We are aspiring healthy, mindful and confident citizens! 

At Southville Primary School PSHE Education includes Relationship Education and Health Education but will be referred to as ‘PSHE’ for the purposes of this subject rationale.

At Southville Primary school, we aspire to be confident, healthy and emotionally well adapted. Our PSHE curriculum will help give pupils the knowledge, skills and understanding they need to lead confident, healthy, independent lives and to become informed, active, responsible citizens. We will enable children to take part in a wide range of experiences across and beyond the curriculum, in lessons, assemblies, through visits and other activities, contributing to the life of their school and communities.   We will help them to value themselves and others, building positive relationships, enabling them to become healthy and fulfilled individuals, active in their local community. We aim to prepare the children both physically and mentally, for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.

We will do this by:

• Ensuring the well-being and views of every individual is valued by establishing clear and agreed positive ground rules in class where each child will feel safe to share their thoughts and feelings. 
• Introducing our children to the growth mindset through lessons and assemblies which will help them develop the emotional skills and resilience needed to thrive in their future endeavours.
• Promoting healthy lifestyles by teaching about them in lessons and engaging the children in weekly healthy and active assemblies where physical achievements will be celebrated.
• Providing the children with daily healthy snacks and school meals in accordance with the DfE schools foods standards. 
• Encouraging respect and tolerance towards themselves and others by modelling this daily as staff and by building on our Jigsaw PSHE program taught in discrete weekly PSHE curriculum time, as well as in other lessons such as PE.
• Teaching them a thorough program of Relationships Education and Health Education through regular PSHE lessons, giving them the knowledge and understanding to help them value themselves and others and form positive relationships. 
• Offering them a high quality RSE programme tailored to the age, physical and emotional maturity of the pupils. [Footnote 1]
• Developing their skills to make informed choices and decisions by giving them opportunities to take part in pupil voice activities regularly such as school’s council meetings and pupil voice surveys.
• Offering them the chance to be active citizens within the local community by weaving activities into our immersive learning curriculum which require them to learn about and engage with their local community and the wider global community.
• Providing opportunities to challenge stereotypes and build personal aspirations by meeting high achieving people in a variety of professions through class visits, assemblies and workshops.

[1] Statutory Relationships and Health Education

“The Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education (England) Regulations 2019, made under sections 34 and 35 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, make Relationships Education compulsory for all pupils receiving primary education…They also make Health Education compulsory in all schools except independent schools.” DfE Guidance p.8

Implementation

We teach Personal, Social, Health Education as a whole-school approach to underpin children’s development as people and because we believe that this also supports their learning capacity. We use planning and resources from the Jigsaw scheme of work.  Jigsaw covers all areas of PSHE for the primary phase including statutory Relationships and Health Education. Children’s self-assessment is built into each Jigsaw unit.  Children assess their progress against the key outcomes at the end of each unit and teachers make ongoing formative assessments as part of the assess-plan-do-review cycle. 

We allocate a minimum of 45 minutes to PSHE each week in order to teach the PSHE knowledge and skills in a developmental and age-appropriate way.  Class teachers deliver the weekly lessons to their own classes. These explicit lessons are supplemented, reinforced and enhanced in the wider curriculum and life of the school: 

• Assemblies, including opportunities for collective worship with visitors of different faiths
• Circle time 
• Events and celebrations, such as Black History Month, Anti-Bullying Week and Democracy Day
• Classroom expectations of conduct based on the Jigsaw Learning Charter 
• Praise and reward systems
• School Council
• Through relationships child to child, adult to child and adult to adult across the school. We aim to ‘live’ what is learnt and apply it to everyday situations in the school community.

In addition to the above, the Superflex and Zones of Regulation programmes and resources may be used where deemed appropriate by staff, to support pupils’ emotional literacy, relationships and social interaction throughout the year.

To ensure consistency across the school and to create an safe, enabling and supportive learning environment, all classrooms have the following:

• Class rules/expectations on display, based in part on the expectations set out in the Jigsaw programme. 
• The Jigsaw Charter on display.  
• A ‘chatbox’, in which children can leave notes for their teacher.  Teachers check these daily and respond to the issues arising from the comments sensitively and quickly.

Using Jigsaw to deliver Relationships and Health Education - We include the statutory Relationships and Health Education within our whole-school PSHE programme.  This content will therefore be taught by class teachers in their PSHE lessons.  This programme’s complimentary update policy ensures we are always using the most up to date teaching materials and that our teachers are well-supported.

Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) - We define Sex Education as “understanding human reproduction”.  Puberty is taught as a statutory requirement of Health Education and covered by our Jigsaw PSHE Programme in the ‘Changing Me’ Puzzle (unit), and so we conclude from the DFE Guidance that sex education refers to human reproduction.  In order to teach this in a scientific context, and knowing that National Curriculum Science requires children to know how mammals reproduce, we have opted to teach this within our science curriculum, not within PSHE or Relationships and Sex Education as we believe this is most appropriate for our children. 

It is expected that teachers discuss the termly PSHE curriculum with parents of identified children before teaching the unit. This is so parents can alert teachers to any possible sensitivities. In addition to this they are aware of what will be taught in order to support the pupils appropriately.

Zones of Regulation

The Zones of Regulation is a programme that aims to help children notice the emotion they are feeling and then regulate themselves if they are feeling uncomfortable. The programme starts by helping children to identify which zone an emotion or feeling is in. The children explore these zones and learn to be able to identify which zone they are in. This is supported by staff who use the language of the zones when appropriate. 

There are posters in every classroom and around the school. Sometimes children can’t or don’t want to name the emotion but they can identify which zone they are in. Children also learn that their feelings and emotions can lead to expected and unexpected behaviours and that those behaviours can have an impact on the children and adults around them e.g., if you are in the red zone and shouting very loudly at your friend it is unlikely that your friend will be in the green zone. 

Once children understand the concept of the zones they will they explore ways to help regulate themselves with the support of sensory devices and calming techniques. We want to help all children recognize when they are beginning to feel uncomfortable in the yellow zone and have a toolbox of ideas to help them regulate themselves. In addition to addressing self-regulation, the students will gain an increased vocabulary of emotional terms, skills in reading other people’s facial expressions, perspective about how others see and react to their behaviour, insight into events that trigger their behaviour, calming and alerting strategies, and problem solving skills.