Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (P.S.H.E.) is an important part of our children’s education. Our P.S.H.E. programme, provides our children with opportunities to learn about British values, their rights and the responsibilities that come with these rights and an appreciation of what it means to be a positive and successful member of our diverse society.While P.S.H.E. is a non-statutory subject, we use the P.S.H.E.
Programme of Study produced by the P.S.H.E. Association (https://P.S.H.E.-association.org.uk/). We aim to thread the content of the Programme of Study throughout every aspect of our children’s school life: within our wider curriculum, through whole school assemblies, through special events like our aspirational career’s fair, themed weeks, external provision including basic first aid (https://birmingham.minifirstaid.co.uk/), discrete weekly P.S.H.E. lessons, and of course through our school values.
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Through this approach, our children learn what is meant by a healthy lifestyle; they learn how to maintain physical, mental and emotional health and wellbeing and how to manage risks to their physical and emotional health. This supports our children’s decision making to maintain their physical and emotional safety, both in the real world and on-line (e-safety/online safety is taught in every year group as part of the Purple Mash Computing Programme of Study).
Furthermore, our children learn about respectful relationships and how to manage change, including puberty. We believe that parents’ views about their children’s understanding of relationships and growing up are vital. Consequently, we have facilitated a number of consultation sessions with our school community to ensure what we teach about protective behaviours, relationships and growing up is appropriate to and understood by our school community whilst still meeting statutory requirements. To achieve this, we have now adopted the Birmingham City Council’s agreed approach to teaching relationships and health education – available to read below.
As well as teaching all of our pupils, how to make informed decisions about their health and wellbeing and where to get help, we provide many additional opportunities for our most vulnerable children to support this: one to one support through Malachi Specialist Family Support Services (https://www.malachi.org.uk/) and mentoring supported by Lenny our school dog.
While we plan to deliver P.S.H.E. in line with the P.S.H.E. Association’s programme of study, we also endeavour to deliver a curriculum that reflects the needs of our pupils. In weekly P.S.H.E. sessions, our teachers retain the freedom to respond to specific issues in their classes or within the local community and to provide our children with an open forum to discuss and resolve these.
By the time our children leave us, they have developed the knowledge and skills necessary to be healthy, independent and responsible members of society who understand how they are developing personally and socially, and who have the confidence to tackle many of the moral, social and cultural issues that are part of growing up in Birmingham and the wider United Kingdom.
Mrs R.Allport (P.S.H.E. Subject Lead)
