Intent
Here at Skyswood, we feel that PSHE underpins all areas of our curriculum. We pride ourselves on our ‘whole child’ approach and we work to ensure that our children feel happy and safe within their environment. We acknowledge that in order to be ‘ready and able to learn’, the children need to be in a state of good and positive mental wellbeing, as without this, they will not be receptive to other areas of learning and the curriculum.
We work to create safe environments within all of our classrooms, ensuring all children feel confident to have a go at a task, even if they are not sure they will succeed. This mirrors our growth mindset approach and encouraging children to venture out of their comfort zones to develop their self-confidence and resilience.
To further support these core values, we use the Jigsaw PSHE programme; which reflects our key values and ensures a consistent approach and a progressive curriculum throughout the school.
Our aim is to prepare the children as best as we can for the world, teaching them mutual respect, core values and an informed understanding of differences between people. In addition, they will have opportunity to discuss and reflect on events occurring to them personally and receive the guidance and support they may require to build up their resilience in order to manage any difficult or challenging situations that they face.
Implementation
JIGSAW is used as the basis of our PSHE lessons from Reception to Year 6.
The topics for each half term are mirrored across the year groups, with the content carefully developed to be age appropriate and build upon previous learning. The topics are as follows:
- Being me in my world
- Celebrating me
- Changing me
- Dreams and goals
- Healthy me
- Relationships
As suggested by the jigsaw scheme, each lesson is structured through six phases:
- Connect Us
- Calm Me
- Open my mind
- Tell me or show me
- Let me learn
- Help me reflect
The learning themes of ‘Changing Me’ and ‘Relationships’ are linked to the RSE and Health Curriculum requirements set by the DfE and the content is age appropriate for the different year groups. As a school, we have further developed this part of the curriculum in consultation with parents, pupils and staff to ensure the age, needs and feelings of pupils are at the forefront of the topics covered.
Additional information about our RSE curriculum can be found within the RSE Policy.
Children are encouraged to actively engage within PSHE lessons and transfer the skills they are taught across their everyday lives. Having the opportunity to share and discuss real life examples helps the children to develop the skills they need to cope with the challenges they face within their lives.
In addition, the school actively promotes mindfulness and teachers will build in opportunities for such activities within the timetable as they see appropriate.
Within the Early Years, Personal Social & Emotional Development (PSED) remains one of the prime areas of development for the children and opportunities are appropriately planned to support this.
For those children who may be requiring some additional support with their mental wellbeing, we have the opportunity to refer individual children to our designated school counsellor. Small group nurture provision is also available and children are identified within our termly pupil progress meetings who may benefit from nurture provision, mentoring or counseling.
As part of their Computing lessons, children are taught e-safety and this is always acknowledged and referred to in any appropriate contexts to further embed children’s understanding.
Impact
The impact of our PSHE curriculum and the everyday values we promote is evident in the classrooms across the school. Children feel they are able to take risks and they are keen to push themselves to achieve their full potential across the breadth of our curriculum. Our children are able to access all areas of the curriculum and progress positively within each of the different subject areas;
We work very closely with the families of all children and parents often comment on the positive changes they are observing in their own children following a period of intervention.
Class teachers closely monitor any friendship difficulties that may be occurring within the cohort and they are able to use PSHE sessions to discretely address and teach strategies to support social integration, collaboration and respect. We monitor incidences both within the classroom and outside during unstructured times as a further measure of the impact of our PSHE curriculum and the emphasis we place on our school values.
Visitors to the school often comment on the warmth of the learning environment, positive learning behaviours and the manners of our children. Visitors regularly comment on the warm welcome they are given by the children across the breadth of the school.