PSHE at Manor Leas Junior Academy

PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) is a subject at the heart of our school and curriculum. We teach PSHE in a variety of ways. It is taught to every class each week as discrete lessons, but also permeates through many other lessons and activities we do. This includes assemblies, the school council, educational visits, fund raising events and involvement in community activities.

Intent - what is the vision?

Manor Leas Junior Academy’s aim is for all children to leave our school with the fundamental life skills they need to be a valued member of society. Our curriculum is carefully designed to excite, challenge, and provoke children’s thoughts and opinions to develop empathetic and inquisitive individuals. We want our children to hold ambitions for their future and understand the qualities needed to get there, but also be able to understand other’s positions and ideologies. Manor Leas Junior Academy has worked hard to create a curriculum to cover a vast range of topics to do so. 

Implementation - how does it work across the school?

Our PSHE scheme of work covers three key areas:

· Health and Well-Being

· Relationships

· Living in the Wider World

This includes: personal safety, healthy eating, healthy lifestyle choices, hygiene, rights and responsibilities at home, school and in the community, friendships, bullying and financial education. All of these areas help our pupils develop knowledge, understanding and skills, so they can manage their lives now and in the future in this ever-changing world, supporting their spiritual, moral, mental and physical development.

The staff and governors support the school’s policy to deliver the programme of work for Relationships, Health and Sex Education (RHSE). At Manor Leas Junior Academy this is called RHSE, with the emphasis on Relationships. The focus in Years 3 and 4 is how to develop positive relationships with yourself, friends and wider circles of people. In Years 5 and 6 this is built upon with lessons on growing up and puberty, with links to life cycles in the science curriculum.

As part of our PSHE lessons, we also take part in a Circle time session each week. Here, we ask the children planned questions to start a class discussion that will then feed into the topic we are covering in PSHE. This is used as a warm up for the children to share their own experiences and opinions before starting the PSHE session. 

Teacher planning is supported by the use of the 1decision, Young Citizens and Wellbeing School schemes of learning.

1Decision

1Decision allows the children to explore a subject even further such as Staying Safe, Relationships and Feelings and Emotions. A video will present a dilemma to the children, and together they will have to decide which option they think is best. They then have the opportunity to watch how their decisions creates consequences, either positively or negatively and then watch what would have happened if they had chosen the other option. 

https://schools.1decision.co.uk/my-modules

Young Citizens 

Young Citizens is another scheme that we use to support our planning and teaching in PSHE. The scheme is designed to enable young citizens to participate actively in society. There a lots of different creative activities that we use to discuss and explore serious topics like climate change, budgeting and citizenship. 

https://www.youngcitizens.org/

Happy Minds

Our PSHE curriculum has been planned on a fortnightly timetable, to allow lessons to be taken at a slower pace to encourage in depth discussions and questions to be raised and analysed. We hope that by doing so, children feel heard, respected and also get an insight into other people's perspectives, beliefs and differences. 

How are the children finding PSHE?

"I really look forward to a Friday afternoon, I enjoy being able to talk to my friends about things we don't usually."

"My favourite part of PSHE is the Circle Time we do at the start. I really enjoy playing the games as a class and laughing a lot." 

"I really like watching the videos on 1Decision and having to decide which is the best option. It has really made us realise how important some of the decisions we make are."