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The new Ofsted Framework – five key considerations for PSHE/RSHE leads and school leaders

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Nov 19, 2025 4:39:09 PM

PSHE Association

Ofsted’s new inspection framework came into effect on the 10th November 2025. Media coverage has highlighted concerns from teachers’ unions about the new approach and last-minute changes following the pilot. But setting the debates about the framework aside, there are big implications for PSHE education, including statutory relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) content. Here are five key considerations for PSHE/RSHE Leads and school leaders.

1. Comprehensive PSHE education (including RSHE) is central to success in ‘Personal Development and well-being’

The evaluation area ‘Personal Development and well-being’ is likely to be your first port of call if you’re a PSHE/RSHE lead. It is clear from the new framework that without a robust PSHE education programme, covering statutory RSHE and wider PSHE education, schools will struggle to meet the expected standard for ‘Personal development and well-being’.

The toolkit outlines “factors that…contribute most strongly to personal development and well-being”, which inspectors will have in mind when looking for evidence, and you can see that PSHE education is central to the following:

promoting equality of opportunity so that all pupils can thrive together and understand that individual characteristics make people unique; this includes, but is not limited to, an age appropriate understanding of the protected characteristics defined in the Equality Act 2010
developing pupils’ confidence, resilience and knowledge so that they can keep themselves mentally healthy
enabling pupils to recognise online and offline risks to their well-being – for example, risks from criminal and sexual exploitation, domestic abuse, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, substance misuse, gang activity, radicalisation and extremism – and making them aware of the support that is available
enabling pupils to recognise the dangers of using technology and social media inappropriately
developing pupils’ understanding of how to keep physically healthy, eat healthily and maintain an active lifestyle…
developing pupils’ age-appropriate understanding of healthy relationships through relationships and sex education
supporting pupils’ readiness for the next phase of education, training or employment so that they are equipped to make the transition successfully, including by providing impartial careers information, education, advice and guidance for secondary-age pupils

And when gathering their evidence, inspectors will consider the extent to which pupils achieve a number of outcomes. The examples below relate directly to PSHE education and form the majority of the list:

pupils develop their ability to recognise the difference between right and wrong, including:
understanding the consequences of their behaviour and actions, and readily applying this understanding in their own lives
pupils learn how to manage their own emotions and resolve conflict with others
pupils are given meaningful opportunities to:
prepare effectively for adulthood and life in modern Britain
acquire the knowledge they need to achieve and thrive in later life
pupils are taught to recognise online and offline risks to their well-being, such as the dangers of sharing personal information and the impact of viewing harmful content online, and risks related to criminal and sexual exploitation, domestic abuse, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, substance misuse, gang activity, radicalisation and extremism; they are made aware of the support available
pupils know how to keep themselves safe and healthy, including how to look after their mental health and how to maintain an active lifestyle
pupils have an age-appropriate understanding of healthy relationships

This shouldn’t be seen as a checklist for auditing your provision, as it doesn’t cover everything within statutory RSHE and the other elements of PSHE education. However, it does show how vital your PSHE education programme — which should include, but not be limited to, RSHE — is to success in this evaluation area.

2. ‘Personal development’ is not a curriculum subject

Your PSHE education curriculum, including statutory RSHE content, is absolutely central to how your school provides for pupils’ personal development and supports their wellbeing. But in this section, there are several references to the school’s ‘personal development programme’ which could, at first glance, imply that a school can rename PSHE as ‘Personal Development’ and attempt to teach personal development as a subject.

This is not the case, and would be a misinterpretation of the inspection framework, which makes clear that the ‘Personal Development and well-being’ evaluation area considers: “whether leaders establish a suitable and coherent programme of personal development, through both the curriculum and the wider opportunities and experiences they provide for pupils”.

Personal development takes into account curriculum subjects such as PSHE education (including RSHE), Citizenship and Religious Education, but also broader opportunities such as extra-curricular sporting, musical, artistic and cultural experiences.

So, in summary, the ‘Personal development and well-being’ evaluation area is broader than the PSHE education (including RSHE) curriculum, although this does play a crucial part. And conflating the curriculum with wider considerations, by renaming a subject as (or creating a new subject called) ‘Personal Development’ could undermine both the effectiveness of your PSHE provision and ability to meet this evaluation area’s criteria.

