Intent
At St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School, we believe PSHE helps pupils develop the knowledge, skills and understanding they need to lead confident, healthy, independent lives and become responsible citizens. At our school, we are committed to ensuring that the emotional and social needs of all our children are met within our school environment, and we support the development of children’s health and wellbeing, self-esteem and confidence. Through our PSHE curriculum, children understand how to make informed decisions about their wellbeing, health and relationships. We aim to help them understand how they are developing personally and socially, and how to negotiate the moral, social and cultural issues that they will encounter when growing up. Our intention is that when children leave St Joseph’s, they will do so with the knowledge, understanding and emotions they need to be able to play an active, positive and successful role in today’s diverse society.
Implementation
The work we do in PSHE links directly to SCARF and has a cross-curricular dimension as it permeates all aspects of life in school. The scheme of work covers all the required objectives and follows the three core areas of Health and Wellbeing, Relationships and Living in the Wider World. These themes have been broken down into six main areas for termly coverage, and are as follows:
It is designed to be taught in thematic units with a spiral approach to ensure themes can be revisited and pupils can recall and build upon previous learning, exploring the underlying principles of PSHE education regularly at a depth that is appropriate for the age and stage of their education. All lessons include supporting materials, including building a rich bank of vocabulary. All pupils at St. Joseph's Primary School will have the opportunity to access the PSHE curriculum, irrespective of social background, culture, race, religion, gender or ability. Where appropriate, activities will be differentiated by the class teacher to facilitate this.
Pupils are taught discreet PSHE lessons once per week; however, we implement bespoke lessons that deal with issues as they arise in real time and in real life. On top of this, PSHE objectives are an integral part of all curriculum subjects and embedded in everyday life at St. Joseph’s. For example, Science and P.E may include work on food, diet and exercise. R.E includes many aspects related to relationships, families and different faiths and beliefs. Whilst Maths involves work on financial capability and Computing covers online safety. PSHE is also an important part of assemblies and collective worship, where spiritual and moral beliefs are nurtured. The distribution of lessons also complements key campaigns throughout the year, such as; Anti-Bullying Week, Black History Month and Children's Mental Health Week.
A mixture of both summative and formative assessment is used to assess pupils learning in PSHE. Pupils’ learning will be assessed throughout each topic using a pre and post assessment task. This helps pupils’ to be involved in regular reflection of their own learning journey in relation to PSHE education.
Children use books to record their work and progress in PSHE lessons. These travel with the children as they move to the next year group so they can look back at their learning and the next teacher can see their starting points.
Impact
Children will leave St Joseph’s as healthy, independent and responsible members of society. They will be able to demonstrate and apply the British Values of Democracy, Tolerance, Mutual respect, Rule of law and Liberty. Children will know how to be safe and to understand and develop healthy relationships both now and in the future. They will be aware of the dangers encountered in life and have the necessary tools to manage and mitigate these as adolescents and adults. They will have an awareness of society as a whole and will be equipped to live in the modern world successfully as adults.
Through our PSHE curriculum, we aim that our pupils will: