PSHE
PSHE Curriculum Intent
At Stillness Infant School, we believe that Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education is an important and necessary part of all children’s education, which encompasses many areas of study. Fundamentally, our PHSE curriculum will equip children with a sound understanding of risk and with the knowledge and skills necessary to make safe and informed decisions.
Through looking at examples of our school values and British values in everyday life, the children will learn about what it means to make a tangible, positive contribution to school life and the wider community. The children learn to be motivated and persistent in the face of difficulties.
We teach the children about rights and responsibilities so that they appreciate and celebrate what it means to be a member of a diverse community where commonalities are identified and celebrated and differences are valued and nurtured.
The children are taught to understand how they are developing personally and socially, tackling many of the moral, social and cultural issues that are part of growing up. The PHSE curriculum is adapted to meet the needs of all children, including disadvantaged children, children with SEND or EAL, giving them the sequenced, progressive lessons they need to be able to develop personally.
We teach the children the vocabulary they will need to express their feelings and opinions in a positive way through our Values Based Education approach.
Through the broad experiences we give the children they learn about risk, challenge and decision making.
Our teaching in PHSE will be age appropriate for our young children, using story reading as a key strategy and contributes to our focus on reading.
PSHE Curriculum Implementation
What does PHSE look like at Stillness infants?
The teaching of PHSE at Stillness Infants builds on the Early Learning Goals for Personal, Social and Emotional Development. The rationale behind the sequence of learning we have chosen is to equip our children with a sound understanding of risk and with the knowledge and skills necessary to make safe and informed decisions. This is delivered in an age appropriate way, using everyday contexts the children are familiar with.
Our PHSE curriculum follows a clear and consistent teaching sequence from the PHSE Association which ensures that our children gain a rich and wide range of skills, knowledge and vocabulary effectively built on year by year. Topics are carefully designed so learning is revisited and deepened, and used as a basis to acquire new learning, for example, our Year One unit ‘How Do We Decide How to Behave?’ feeds into our Year Two unit ‘How Can We Help?’
Lessons are designed around the unit question in a progressive and sequential manner each week so that knowledge is then built up week by week to move through the aspect of PHSE being covered. This enables children to be able to call upon the vocabulary, skills and subject knowledge taught during the unit in order to answer the unit question, for example, ‘How Can We Be Healthy?’ The knowledge organiser that accompanies each unit makes the expectations of what must be known by every child clear and these guide teacher’s planning and help ensure lessons are progressive & sequential and vocabulary rich.
At the start of each lesson, teachers frequently draw upon the important content and vocabulary defined in the topic’s Knowledge Organisers to allow regular retrieval opportunities in order to embed subject knowledge. We provide varied lessons both in presentation and outcome to allow students to fully engage with the subject. Lessons can include: paired, group or independent activities, role play and drama and written outcomes. All lessons use materials for teaching which avoid stereotyping, and bias towards race, gender, role or disability
To support children’s learning and to ignite curiosity and engagement with the unit in class, stories and books form a central part of our teaching in PHSE. Each class has a library of books to teach emotional literacy, there are books to support the teaching of the ‘Value of the Month’ and stories underpin the PHSE teaching sequences.
At Stillness Infant School, children are given the opportunities of broad experiences through trips, visitors and theme days. We use these experiences to show children how to apply the knowledge they have learned in PHSE lessons, for example, rail safety whilst we are on a trip into London. We use opportunities in everyday school life to teach PHSE knowledge, for example, discussing playground behaviour to teach the unit ‘What is a Friend?’
