Why We Study Personal, Social And Health Education
Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) is a subject through which pupils develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to manage their lives, now and in the future.
These skills and attributes will help pupils to stay healthy and safe; become more independent and resilient; become informed, responsible and active citizens and prepare them for life’s challenges and work in modern Britain.
PSHE can address unhealthy eating, lack of physical activity, emotional health, identity, equality, diversity and other key issues. PSHE is essential as it supports pupils’ spiritual, moral, cultural, mental development. PSHE promotes pupil wellbeing, pupil safeguarding and community cohesion.
How We Teach Personal, Social And Health Education
PSHE education is taught in a number of ways:
- Regular discrete timetabled lessons, which offer a wide variety of teaching and learning styles with an emphasis on interactive learning and the teacher as facilitator.
- Ad-hoc lessons/discussions when needs arise.
- Planned one-off assemblies led by internal staff and external agencies.
Our first aim is to find out what pupils already know, understand, can do and can say.
We follow the Jigsaw PSHE system which introduces new and more challenging learning, while building on what has gone before, reflecting and meeting the personal developmental needs of the children and young people.
We take a positive approach that focuses on what children and young people can do to keep themselves and others healthy and safe and to lead happy and fulfilling lives.
We aim to provide information which is realistic and relevant and which reinforces positive social norms.
We aim to encourage young people to reflect on their learning and the progress they have made. They learn to transfer what they have learned to say and to do from one school subject to another and from school to their lives in the wider community.
What Is Special About Personal, Social And Health Education In Our School
We aim to link the PSHE programme to other whole school approaches, to pastoral support and provide a setting where the responsible choice becomes the easy choice. We encourage staff, families and the wider community to get involved.
We embed PSHE within other efforts to ensure children and young people have positive relationships with adults, feel valued and where those who are most vulnerable are identified and supported.
We provide opportunities for children and young people to make real decisions about their lives, to take part in activities which simulate adult choices and where they can demonstrate their ability to take responsibility for their decisions.
We provide a safe and supportive learning environment where children and young people can develop the confidence to ask questions, challenge the information they are offered, draw on their own experience, express their views and opinions and put what they have learned into practice in their own lives.
We aim to develop our children’s sense of social justice and moral responsibilities and help them to begin to understand that their own choices and behaviour can affect local, national or global issues and political and social institutions.
Some of the whole school activities related to PSHE:
- NSPCC assemblies;
- Google Internet Safety assemblies;
- Red Nose Day and Children in Need fundraising;
- School Council elections;
- Annual pupil surveys;
- Sport ambassador role;
- Reading buddies;
- Careers’ aspiration events; and
- Commonwealth Week.