Rationale

The PSHE (including RSE) Curriculum

Our Vision

At Locking our PSHE and RSE curriculum focuses on the skills, attitudes and knowledge

that will enable children to keep themselves safe, develop awareness of their thoughts, feelings and responsibilities and make informed choices. Through this child-focused and tailored approach , we will be able to improve the children’s capacity to learn and, ultimately, their life chances.

The PSHE and RSE curriculum at Locking Primary School will:

• bring together Personal, Social, Health Education, emotional literacy, social skills and spiritual development
• provide accurate and relevant knowledge
• progressively build upon a range of skills and strategies to live a healthy, safe, fulfilling, responsible and balanced life
• empower children to speak up and get help if needed, knowing how to keep themselves safe
• centre on Mindfulness, supporting children to be aware of their thoughts and feelings as they arise and focus their mind on what they choose to focus it on

PSHE and RSE teaching at Locking Primary School will:

• provide opportunities to explore and challenge a range of values, attitudes, beliefs, rights and responsibilities
• provide opportunities to create personal understanding
• be child-focused, responding and tailored to the needs of the child
• allow teachers to enjoy building a relationship with their class, getting to know them better as unique human beings

Assessment of PSHE and RSE at Locking Primary School will:

• be formative, informing planning and how to best deliver further teaching
• focus on ensuring the learning of the National Curriculum statements through children’s responses to retrieval tasks and in books
• draw on planning to understand the progress that has been made by children
• provide quality responses (verbally and written, if required) to children, ensuring all knowledge is firmly embedded
• identify children who require additional support and those who excel in the knowledge, skills and
• understanding required (through identifying these children it is assumed that all others – the vast majority have achieved the objectives at the level expected of their year group)

Curriculum Rationale – Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE)

The choices made within our PSHE curriculum are motivated by the belief that if attention is paid to supporting children’s personal development in a structured and developmentally appropriate way, this will not only improve their capacity to learn (across the curriculum) but will ultimately improve their life chances.

Programme: We use the scheme Jigsaw, the mindful approach to PSHE, which fulfils all the requirements for the statutory Relationships and Health Education curriculum, as announced by the Department for Education in England in 2019, for full implementation from September 2020. Jigsaw goes even further than this and provides a spiral and progressive comprehensive PSHE Programme in which the statutory elements sit and are embraced. Jigsaw materials are age- and stage-appropriate.

Timetabling: Timetabling of PSHE lessons is kept flexible, allowing teachers to choose the most appropriate structure for that unit or group of children. PSHE units tend to be taught in a weekly session. However ‘Sex Education’ may be blocked. With the exception of the Changing Me unit, teachers have the freedom to adjust the length of sessions to meet the needs for the children in their class, meaning sessions could range from 20 to 60 minutes. The learning objectives of each session will remain unchanged but, where there is an outcome which is product-based, this may be adjusted as appropriate to allow a focus on sharing and discussion.

Jigsaw

We chose Jigsaw for PSHE at Locking as it provided a comprehensive Personal, Social, Health Education (Health and Well-being) curriculum, giving the relevant context to build skills, attitudes, self-esteem, resilience and confidence. It covers all the requirements of the government guidance and outcomes, and more. Through a well-structured, progressive lesson-a-week process skills, attitudes and knowledge are taught explicitly as well as nurtured implicitly. Ongoing support and access to updates from the creator of Jigsaw means that we can keep our PSHE curriculum dynamic and relevant to children in an ever-changing world.

The Relationships and Healthy Me Puzzles (units) cover most of the aspects in the guidance but these are enhanced, revisited and foundations built throughout the Jigsaw Programme. Jigsaw’s philosophy starts by building positive self-image, a sense of identity and a healthy relationship with self, and from that starting point helps children grow healthy relationships with others. Teaching strategies are varied and are mindful of the need for adaptation.

