School Practicalities 

As teachers and former Heads of Departments, we are well aware of the practicalities of designing a curriculum for a real school. Limitations are placed on you in terms of timetabling, staffing and budget. Perhaps there are concerns about the responses of parents to potentially tricky and controversial topics. Never fear, we are here with solutions!

If you are in a position to do so, try to secure full lessons for PSHE: at least one per week. Some additional time for visiting speakers is also a great idea. When pitching to a reluctant Headteacher, you may find our Government Guidance page useful. It demonstrates just how much PSHE content is now mandatory and how the PSHEasy curriculum ticks all the boxes for both the independent and state sectors.

In an ideal world, PSHE would be staffed like every other department: with subject specialists who have applied for that role. However, we know that most schools use PSHE to make up shortfall in timetables. The one thing we would really push for is that all teachers want to be there. A teacher who hates PSHE or thinks it is a waste of time will not do a good job. We hear horror stories of teachers using that time to teach their own subjects or skip parts of the course that they find uncomfortable (e.g. Sex Education).

One of the difficulties in designing a PSHE curriculum is ensuring that everything is covered at just the right time. We recommend a spiral curriculum (see example below, which means that each theme is revisited every year, with an increasingly mature focus. This means that no student is left unprepared for important life events but neither are they faced with material for which they are not ready. An additional benefit of this type of curriculum is that no student misses an entire topic due to absence. See our Resource Hub for an example curriculum.

It goes without saying that no PSHE department ever has enough money. On the plus side, we do not believe that you need much in the way of equipment to teach PSHE well. There are a few pieces of equipment that we would recommend shelling out for, but these can be shared between all members of a department. Specifically, different types of contraception and models on which to demonstrate condom use (bananas are just so '90s!) To read more about these resources, please visit our Sex Education page.

Parents can be nervous about what is being taught in PSHE lessons. It is good practice to share information with parents but try to do it in such a way that it will not make them panic. We recommend sharing learning objectives rather than topic titles. For example, the objective "to understand that pornography is not representative of real-world sex" is far less alarming than the ambiguous title "pornography". For information on parents declining Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) see our page on Government Guidance.

It's a good idea to set some mutually-agreed ground rules for behaviour in PSHE lessons. If you allow students to come up with their own ground rules, they tend to cover most things ("be respectful, "listen to each other", etc.) without any teacher intervention. We like to add, "I won't ask you any personal questions and I won't answer any personal questions." This deals with the inevitable, "Miss, have you ever done illegal drugs?" and other such questions.