stay healthy, how to stay safe on and off-line, how to manage risks safely, how to manage their emotions and to understand and develop safe and healthy relationships.
We wanted them to be taught how to make informed decisions in their lives, enabling them to become confident, healthy, independent and responsible members of society now and in their future lives.
Most importantly, we wanted to improve the children’s mental wellbeing, increase resilience, raise self-esteem, and help them to face challenges and to believe in themselves.

Our PSHE education Curriculum is taught weekly as 45-minute lessons and is organised into a series of six recurring themes, which our pupils experience annually. This helps children to recall and build upon previous learning at a depth that is appropriate to their age so by the end of Year 6, each child will have a thorough understanding of each theme.

The 6 Themes are:

Keeping/ Staying Safe
Keeping/ Staying Healthy
Feelings and Emotions
Computer Safety
Being Responsible
Relationships: growing and changing

Schemes of Work

We developed this curriculum around two schemes of work, which provide our children with up-to-date learning, relevant to their own lives in the modern world.

The first scheme is ‘1 Decision’, which has a primary focus on the PSHE curriculum and enables pupils to make decisions on a wide range of inter-related subjects relevant to their lives and see the consequences of wrong decisions.

We have adapted this resource to ensure that it is fully appropriate for our pupils and our school ethos. These materials include all of the themes required by statutory guidance on Relationships Education and Health Education so pupils will have covered all that is required by the end of Key Stage 2. All these units are planned in full on the sites, which include slides, activities, worksheets and film clips to discuss.

The second scheme we use is ‘Ten:Ten – Life to the Full’. This scheme is accredited by the Archdiocese of Birmingham and meets statutory guidance for Relationships and Health Education using a faith-based programme. Teaching is underpinned with the understanding that our deepest identity is as a child of God – created, chosen and loved by God. It is based on the teaching that God created our bodies, in his image, out of love and therefore we should love and respect ourselves and other people including our own and others’ bodies. We chose this programme due to the Catholic teaching and also because it is fully inclusive of all our pupils and their families..

Enrichment

PSHE is continually re-enforced on a day to day basis in our weekly ‘Worship Assemblies’, Class worship, Science lessons, Religious Education lessons, class discussions, Good work assemblies, Harvest festival, the Shoe box appeal, visitors, workshops, trip and many other PSHE related activities and enrichment.