PSHE & RSE
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» Curriculum Intent
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The PSHE Department Team
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Curriculum Intent
COGNITION CURRICULUM
In the PSHE Curriculum Area the cognition curriculum is covered in many different ways. For example, reciprocation is covered in Year 7 and 8 when they have lessons which explicitly focus on teamwork and developing businesses. Most lessons require students to work in pairs or groups to share information.
Resilience is taught in a number of ways. Students complete baseline assessments in most lessons to assess their own skills and then they work throughout the lesson to improve. Some of the topics discussed in PSHE are also sensitive (bullying, homophobia, knife crime etc.) and students have to learn to listen and respect others showing their resilience by managing sometimes strong feelings and emotions.
Students learn resourcefulness through group discussions where they are often given the resources that they need but need to figure it out for themselves. They also ask each other for support before asking the teacher. Tasks are differentiated allowing students to use their prior knowledge from previous tasks to help them with their answers. Students are also given a bank of resources/contacts at the end of each lesson if they want to go elsewhere for support for example at the end of the lesson for year 8 about healthy coping strategies students are directed to websites and helplines for additional support if they need it. 
Reflectiveness is seen in every lesson through plenaries and baseline assessments. Students reflect on their progress and at the end of each term students are directed to reflect on what they have learnt. There are often tasks throughout a term which asks them to reflect on what they have learned and asks students how they would apply it to real life situations. For example in Autumn 1 of Year 7 students learn about friendships and the good qualities a friend should have and in Spring 1 students have a lesson on living in a diverse society. Students can reflect on the good qualities of a friend and compare them to what qualities people living in a diverse society would need.
Recall is used in some lessons. Students recall the rules for PSHE lessons and the British values that we have focused on before. Students also need to recall the protected characteristics when we discuss stereotypes, prejudicial language and living in a diverse society (these topics come up in every year group multiple times).
Culture curriculum
In PSHE students have visitors and speakers to discuss different topics. For example Russell from Safety for you and his colleagues delivered an assembly in September about First Aid and CPR. Students also had a lesson to go with this assembly which had real life scenarios and Year 11 students had the option to use a CPR dummy. We have visitors in to deliver RSE topics as well (RAP Project). In February we have a company delivering a play on Knife Crime to year 10s and last year we had Thames Valley police deliver lessons on Drug Awareness to Year 9s.
Students are always given case studies and real-life examples in lessons that they discuss and react to eg. E-safety, healthy relationships.
We also cover some elements of careers in PSHE. Students have access to Unifrog which gives them information about careers in their local area, webinars about different jobs and links to external agencies that provide training and support.
Core Curriculum
PSHE must cover Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education. We cover this whole school while also covering Living in the Wider World. We follow the government approved PSHE Association thematic approach from KS1 through to KS5. We also supplement and support our curriculum with external speakers, visitors and assemblies.
We adapt our curriculum to suit the needs of our students. This is informed by our safeguarding team, the needs of the local context and the national agenda.
PSHE & RSE News
The Academy proudly received an 'Equally Safe' award after successfully completing the Equalteach's 'Equally Safe Anti-Bullying' programme.
Mindfulness and Wellbeing
Please see below for helpful links for mindfulness and wellbeing
https://10daysofhappiness.org/#joinform
http://mindfulnessforteens.com/resources/