Jigsaw is designed as a whole school approach, with all year groups working on the same theme (Puzzle) at the same time. This enables each Puzzle to start with an introductory assembly, generating a whole school focus

Health Education: Health Education in Jigsaw embraces not only physical health but has a strong focus on mental health and emotional literacy throughout, and empowers children to be aware of their own thoughts and feelings and know how to manage and regulate these (e.g. using Calm Me (mindfulness techniques)

Mindfulness: Thoughts and feelings motivate and determine  actions/responses/behaviours. If we are caught up in thoughts and feelings and are not aware of them as they happen, the responses that follow may not be under our control, and may not be in our best interest or appropriate in the situation. If a child can be aware of their thoughts and feelings as they arise and have been taught and practised how to use interventions, they can choose to regulate and manage their thoughts and feelings by using these interventions. They can effectively press the ‘pause’ button and consider whether to allow that chain of thoughts to continue or to change its direction, thus potentially choosing the response, action or behaviour that will be motivated by it.

Mindful children can more readily choose their responses to situations rather than react while caught up in the thought-flows and emotions, saving behaviour issues from happening, helping concentration and lessening stress and anxiety.

SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social, Cultural) development: Every lesson within Jigsaw contributes to at least one of these aspects of children’s development

Safeguarding: The Relationships and Changing Me units have a strong safeguarding focus in particular, which will be obvious to teachers but not necessarily so explicit to children. Jigsaw’s philosophy is to grow resilience and positive self-esteem and confidence in children, so they can recognise when they feel uncomfortable in a situation and know who to trust and how to speak up for help. Children will respect themselves and their bodies and know what healthy relationships feel like.

Curriculum Rationale – Relationship and Sex Education (RSE)

Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) is lifelong learning about physical, moral, social, cultural and emotional development. It is about understanding the importance of positive relationships and of respect, love and care. Within this context, it also involves learning about sex and sexual health at an age appropriate stage of children’s development.

Our RSE curriculum is tailored to the age and the physical and emotional maturity of the pupils, ensuring that that both boys and girls are prepared for the changes that adolescence brings and – drawing on knowledge of the human life cycle set out in the national curriculum for science - how a baby is conceived and born.

At Locking Primary School, we believe children should understand the facts about human reproduction before they leave primary school. We intend to teach this in Science lessons and PSHE (Jigsaw) lessons.

Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) within science (reproduction including humans):

Year 1: To identify, name, draw and label the basic parts of the human body.

Year 2: To notice that animals including humans, have offspring which grow into adults.

Year 3: To identify that humans and some other animals have skeletons and muscles for support, protection and movement.

Year 4: To describe the life process of reproduction in some plants and animals. To describe the simple functions of the basic parts of the digestive system in humans.

Year 5: To describe the changes as humans develop to old age.

Year 6: To identify and name the parts of the human circularity system and describe the functions of the heart, blood vessels and blood.

Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) within science (reproduction including humans):

EYFS: Growing up - how we have changed since we were babies.

Year 1: Boys’ and girls’ bodies; correct names for body parts.

Year 2: Boys’ and girls’ bodies; body parts and respecting privacy (which parts of the body are private and why this is).

Year 3: How babies grow and how boys’ and girls’ bodies change as they grow older; Introduction to puberty and menstruation.

Year 4: Internal and external reproductive body parts. Recap about puberty and menstruation. Explained in simple terms.

Year 5: Puberty for boys and girls in more detail including the social and emotional aspects of becoming an adolescent. Explained in simple biological terms.

Year 6: Puberty for boys and girls revisited. Understanding conception to the birth of a baby. Becoming a teenager.

All lessons are taught using correct terminology, child-friendly language and diagrams.

RSE within Jigsaw

The DFE statutory guidance (England 2019) expects schools to deliver work on puberty. This sits under the Health Education statutory expectations. Lessons on human reproduction are left to the discretion of the school.

However, Jigsaw believes children need to understand this before they leave primary school so that:

a) they see that puberty needs to happen to enable them to have babies in adulthood

b) this knowledge helps to safeguard them

The work on puberty and human reproduction is taught through the Changing Me Puzzle (delivered in the last term of the academic year). All the teaching resources are original to Jigsaw; - picture cards, resource sheets and animations that are used to enhance teaching and learning. The specially-commissioned animations of the female reproductive system and the male reproductive system provide a visual resource to enable children to understand how the body changes and develops in puberty. This work is done in the context of managing change and is age appropriate.