The National Curriculum states that ‘all schools should make provision for personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE), drawing on good practice. According to the Education Act 2002 and the Academies Act 2010, the PSHE curriculum should be a balanced and broadly based curriculum which ‘promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and prepares pupils at the school for opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.

We deliver the Curriculum through a Programme called ’3D’in which pupils develop the knowledge, skills and attributes needed in order to keep themselves healthy and safe whilst preparing them for life and work.

The Dimensions Curriculum, reflects the 2020 guidance and covers all aspects of Relationships Education and Health Education in an age appropriate way. There are three underlying core themes taught throughout Dimensions 3D PSHE,

1.Health and Wellbeing

2.Relationships

3.Living in the Wider World

Pupils are encouraged to participate in a wide variety of activities, enabling them to make significant contributions to both life in school and within the wider community. Our children begin school life with poor speaking and listening skills and a limited range of vocabulary, therefore they need a wider range of experiences. This allows them to become aware of their skills and talents, develop their self-worth, learn to work as part of a team and take greater responsibility for their own learning. In doing so, they are able to reflect and evaluate on how they are making progress. The 3D PSHE Programme provides pupils with the means to handle many of the social, cultural, spiritual, physical and moral issues that occur throughout life.

Our intention is that, when children leave St. Edward’s they do so with the knowledge, understanding and emotions to be able to play an active role in today’s society. We want our children to have high aspirations, a belief in themselves and realise that anything is possible if they put their mind to it.

We have identified some core barriers that the children of our school face when they are accessing the curriculum, and we intend to deliver the PSHE curriculum with an approach that addresses these:

• Vocabulary – we ensure that all aspects of the curriculum are planned with careful and appropriate vocabulary progression, creating cross-curricular opportunities for consolidation where appropriate.
• Communication and teamwork skills – our PSHE curriculum provides many opportunities for discussion. Children are encouraged to express their thoughts and opinions on a range of topics.
• Resilience – we design challenging tasks in our PSHE curriculum, allowing children to experience failure and errors in a safe environment, scaffolded by the implementation of growth mindset training.
• Life experiences to contextualise learning – we encourage children to reflect on their own experiences and affirm parental engagement and involvement. This may include practical advice, parent workshops or an overview of requirements regarding withdrawal of pupils from sex education.

Ambition

Our ambition in PSHE for children with SEND is broadly in line with our ambition for all children. 

We want all children to be able to decide upon and share their opinion. We would like them to know how to express why they feel the way they do. 

We aim for all children, regardless of their attainment level, to know that their opinion and contribution is valued and valid.

We want all children to have strategies to keep safe and happy and to know how to seek help/support if they consider themselves not to be.

Access (How we may support children with SEND to achieve in PSHE)

• Model and scaffolding forming opinions - providing appropriate sentence stems or vocabulary when necessary

• Careful consideration is given to talk partners - not simply pairing children with SEND with academically higher achieving students but students whose characteristics would engage, support, mentor and encourage these students to form and share an opinion

• Ensuring the classroom culture is established so that share time is a 'safe space' - clear rules for ensuring this are recapped / shared before each session

• Using community circle or a 'sharing object' that is passed around the group so that each child is given equal opportunity to talk and be heard

• Revisiting ways to stay physically, emotionally and mentally safe and what they can do if they are not

• Providing visual support e.g. pictures of people who can keep them safe / provide support at school etc

All key areas of the Early Years PSHE curriculum are covered in creative and innovative ways within the Early Years 3D PSHE programme. Modern British values are embedded, both implicitly and explicitly within the teaching resources that we use, so that, from a very early age, children are being taught the importance of tolerance, democracy, respect and rules and responsibilities. The areas that we cover are:

It’s All About… Taking Part!

Encouraging young children to participate and be actively involved in home, school and community life at an individual, group and class level, understanding how to behave appropriately in different situations. 

It’s All About… Being Smart!

Encouraging young children to think carefully, to develop positive attitudes towards themselves and others, to recognise and have confidence in their own abilities and talents and to know how to manage personal hygiene, as well as keeping healthy and safe, linked to behaviour and potential consequences. 

It’s All About… Where to Start!

Encouraging young children to be confident, to show initiative in a range of different situations and settings and to develop strategies for how to solve problems and resolve conflicts. 

It’s All About… Having Heart!

Encouraging young children to show sensitivity and compassion towards others, to manage their feelings, to develop positive, caring and respectful relationships with both children and adults and to cooperate and share willingly

Through a variety of teaching strategies i.e. stories, role play, songs, games and research our children learn all about keeping themselves healthy and safe, as well as feelings and emotions, kindness and friendship, similarities and differences, sharing and turn taking as well as e-safety and anti-bullying.

Why do we assess in PSHE?

