St Anne's Catholic Primary School

RSE and PSHE

From September 2020, Relationships Education became compulsory for all pupils receiving primary education.  

The DFE guidance defines RSE as “lifelong learning about physical, moral and emotional development.  It is about the understanding of the importance of marriage and family life, stable and loving relationships, respect, love and care.  It is also about the teaching of sex, sexuality and sexual health.”[1]  It is about the development of the pupil’s knowledge and understanding of themselves about what it means to be fully human, called to live in right relationships with self and others and being enabled to make moral decisions in conscience.  The DFE identifies three main elements: “attitudes and values, personal and social skills, and knowledge and understanding”.

INTENT/What we aim to do through our RSE/PSHE Curriculum

The Rationale behind RSE at St Anne's

“I have come that you might have life and have it to the full”    John 10:10

At St Anne's we are involved in relationships and sex education precisely because of our Christian beliefs about God and about the human person.  The belief in the unique dignity of the human person made in the image and likeness of God underpins the approach to all education in a Catholic school.  Our approach to RSE is therefore rooted in the Catholic Church’s teaching of the human person and presented in a positive framework of Christian ideals.

At the heart of the Christian life is the Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit in communion, united in loving relationship and embracing all people and all creation.  As a consequence of the Christian belief that we are made in the image and likeness of God, gender and sexuality are seen as God’s gift, reflect God’s beauty, and share in the divine creativity.  RSE, therefore, is placed firmly within the context of relationship as it is there that sexuality grows and develops.

Following the guidance of the Bishops of England and Wales and as advocated by the DFE (and the Welsh Assembly Government) RSE is firmly embedded in the PSHE framework as it is concerned with nurturing human wholeness and integral to the physical, spiritual, emotional, moral, social and intellectual development of pupils.  It is centred on Christ’s vision of being human as good news and will be positive and prudent, showing the potential for development, while enabling the dangers and risks involved to be understand and appreciated.

All RSE is in accordance with the Church’s moral teaching.  It emphasises the central importance of marriage and the family whilst acknowledging that all pupils have a fundamental right to have their life respected whatever household they come from and where pupils in our school community have different values from ours, our priority would always be to include them and to support them pastorally as appropriate.

Adaptations are made to all RSE and PSHE lessons to ensure that all children are able to access the curriculum and are not disadvantaged by Special Educational Needs or Disability.

Please see the Policy for more information.

At St Anne's we ensure that RSE is sensitive to the different needs of individual pupils in respect to pupils’ different abilities, levels of maturity and personal circumstances and is taught in a way that does not subject pupils to discrimination. Lessons will also help children to realise the nature and consequences of discrimination, teasing, bullying and aggressive behaviours (including cyber-bullying), use of prejudice-based language and how to respond and ask for help. 

We use two schemes to support our planning and learning; in RSE we use Journey in Love which we supplement with extra teaching from 1Decision.  Throughout, our RSE teaching is rooted in our Catholic faith and Catholic teachings.  PSHE is taught using the 1Decision scheme.

In the EYFS we use Journey in Love as well as the Development Matters document to support our planning in PSED. 

BROAD CONTENT OF RSE

Three aspects of RSE – attitudes and values, knowledge and understanding, and personal and social skills will be provided in three inter-related ways: the whole school/ethos dimension; a cross-curricular dimension and a specific relationships and sex curriculum.

The children cover 3 modules:

• Created and Loved by God – explores the individual. Rooted in the teaching that we are made in the image and likeness of God, it helps children to develop an understanding of the importance of valuing themselves as the basis for personal relationships.

• Created to Love Others – explores the individual’s relationship with others. Building on the understanding that we have been created out of love and for love, this module explores how we take this calling into our family, friendships and relationships, and teaches strategies for developing healthy relationships and keeping safe.

• Created to Live in a Community – explores the individual’s relationship with the wider world. Here we explore how human beings are relational by nature and are called to love others in the wider community through service, through dialogue and through working for the Common Good.

During this week's RSE lesson we looked at different ways trusted people in our life can support us through our puberty! Help us underastand that we are all special made in the image and likeness of God; our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and it is God’s gift to us.Therefore, we should respect our bodies, character and personality. At the end we created a poster-guide for puberty!