Personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) is an integral part of a child’s education. PSHE is currently a non-statutory subject. However, the Department for Education does expect all schools to teach PSHE to their students. And, some parts of PSHE are compulsory; for primary schools, it is compulsory to teach relationship education and in state-funded primary schools it is also compulsory to teach health education.
A well-built PSHE curriculum, that has been designed to meet the particular needs of the children in your school, will foster a healthy and informed attitude towards sex and relationships, physical and mental health, drugs and alcohol, financial health and personal wellbeing.
But it should also do more than this. When a good PSHE curriculum is delivered well, teachers or facilitators give students a model for discussing topics that they may find difficult or embarrassing, they demonstrate healthy ways to set boundaries and they empower students to use their voices.
These 6 tips will help you deliver a meaningful PSHE curriculum that will give your students a set of tools and ideas to help them navigate the world ahead of them.
Stand-alone lessons don’t work! To build student knowledge and skills effectively, it’s important to build on prior knowledge; from year to year, unit to unit and from subject to subject.
This has become fairly established for core subjects and there is a significant current drive towards the creation of schemes of work that focus on the progression of skills and of knowledge across a child’s school career.
These same principles apply to PSHE and it’s important to create or use schemes that have been planned for the long-term.
Take a look at some of the most effective PSHE schemes:
Setting clear expectations that students recognise and understand is a cornerstone of good behaviour management when teaching any lesson. Since topics taught in PSHE can be sensitive or difficult for students, it is particularly important that clear ground rules are established.
Students need to believe in the ground rules that will go on to govern their PSHE lessons. An effective way of boosting buy-in is by involving students in the creation of the rules; dedicate the first 15 minutes of your first PSHE lesson to creating a set of rules with the class. If students feel like they were involved in the creation of the rules, they’re more likely to abide by them.
Education Endowment Foundation’s Improving Behaviour in Schools Guidance Report.
Top tips for ground rules
It can be powerful to involve students in the creation of rules, but you should also guide them towards rules that will ensure you create a space where students feel comfortable asking questions and getting things wrong.
Try to include rules about:
CPD can be expensive to access and schools don’t always have the budget to spend on dedicated training courses.
But don’t worry! CPD for PSHE can come in many forms, and it doesn’t have to be a paid-for, full-day training session. There are dozens of fantastic, free resources available for you to learn more about topic areas within PSHE. Here are some of the best:
Any work that you can do to build your knowledge of the topics you’ll be teaching is valuable CPD, and for virtually all PSHE topics there is a wealth of fantastic resources creatable by incredible charities and organisations.
It’s important to create a safe and inclusive environment, when talking about topics like mental health, gender identity and drugs and alcohol, we as educators can’t always know the full scope of any young person’s experience.
Here are some ways that you can help any young people that may have had negative experiences or exposure, or who are worried or anxious about any of the topics you teach, feel safer.
It’s important to understand that students may want to learn more about these topics in their own time. Particularly as some topics that you cover might be considered taboo for some in your class. There is dangerous, harmful content on the internet and social media relating to drugs and alcohol, self-harm, gender identity and LGBTQ+ and it's important to ensure your students are aware of this.
Help your students to know where they can go to find safe, reliable information and have these sites and services up on a display somewhere in the classroom or the school. Students may decide days or weeks later that they want to know more, and it should be easy for them to find those safe sources of information.
Some great examples of free services that you can signpost to young people:
As with all subjects, as educators, it’s essential that we are assessing for learning as we teach PSHE. By embedding Assessment for Learning in your teaching of PSHE, you involve students in their own learning, can more quickly assess whether learning outcomes have been met and more effectively alter and adapt your curriculum to meet long-term learning objectives.
Votes for Schools recommends exercises to complement their teaching resources and evidence learning, including students responding to agony aunt letters and students creating a decision map game. These exercises and others they recommend are excellent for ensuring that you have a good grasp of how well students have understood the content of the lesson. A simple initial Assessment for Learning technique to complement these would be for students to peer-assess one another’s work.
Finally, evidencing learning is a way to tie your whole curriculum together and allow you to measure the impact that the teaching has had. Measuring how well students met the long-term learning outcomes will allow you to make tweaks and adjustments to your curriculum in the future.