PSHE, Wellbeing and Equality
The importance of positive wellbeing and relationships is central to everything that we do at Clinton. Our curriculum, as a whole, draws on transferrable skills that enable children to practise and develop skills such as focus, perseverance, collaboration, reflecting on learning, empathy, developing a positive mindset and thriving in a community. The contexts within which children learn history and geography all include a citizenship element, which enable the children to consider issues that are impacting the wider world and the role that they have to play in that.
Alongside this, we also teach Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education discretely to ensure that we are equipping the children of Clinton with the skills and knowledge that they need to thrive now, and in the future. This includes helping them to deal with critical issues they face every day such as friendships, emotional wellbeing and change, and giving them a solid foundation for whatever challenging opportunities lie ahead.
At Clinton, we draw together a number of curriculums that help us to teach pertinent PSHE skills and knowledge.
These include:
Taking Care: Protective Behaviours Programme
Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) following the Growing Up with Yasmine and Tom scheme of work
The Spark curriculum
No outsiders
As a school, we have then decided that there are 5 other main areas of PSHE that we feel are important for us to focus on. These are bereavement, family break up, learning about additional needs, anxiety and successful friendships. Each year group teaches a lesson relating to each of these areas focussing on the strands empathising, normalising, learning coping strategies, understanding and communicating.
Relationships and Sex Education
From the very start of Primary school, we help children to learn how to form good relationships. Our policy – linked below, explains our approach to relationships and sex education and gives a brief overview of our curriculum. We use ‘Yasmine and Tom’ which is a ‘PSHE Association Quality Assured Resource’ to deliver the programme – from Year R to Year 6.
For a flavour of the programme, click here! https://www.fpa.org.uk/growing-up-with-yasmine-and-tom/Relationships and Set Education policy
No Outsiders
‘No Outsiders’ is a programme we use to promote equality for all sections of the community. The aim is to bring all parents and children on board from the start so that children leave primary school happy and excited about living in a community full of difference and diversity, whether that difference is through ethnicity, gender, ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, age or religion. The programme is based around through provoking, age appropriate books which open up lots of discussion and reflection, and each lesson, children record their thoughts in a journal.
As a starting point, we developed our own statement about diversity:
To see the titles of the lessons children will be learning click below:
Taking Care
The Taking Care: Protective Behaviours Programme helps children to recognise safe and unsafe feelings and how to talk about their feelings. It supports them in developing a range of strategies for self-protection and helps them to recognise and trust their own feelings about a situation – early warning signs.
The programme focuses on two key themes:
• We all have a right to feel safe all of the time; and
• We can talk with someone about anything, even if it feels awful or small.
The sessions are specifically tailored to meet the needs of the different year groups, from Foundation Stage to Year 6, and usually take place over a four-week block.
We teach much of the work early in the Autumn term, and children may come home with stickers when they have completed modules – giving you a way in to conversations which can deepen their understanding.
The programme, developed in Warwickshire, is about developing, in children, greater emotional intelligence in order that they recognise from their ‘early warning signs’ when they are feeling troubled. Recognising this is important so that they can express their concerns so that we at school or anyone they are talking to can help them. By giving them the vocabulary to talk about their feelings and by helping them to form networks of people they can talk to – especially when they aren’t at home - it improves children’s resilience and ability to cope with difficult situations.
Children fill in ‘network cards’ which they give to people on their networks to show them that they have been chosen as a trusted adult they could talk to if they felt they needed to. Often they give these to parents and will relay things they are worried about to them but sometimes, for several possible reasons, they choose others to speak to and identifying those people is a protective factor for them.
The programme has strong links to Child Protection and equips children with skills they need to get help if they are ever in unsafe situations.
Click below for further information:
We all have the right to feel safe
The Spark Programme
In upper KS2, we use the ‘Spark Programme’ to teach children how to look after their own wellbeing by showing them how to manage difficult thoughts and the feelings they create.
The programme explains ‘Your Spark’ as being your ‘inner voice / conscience’ and encourages you to listen to it. It talks about how sometimes thoughts clutter up our spark and crowd out what we know to be true and rational. We might act differently as a result.
It also teaches that we can choose what we focus our attention on, and that some thoughts are unhelpful, and we shouldn’t fixate on those ones as it will give us more intense feelings which might overwhelm us.
Bereavement
The following books are used to sensitively explore the topic of bereavement in each year group:
Reception – Goodbye Mousie
Year 1 - Mum’s Jumper
Year 2 - Lifetimes: a beautiful way to explain death to children
Year 3 - Storm in a Jar
Year 4 - Seal Surfer
Year 5 - The Heart and the Bottle
Year 6 - Michael Rosen’s Sad Book
The website below is helpful for parents who are looking for ways to help children come to terms with a bereavement.
Family Breakup
The following books explore the diversity of families and family-life, with a particular focus on family breakup:
Reception – The Family Book
Year 1 - My Daddy is a Silly Monkey
Year 2 - Where did you go today?
Year 3 - My Family’s Changing
Year 4 - PSHE association resources
Year 5 - Grace and Family
Year 6 - I, Cosmo
The following website is useful for parents who want to support their children through family breakup.
https://www.familylives.org.uk/
Positive Relationships
The following books focus on the positive aspects of friendships and how important it is to show kindness to everybody:
Reception – A Friend Like You
Year 1 - On Sudden Hill
Year 2 - The New Girl
Year 3 - Be Kind
Year 4 - The Same Inside
Year 5 - Each Kindness
Year 6 - The Small Things
Additional Needs
The following books help us to celebrate how we are all different and introduce the children to some specific physical and behavioural needs:
Reception – Along Came a Different
Year 1 - Don’t Call Me Special
Year 2 - Through the Eyes of Me
Year 3 - Perfectly Norman
Year 4 - The Girl Who Thought in Pictures
Year 5 - The Girl Who Thought in Pictures
Year 6 - Emmanuel’s Dream
Anxiety
The following books are used to help children understand ‘worry’ and how to manage our worries.
Reception – The Worrying Worries
Year 1 - The WorrySaurus
Year 2 - Ruby's Worry
Year 3 - Willy and the Cloud
Year 4 - Your Mind is like the Sky
Year 5 - Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom
Year 6 - Don't Worry, Be Happy
The website below supports parents with helping children who suffer from anxiety.
https://childmind.org/article/classroom-anxiety-in-children/