“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think” – Margaret Mead

Intent

At Firs Primary School, PSHE is integrated throughout the curriculum and plays a key role in the children's overall school experience. Our aim is to equip children for life beyond school, helping them recognise and appreciate their true selves while understanding how they connect with others in our constantly evolving world.

PSHE is a central focus throughout the school, with Personal, Social, and Health Education being taught directly as part of our whole-school approach. We believe that effective PSHE enhances children's ability to learn, and this area of the school's work is highly valued, as it fosters wellbeing and supports the overall development of children as individuals.

Implementation

At Firs Primary School, our vision for Teaching and Learning is centred on maintaining high expectations and a firm belief that every child can achieve and succeed according to their individual abilities. We value challenge, engagement, and continuous learning (mastery). This is supported by thoughtful curriculum planning, modelled examples of practice, and responsive teaching that includes deliberate and purposeful checking for understanding.

A positive and stimulating learning environment is essential, ensuring that behaviour for learning is at the heart of our vision, as we aim to create a warm and productive classroom atmosphere. We carefully plan assessments to support the development of retrieval skills and schema, allowing students to make connections across subjects. Finally, we place a strong emphasis on the explicit teaching of Reading, Speaking, and Vocabulary in all subjects, which forms the foundation of our approach to teaching and learning at Firs.

Firs Foundation of Effective Practice ensures we have a whole school approach to delivering our curriculum vision. The six Foundations provide staff with a learning model to ensure we deliver lessons based on research evidence, the six Foundations we model our Teaching and Learning on:

Foundation 1: Culture and Climate.

Foundation 2: Checking For Understanding.

Foundation 3: Explaining and Modelling.

Foundation 4: Reading, Talking and Vocabulary.

Foundation 5: Curriculum Planning.

Foundation 6: Retrieval and Schema building.

At Firs Primary School, we use the PSHE Association Programme builders to support our curriculum. These suggest content to be covered for each year group for each half term. Each term or half term there is an overarching question to lead the study.

In Key stage 1 they begin with ‘What?’ and ‘Who?’ questions building throughout Key stage 2 into ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ questions.

The three core themes Health and Wellbeing, Relationships and Living in the Wider World are fully covered and colour coded throughout the key stages. The teaching builds according to age and needs of the pupils with developmentally appropriate learning objectives linked to each key question.

Impact

By the end of primary school pupils will know about:

Physical Health and Mental Wellbeing

• Mental wellbeing
• Internet safety and harms
• Physical health and fitness
• Healthy eating
• Drugs, alcohol and tobacco
• Health and prevention
• Basic first aid
• Changing adolescent body

Relationships

• Families and people who care for me
• Caring friendships
• Respectful relationships
• Online relationships
• Being safe

Living in the Wider World

• Shared responsibilities
• Communities
• Media literacy and Digital resilience
• Economic wellbeing – Money
• Economic wellbeing- Aspirations. Work and careers

By the time pupils leave Firs Primary School, they will have developed the skills, knowledge, and understanding to succeed in PSHE in secondary education and beyond.  They will recognise and appreciate their true selves while understanding how they connect with others in our constantly evolving world.