What is the intent of PSHE at Mandeville Primary School?
Our intent is that our PSHE curriculum equips pupils to live healthy, safe, productive, responsible, balanced and fulfilling lives. Children are provided with opportunities to reflect on and clarify their own values and attitudes and explore the complex and sometimes conflicting range of values and attitudes they encounter. The curriculum encourages them to be enterprising and supports them in making effective transitions and positive choices. PSHE contributes to personal development by helping pupils to build their confidence, resilience and self-esteem, and to identify and manage risk, make informed choices and understand what influences their decisions. It enables them to recognise, accept and shape their identities, to understand and accommodate difference and change, to manage emotions and to communicate constructively with appropriate vocabulary in a variety of settings. Developing an understanding of themselves, empathy and the ability to work with others will help pupils to form and maintain good relationships, develop the essential skills for the future and better enjoy and manage their lives.
How is PSHE organised at Mandeville Primary School?
The progression document follows the PSHE Association model curriculum. The PSHE Association is the only national body for PSHE education and is also signposted to by the Department for Education.
It provides a comprehensive programme of study from Year 1 to Year 6 that integrates and sequences the statutory content of the ‘Relationships Education’ and ‘Health Education’ within a non-statutory, broader PSHE curriculum, which includes economic wellbeing and personal safety. Our progression document follows a thematic curriculum, which covers all three core themes of the Programme of Study (Health and Wellbeing; Relationships; and Living in the Wider World) over the school year, with three topics per half term. We believe that this approach is most effective for our pupils as it allows different year groups to work on similar themes at the same time, building a sequenced, spiral programme year on year, whilst offering flexibility in terms of medium term planning. Pupils are supported in building their knowledge and skills sequentially, revisiting, reinforcing and extending learning that has become embedded year on year as they journey through the school. Our structure helps children to remember long term the content they have been taught and to integrate new knowledge into more complex learning, supported by the school’s formative assessment, metacognition, self-regulation and retrieval practice strategies.
Pupils also need to be provided with opportunities to develop the associated positive habits. By every class working in a similar theme each term, we can maximise the impact of whole school wider curriculum enrichment opportunities – visits, visitors, themed days/weeks, clubs, etc.
We believe that our PSHE curriculum fulfils statutory requirements, meets the universal needs of all children, as well as the specific needs of the pupils in our school community.