PSHE and RSE at St. John's CofE primary & nursery school.

Our vision of PSHE and RSE at St.John's

We want to put in place the key building blocks of healthy, respectful relationships, focusing on family and friendships, both on and offline. We define RSE (within PSHE) as being part of lifelong learning about the emotional, social and physical aspects of growing up, relationships, sex, human sexuality and sexual health. It aims to give pupils essential skills for building positive, enjoyable, respectful and non-exploitive relationships and to stay safe on and offline. PSHE at St. John's

PSHE enables exploration of attitudes and values, helps build self-esteem and confidence to view their sexuality positively, helping children to gain knowledge, develop skills and form positive beliefs and attitudes. This will sit alongside the essential understanding of how to be healthy. Teaching on mental wellbeing is central to these subjects, especially as a priority for parents is their children’s happiness. All of this content should support the wider work in helping to foster pupil wellbeing and develop resilience and virtues that we know are fundamental to our pupils being happy, successful and productive members of society. This should be complemented by development of virtues like kindness, generosity, self sacrifice and honesty.

Teaching PSHE at St. John's

From September 2019 we have used the Derbyshire 'PSHE Matters' resources to help us deliver an exciting and relevant curriculum to our children. These resources allow us to teach the legislative Sex and Relationship Education curriculum that was updated and is statutory from September 2020. 

You can see a curriculum map below showing you which units we teach, and when. 

Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) at St. John's.

The guidance introduced in 2020 focuses on healthy relationships and keeping children safe in the modern world. It also covers a wide range of topics relating to physical and mental health, wellbeing, safeguarding and healthy relationships.

Learning about the emotional, social and physical aspects of growing up will give children and young people the information, skills and positive values to have safe, fulfilling relationships and help them take responsibility for their own well-being.

Relationships, along with Health Education, is statutory, and form part of the National Curriculum. For Secondary schools Sex Education will also become statutory. However, the DfE continue to recommend that all primary schools should have a sex education programme tailored to the age and the physical and emotional maturity of the pupils. Where schools provide sex education at key stages 1 and 2, parents will have the right to withdraw their child from sex education but not from statutory Relationships Education, Health Education or what is taught in the Science National curriculum.

Our RSE (Relationship and Sex Education) curriculum and policy ensures that our RSE provision is appropriate for our pupils based on their:

• Age
• Physical and emotional maturity
• Religious and cultural backgrounds
• Special educational needs and disabilities

Whilst there will be differences of opinion about this, we hope that consulting with you will help to inform our schools’ decisions on when and how certain content is covered, and enable us to reach a general consensus. 

Sticky Knowledge Organisers

At St. John's Primary School and Nursery we strongly believe that parents should work in partnership with us. Therefore, we will be sharing some 'sticky knowledge' PSHE and RSE organisers to share with our parents at the start of each half term. These knowledge organisers show you what we are hoping to learn each half term, the vocabulary we will be using and provide parents with some activities that they can do at home. 

Parent consultation

Mrs.Girling our PSHE regularly runs a Sex and Relationship Education workshop for all our parents where she shows resources that we use and answers questions that parents have. The workshop was last run during the summer of 2022 where, once again, parents were able to understand the purpose and content of our PSHE curriculum, including RSE.

We will run this parent workshop every two years (the next workshop will be run during Summer 1 2024) to ensure parents have the opportunity to view our resources and ask any questions.