Curriculum Statement for RHE

Intent

At Silvertrees Academy, we believe that pupils should be provided with an education that prepares them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life. A key part of this relates to relationships and health education, which must be delivered to every primary-aged pupil.

The focus of Relationship Education in primary schools should be on teaching the fundamental building blocks and characteristics of positive relationships, with particular reference to friendships, and relationships with other children and adults. This will create opportunities to ensure children are taught about positive emotional and mental wellbeing and how friendships impact on this.

Health education focuses on equipping pupils with the knowledge they need to make good decisions about their own health and wellbeing.

At Silvertrees, we understand our responsibility to deliver a high-quality, age-appropriate and evidence-based relationships and health curriculum for all our pupils.

The aims of teaching RHE in our school are:

• To put into place key building blocks concerning healthy and respectful relationships in all contexts and environments.
• To understand how to be healthy and to make informed decisions on their choices.
• To develop the knowledge and capability to take care of themselves, their peers and others around them, including where to access help and support if problems arise.
• To support in the development of attributes including helping them to develop self-belief and self-worth, perseverance, delayed gratification, courage, humility, trustworthiness, good mental health, resilience, kindness, integrity, generosity, honesty and a sense of justice.
• To support them to become successful and happy young adults who make a meaningful contribution to the community.
• To tackle arising safeguarding concerns before they arise and where they do, to ensure students are equipped emotionally to deal with these issues.

Implementation

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in RHE, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school and in line with the National Curriculum. RHE is taught through half termly themes, focusing on the knowledge and skills stated in the Sandwell curriculum: Healthy Mind, Happy Me. These key themes include All About Me, Friendships, Resilience and Coping, Belonging, My Wider World and Being the Best I Can Be.

At Silvertrees, we ensure RHE has the same importance given to it as the core subjects, as we feel this is important in enabling all children to have the knowledge, skills and understanding they need to lead confident, healthy, independent lives and become informed, responsible citizens of their community. Key themes of RHE are also covered in other areas of the curriculum including Science, PE and Computing as well as during whole school routines such as Assemblies.

Teachers plan lessons for their class using our progression of knowledge and skills document, alongside the Sandwell curriculum. These documents ensure the curriculum is covered and the skills and knowledge taught is progressive from year group to year group, and this spiral progression carries through to our feeder junior school where they continue the Sandwell curriculum.

The teaching of RHE enables all children to learn and understand how to manage all aspects of their lives, both now and in the future and support them in developing the qualities and attributes they need to thrive as individuals, family members and members of society.

Impact

Our RHE curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate individual progression. We focus on progression of knowledge, understanding and skills and the discreet vocabulary progression also forms part of the units of work. The impact of RHE is assessed by monitoring change and development in the behaviour and attainment of individuals and groups over time. Throughout the Early Years Foundation Stage, children are regularly assessed across the strands of PSED (Personal, Social and Emotional Development): Making Relationships, Self Confidence and Self Awareness and Managing Feelings and Behaviour. Assessments are recorded through observations and these assessments inform future lesson planning and individual interventions where necessary. In KS1, teachers assess children’s progress in RHE by making informal judgements based on observations during lessons. These inform future lesson planning, individual interventions where necessary and feedback to parents.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods and ideas:

• Children are sociable and interact well with each other and adults.
• Children are healthy, independent and responsible.
• Children are able to manage and reflect on their own feelings appropriately and use key strategies to support their emotions and a range of situations.
• Children appreciate what it means to be a member of a diverse society.
• Children play a positive role in contributing to school life and the wider community.
• Children demonstrate a positive outlook towards school with good attendance and behaviour.
• Children achieve age related expectations across the wider curriculum.
• Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary before and after the unit is taught.
• Appropriate evidence of children’s work from RHE lessons will be collated in Year Group Big Books – EYFS, Year 1, Year 2. This will be monitored every half term.
• Interviewing the pupils about their learning and always giving children the opportunities to reflect (pupil voice).
• Annual reporting of standards across the curriculum.