Personal, Social, Health Education (PSHE) including Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSE) .

Intent

At Westcott, we work to enable all children to achieve academic and personal success. We nurture individuality – providing challenge, and support pupils to grow into all God wants us to be.  PSHE education at Westcott is underpinned by our Christan and British values. The overriding aim of our PSHE programme is to provide pupils with strong virtues and resilience to help cope with the challenges of daily life.

The PSHE curriculum aims to develop a positive attitude and mindset, leading to confidence, self-belief, motivation and engagement. This enables children to acquire the ‘tools’ to develop and maintain good physical and mental wellbeing, as well as being able to make informed choices in life and play a positive role in society.

The statutory requirements of relationship, sex and health education (RSE) are delivered through implicit and explicit learning experiences in order to:

• Foster self-esteem and respect for others as the cornerstone of good health education and therefore of good sex and relationship education
• Nurture a partnership between caring adults – governors, teachers, other staff and parents – to ensure sensitive support for children and young people as they grow and mature
• Ensure children have the ability to accept their own and others’ sexuality
• Encourage children to enjoy relationships based upon mutual trust and respect, free from any abuse
• Generate an atmosphere where questions and discussion on sexual matters can take place without embarrassment
• Avoid sexual stereotyping and sexual discrimination

Implementation

Westcott Ce School has designed a 2-year cycle PSHE scheme of work that follows The PSHE Association Curriculum Framework. This ensures teachers have an overview for each year, so they can see where and when different topic areas including RSE are planned. This considers the needs of the pupils, the aims and ethos of the school, the local community and the local environment in which the school is situated. This will provide a meaningful context for short term planning, helping ensure PSHE lessons are relevant and interesting for pupils.

The planning follows a ‘spiral curriculum’, meaning that the specific learning builds for pupils as they move through the school, gradually expanding and deepening their knowledge, skills and attributes. Learning in PSHE is not delivered as a one-off experience but one where learning opportunities covered in one-year group will be further developed in another.

Impact

Through quality PSHE lessons and teaching, children develop resilience, perspective taking and problem-solving skills. As a result, pupils will become self-managing, reflective, resilient, collaborative learners, who are able to be successful in school as well as in the wider community.