The PSHE curriculum at Sheffield Springs follows guidance from the PSHE association and Learn Sheffield to ensure that our children can live happy, confident and independent lives.
The PSHE curriculum at Sheffield Springs aims to develop the powerful knowledge, skills and attributes students need to keep themselves healthy and safe. It should prepare students for life and work allowing students to play an active, positive, and successful role in today’s diverse society. The curriculum will allow students to voice their opinions and debate topical themes and issues. This will enable pupils to have conversations in school which they may not have the chance to have at home. As a result, this should help students to feel safe outside of school and equip them with the skills they need to come to informed decisions when faced with challenges in their life beyond the classroom.
The PSHE curriculum will give pupils a range of skills which will be built up and developed over time, whilst providing the opportunity to recap key concepts to combat the forgetting curve.
The curriculum has been sequenced to encourage increasing cognitive demand from Year 7 onwards. As pupils progress through the curriculum, expectations around understanding and application increases. Pupils acquire knowledge and the foundations of the subject in Year 7, the depth of understanding increases year on year. Therefore, by the end of Year 9, pupils should be able to apply their knowledge and understanding, to understand intimate relationships in Year 9 after learning about puberty in Year 7 and general relationships in Year 8.
All students are challenged appropriately in lessons to enable them to all reach the same end point. All students need to develop an understanding of how society works to ensure that our students are sent into the wider world as respectful and resourceful young people.
The PSHE curriculum is carefully constructed at Sheffield Springs to allow students to build on their prior knowledge and make clear links between topics to understand the world around them at a deep level. It is important that students don’t think of PSHE as a stand-alone subject and they see it as story which educates and inspires, linking to the society and physical and social interactions around them.
The PSHE content in Year 7, 8 and 9 helps to prepare students not just for key stage 4 but for life after school. Building confident, resilient, understanding young people is our aim. We want students to understand relationships and what a negative or toxic relationship might present itself. We want them to be knowledgeable about mental health, healthy life styles and drugs and alcohol, we want them to be equipped with life skills such as financial decision making, career skills and self-worth so that they can live successful and fulfilled lives when they leave Sheffield Springs.
By having a good understanding of the areas of the PSHE curriculum students may find challenging, it allows us to reflect on the best ways to teach content to our students. Content needs to be delivered in manageable chunks of information, using the teacher as the expert to establish the key processes which can then be confidently applied to independent tasks. It is important to enable students to discuss their ideas to build confidence with answering extended questions and presenting ideas to the class. Students also need to have the opportunity to reflect on the concepts that they have learnt in previous years so that the forgetting curve is minimised. Therefore, by having schemes of work which build on each other from one year to the next we will help to address gaps in understanding and also ensure that key skills and knowledge are re-taught throughout key stage 3.