PSHE & Relationships and Sex Education
If you Our Vision for P.S.H.E. and R.S.E. at Jupiter Primary School
Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education is a school subject through which pupils develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to manage their lives, now and in the future. We deliver engaging and relevant PSHE lessons within a whole-school approach. Our teaching helps our children to understand how they are developing personally and socially, and tackles many of the moral, social and cultural issues that are part of growing up. The skills and attributes they develop help pupils to stay healthy and safe, preparing them for life and work in modern Britain. Additionally, it ensures children can celebrate diversity and ‘difference’ within society, giving them an understanding of equality and empathy towards others. At Jupiter, PSHE education helps pupils to achieve their potential, thus leaving school equipped with skills they will need throughout later life.
At Jupiter we us the Jigsaw Programme for PSHE. This includes a strong element of the now statutory Relationships Education. It is taught in a spiral, progressively, through a fully planned scheme of work. It provides children with relevant learning experiences to help them navigate their world and to develop positive relationships and attitudes towards themselves and others. There is a strong emphasis on emotional literacy, building resilience and nurturing mental and physical health. Jigsaw lessons also include mindfulness, allowing children to advance their emotional awareness, concentration and focus.
Our P.S.H.E. and R.S.E. Curriculum
At Jupiter Primary School, we use a whole school approach called Jigsaw. Jigsaw combines all areas of P.S.H.E., including statutory Relationships and Health Education, in a progressive approach with an emphasis on emotional literacy, building resilience and nurturing mental and physical health.
Relationships & Sex Education
An important part of the Jigsaw PSHE programme is delivered through the 'Relationships' and 'Changing Me' puzzle pieces which are covered in the summer term. There are five main aims of teaching RSE:
- To enable children to understand and respect their bodies.
- To help children develop positive and healthy relationships appropriate to their age and development.
- To support children to have positive self-esteem and body image.
- To empower them to be safe and safeguarded.
- To enable to children to understand diversity and equality.
Each year group will be taught appropriate to their age and developmental stage. At no point will a child be taught something that is inappropriate; and if a question from a child arises and the teacher feels it would be inappropriate to answer, (for example, because of its mature or explicit nature), this information with be shared with you by your child’s class teacher. The question will not be answered to the child or class if it is outside the remit of that year group’s programme.
Below is a summary of RSE coverage within the Jigsaw scheme for each year group:
- Foundation Stage - Growing up: how we have changed since we were babies
- Year 1 - Boys’ and girls’ bodies; naming body parts
- Year 2 - Boys’ and girls’ bodies; body parts and respecting privacy (which parts of the body are private and why this is)
- Year 3 - How babies grow and how boys’ and girls’ bodies change as they grow older
- Year 4 - Internal and external reproductive body parts, body changes in girls and menstruation
- Year 5 - Puberty for boys and girls, and conception
- Year 6 - Puberty for boys and girls and understanding conception to birth of a baby
If you would like to see the curriculum content and resources please contact the school office and we can share this with you.
At Jupiter we believe that it is important to teach all children to be accepting of each other as this gives a sense of belonging to any child who feels a little bit different and helps them to know it is okay to be themselves.
We do this at Jupiter throughout our curriculum. Anything we cover will be age appropriate and sensitive to all children's backgrounds, it is teaching about diversity on a wider scale, including learning about disabilities, ethnicities, and faiths. This is linked with our school values like kindness and respect. It’s also important for children to learn that families come in different shapes and sizes, including those with same-sex parents.
Since September 2020, relationships education has been compulsory in primary schools, and while there’s no statutory obligation for schools to cover LGBT issues, government guidance makes it clear that they shouldn’t be overlooked. It states:
‘Schools should ensure that all of their teaching is sensitive and age appropriate in approach and content. At the point at which schools consider it appropriate to teach their pupils about LGBT, they should ensure that this content is fully integrated into their programmes of study for this area of the curriculum rather than delivered as a standalone unit or lesson. Schools are free to determine how they do this, and we expect all pupils to have been taught LGBT content at a timely point as part of this area of the curriculum.’
Although this doesn’t oblige primary schools to include LGBT issues in its relationships education curriculum, it does set out specific points that pupils should learn about by the end of primary school, including:
- That others’ families, either within the school or the wider world, may look different from their own family, but that they should respect those differences and know that other children’s families are also characterised by love and care.
- That stable, caring relationships, which may be of different types, are at the heart of happy families.
- That marriage is a formal and legally recognised commitment between two people that’s intended to be lifelong.
- The importance of respecting others, even when they’re different from them.
We will incorporate these topics within the curriculum and not as stand alone lessons. Some examples of this are below.
- Reading books that include different types of family. For younger children an example may be - ‘And Tango makes three’ by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. This book is a story based around two male penguins – who are in a relationship – adopting an egg and raising a chick named ‘Tango’.
- Looking at diverse role models, for instance, in a topic about sporting heroes, pupils could learn about LGBT, BAME and disabled Olympians
- In RE, comparing different weddings from across different religions, including non-religious and same-sex weddings
- Discussing the rainbow flag and the meaning of its colours.
- Teaching children that ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ can be plural as well as singular, and explaining why some people choose to use the pronoun ‘they'.
- Challenging gender stereotypes with classroom resources, for instance using images that reflect different identities and types of relationships
We aim to be inclusive at Jupiter and through our curriculum, assemblies, discussions in PSHE and RE children are reminded to be respectful of each other and the people in the world around them.
