PSHE/RSE

Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship Education (PSHCE)

At Linchfield Community Primary School. Pupils are taught PSHCE in order to assisted them in gaining the knowledge, skills and understanding they require to lead confident, healthy and independent lives, and to become informed, responsible citizens.

PSHCE is taught as a discrete lesson following the Cambridgeshire Primary Personal Development Programme as well as through an every day part of school.

Health and Sex and Relationships Education

Health education is taught within the PSHCE and Science lessons following the Cambridgeshire Primary Personal Development porgramme. Linchfield Community Primary School’s health education includes the teaching of sex education to ensure that pupils are able to cope with the physical and emotional challenges of growing up. The sex education taught provides pupils with an elementary understanding of human reproduction.

We teach sex education through different aspects of the curriculum. While we carry out the main sex education teaching in our PSHCE curriculum, we also teach some sex education through other subject areas (for example, science and PE), where we feel that they contribute significantly to a child’s knowledge and understanding of his or her own body, and how it is changing and developing.

We believe it is important to teach about relationships throughout the children’s school life and in PHSCE we teach children about relationships and we encourage children to discuss issues. In science, we follow the guidance material in the national scheme of work for science. In PE we consider health and hygiene.

Foundation Stage we explore:

  • relationships and belonging including getting on and falling out and anti bullying.
  • managing conflict
  • who to ask for help
  • feelings
  • similarities and differences
  • respect including self respect
  • values, love and care
  • choices
  • gender, equal opportunities and stereotyping
  • good and bad touches
  • cleaning and washing
  • changes
  • personal space
  • life cycles
  • animal babies
In Key Stage 1 we teach:

  • relationships and belonging including getting on and falling out and anti bullying.
  • Respect, self respect
  • managing conflict
  • who to ask for help
  • feelings
  • empathy
  • similarities and differences
  • respect including self respect
  • values, love and care
  • choices
  • gender, equal opportunities and stereotyping
  • cleanliness
  • changes
  • personal space and inappropriate touching
  • life cycles and babies
  • how animals, including humans, move, feed, grow and reproduce
  • the main parts of the body.

In Key Stage 2 we teach and reinforce all of the above and about life processes and the main stages of the human life cycle in greater depth.

In years 3 and 4 we:

place a particular emphasis on health education
look at changes from birth to death but not the details of how a baby is made.

In years 5 and 6 we also place an emphasis on health education and look at puberty in more detail as some children experience puberty at this age and many are preparing for Secondary School. We liaise with the Local Health Authority, specifically our school nurse about suitable teaching materials to use with our children in these lessons.

By the end of Key Stage 2 we teach about::

reproductive parts of the body and how these work
what will happen to their bodies during puberty. (For example, we tell all of the children about changes in boys and girls but elaborate with the boys about developments pertaining to them and we explain to the girls about menstruation in more detail.

Parents have the right to withdraw their child from all or part of the sex education programme that we teach in our school. If a parent wishes their child to be withdrawn from sex education lessons, they should discuss this with the Headteacher, and make it clear which aspects of the programme they do not wish their child to participate in. The school always complies with the wishes of parents in this regard.