PSHE
Intent
Through PSHE our intent is that children are enabled to become healthy, independent, and responsible member of society by giving them the crucial knowledge they need as the foundation stone for other learning.
Our curriculum aims to help them understand who they are personally and socially. It tackles many issues that individuals face as part of growing up. These include moral, social and cultural issues. We provide our children with the opportunity to learn about their rights and responsibilities whilst also developing an understating of their emotions and how these develop. Safety is an integral part of our learning in a purposeful way to ensure children know how to keep themselves safe and ask for help; ranging from home, road and fire safety to digital resilience and emotional wellbeing. Our children are encouraged to develop their sense of self-worth by playing a positive role in contributing to school life and the wider community.
Our curriculum is broken into 3 main areas. We study Relationships in Autumn, Living in the Wider World in Spring and Health and Wellbeing in Summer. Our intent for the three areas is as follows:
Relationships
We teach children about their relationships with other individuals and their relationship with themselves so they understand what healthy and unhealthy relationships look like. By teaching children what they should expect from others, they are better able to understand when they are part of an unhealthy relationship, and therefore more likely to seek help. Teaching children how to be a good friend, how to respect boundaries, and how to relate to others, will allow them to form stronger, happier relationships throughout the duration of their lives, which will support their emotional wellbeing.
Living in the Wider World
It is incredibly important that we teach children how to exist in the world around them. Encouraging them to recognise the communities they belong to will allow them to better feel the support they provide, and eventually will enable children to become strong, giving members of their communities. Teaching them media literacy and digital resilience gives children the knowledge they need in today’s society, where the influence and reach of social media is constant, and their digital footprint is everlasting. It is vital that children understand how to utilise the technology they have access to, whilst also recognising and avoiding the dangers it presents. Learning about money is also essential at a primary school level. Children need to know how money is earned, how to look after it and different ways it can be spent, so that when they eventually do start to have money of their own, they are financially literate and understand it’s value.
Health and Wellbeing
We believe that children need to be aware of both their mental wellbeing and their physical health, therefore we place utmost importance on educating children of all ages on how to maintain overall health. We begin with ideas of physical health at a very young age and enable children throughout the school to know what they need to do to keep their bodies healthy. We introduce ideas of mental wellbeing slightly later, in Key Stage 2, as we believe that this is the age where children are able to understand what mental wellbeing is, and how our actions and choices can impact upon it. As the children grow, our curriculum is designed to give children the knowledge of what will be happening to them and their bodies throughout the next stages of their lives. This knowledge should help them to process these changes as they occur and enables them to ask questions to help them through a time that can be confusing to a young mind. Covering all manners of ways to keep safe is vitally important in school, so children understand the purpose of rules and boundaries in all areas of their lives. The breadth of knowledge we aim to impart empowers children to make good choices that will keep them safe, whether they are outside exploring the world or within their homes.