At St. Edward’s, we believe that Assessment is central to effective teaching and learning in PSHE Education.

Assessment refers to gauging what has been learned and what still needs to be learned. It therefore differs from evaluation, which is about the process: how well activities worked, how useful resources were, how interesting students found the lesson, and so on. Teachers have tended to find evaluation easier in PSHE education than assessment but both are central to an effective programme.

Assessment is needed to consider whether children are picking up the learning points and use this information to inform future lessons. It is important to be able to report back to the children so that they have an awareness of their progress and how to move forward. In addition to this, this will help us to identify children’s strengths so these can be used to model to other. Furthermore, teachers will be able to report to parents

Our approach to Assessment is based on the following underlying principles:

 • It is important for pupils to have opportunities to reflect on their learning, especially when that learning relates directly to the individual’s identity – their personal qualities, attitudes, skills, attributes, achievements and influences.

 • It is important for teachers to feel confident that learning has taken place, to be able to demonstrate progress, and to identify future learning needs.

• Assessment increases pupils’ motivation and improves learning, as their increased awareness of their own progress and development illustrates the value of their learning.

 • It allows the leadership team, parents, governors and school inspectors to see the impact PSHE education is having for pupils and for whole-school outcomes, such as Ofsted judgements on personal development, safeguarding, SMSC development and the promotion of fundamental British values. Without assessing PSHE education all you can do is describe provision; you cannot show its impact.

 • The Department for Education (DfE) states in the statutory guidance for Relationships, Sex and Health education that “schools should have the same high expectations of the quality of pupils’ work in these subjects as for other curriculum areas”

Personal attributes, so central to PSHE education, are arguably the hardest aspects of learning to assess. It is difficult for teachers to accurately assess a pupil’s self-confidence or sense of their own identity and values. However, pupils themselves will be able to judge, for instance, whether they feel more confident, or have a firmer sense of their own beliefs and opinions than they did before a particular series of lessons. Such personal reflection in PSHE education lessons is essential, so ensuring pupils have time and space within the lessons to reflect on this, either privately or through discussion, is a vital part of the assessment process. Assessing learning in PSHE education must therefore use a combination of teacher assessment and pupil self- and peer assessment. The model of assessment that is most meaningful in PSHE education is ipsative assessment. Ipsative assessment compares where a pupil is at the end of a lesson or series of lessons against where they were before the lesson(s), in a similar way to an athlete measuring today’s performance against their own previous performance.

Baseline assessment PSHE education covers issues and areas of life which children and young people will be affected by in different ways and at different times. As such, we cannot make any assumptions based on pupils’ age or year group about their existing knowledge, understanding, attributes, skills, strategies, beliefs and attitudes. So to assess learning and progress effectively, it is important to carry out a baseline assessment before teaching anything new. As pupils’ learning in topics such as healthy eating, online safety, relationships and so on will come from a number of sources, we can only see whether they have made progress in their learning if we have established the knowledge, understanding, attributes, skills, strategies, beliefs and attitudes they had before any new teaching took place. The learning we wish to assess will relate to the pupils’ attributes and skills, as well as their knowledge and understanding related to the topic. Pupils’ existing knowledge and understanding is often the easiest learning to assess but whilst gauging pupils’ existing skills, strategies, attitudes, beliefs and attributes can never be an exact science, there are activities that provide an insight into their starting point.

Assessing progress over the course of a lesson or series of lessons

At the end of the lesson or series of lessons, pupils should have opportunities to demonstrate the progress they have made from their starting point assessed in the Baseline activity. Possibly the simplest and most effective way of demonstrating progress is to either repeat, or better still, revisit the original baseline activity. Some baseline assessment activities (such as mind-maps, ‘draw and write’, ‘explain to an alien’), lend themselves very well to a simple revisit where each pupil uses a different colour to add to their baseline activity and make any changes they now want to make, allowing the pupil and teacher to clearly see how far they have come in their learning. In other cases, pupils might repeat the activity or carry out a completely different activity.

Assessment Strategies:

• Teacher Baseline Assessment
• Teacher Feedback books updated weekly after each session
• Pupil Assessment - children should develop the ability to observe and feed back to their peers using precise and specific language
• Observations and in the moment feedback
• Written tasks – evidenced in Floor-books
• End of Unit Assessment – Return to Baseline Assessment

Subject Leadership Monitoring

We know that the Subject leader and senior leaders need to know how well children are learning in this subject, so they should monitor progress by:

• Lesson drop-ins/ pupil voice/ discussions with teachers/ listen to children’s conversations
• PSHE Floorbooks
• Examination of Medium-term planning to check that learning points are effectively sequenced in appropriate sized chunks, and that teachers are considering opportunities for spaced practice and retrieval.