3. RSHE will also be considered under ‘Curriculum and Teaching’

Under the previous Ofsted framework, statutory RSHE — together with the rest of PSHE education — was only looked at in relation to ‘Personal development’ and not considered in the same way as other curriculum subjects as part of the ‘Quality of education’ judgement. This has now changed.

The new framework makes clear that the school’s curriculum must cover “the statutory requirements set out in the basic curriculum (which includes the national curriculum, and relationships, sex and health education, and religious education)”.

Therefore, everything included under ‘Curriculum and Teaching’ will also apply to your RSHE provision, including that:

the curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced so that pupils build knowledge and skills sequentially and cumulatively
time is available within the curriculum for revisiting content and dealing with gaps in knowledge and skills
the curriculum has subject-specific rigour, so that pupils gain disciplinary knowledge and can answer subject-specific questions
teachers have expert knowledge of the subjects that they teach and, if they have gaps in their knowledge, they are supported so that ineffective teaching does not disadvantage pupils

And in the descriptors for ‘Expected standard’:

Leaders make sure that teachers have, or gain, the expertise they need for the subjects and phases they teach.

The points above make it clear that RSHE needs to be delivered through a well-planned, rigorous, sequenced curriculum, that’s given sufficient time and is taught by teachers with expertise who have received appropriate support and training. This will also be especially useful for PSHE leads when making the case for more curriculum time and CPD for staff.

4. The PSHE curriculum is crucial to effective safeguarding and inclusion

Safeguarding

Your school’s safeguarding and child protection policies and protocols should, of course, keep your pupils safe, identify when there’s a cause for concern, and enable appropriate intervention if something is wrong, whilst pupils are in your school’s care.

But schools are places of education, and it is therefore paramount that your school also teaches pupils how to keep themselves and others safe, including how to access appropriate help, now and in the future. This has always been the role of PSHE education and with the new RSHE requirements’ increased focus on personal safety, it is now an integral part of the statutory content.

Whilst it is disappointing that the new framework has relatively little to say on this crucial link between PSHE and safeguarding, it does state that:

“In gathering evidence about the management of safeguarding, inspectors evaluate the extent to which leaders:

ensure that pupils are taught how to stay safe and keep others safe, including online”

And the descriptors for judging that safeguarding requirements are ‘Met’, include:

“Teaching pupils about how they can stay safe and when they may need help is embedded across the curriculum.”

You can demonstrate your school’s understanding and appreciation of the curriculum’s contribution to keeping pupils safe by (a) making sure your safeguarding policy explicitly links to the RSHE/PSHE curriculum and (b) by ensuring your RSHE/PSHE policy includes a brief description of how the subject contributes to safeguarding.

Inclusion

The new framework has a strong focus running through it on how schools identify and support:

socioeconomically disadvantaged pupils (those eligible for the pupil premium)
pupils with SEND; this means pupils receiving special educational needs (SEN) support, and those with an education, health and care (EHC) plan
pupils who are known (or previously known) to children’s social care, such as children in need and looked-after children
pupils who may face other barriers to their learning and/or well-being, which may include pupils who share a protected characteristic

Inspectors will typically use case sampling of five or six pupils they have identified with the school and look at personal development and the curriculum through their eyes. They will be looking at what the school is like for those pupils and what you are doing to ensure they can access not only the same curriculum, but also the same personal development opportunities as other pupils. For example, when ‘Personal development and well-being’ for pupils with SEND is evaluated, inspectors will:

“recognise that these pupils may face increased risks relating to their age rather than their developmental stage; inspectors want to understand how the school supports pupils with SEND to access, in ways that are developmentally suitable, the age-appropriate content they need to keep themselves healthy and safe”.

So, it is vital to think about this in relation to your PSHE/RSHE curriculum. How do you ensure that pupils with SEND have an age- and developmentally-appropriate understanding of puberty, of online safety, of careers options, and so on? And how do you ensure that all pupils who face barriers to learning, benefit fully from their PSHE education?

5. It’s not all about RSHE — the wider PSHE education curriculum is essential

With the new DfE statutory guidance for RSHE including more content on personal safety and child financial harms, statutory RSHE will constitute 80-90% of the PSHE education curriculum. And inspectors will certainly be expecting schools to provide RSHE that meets the statutory guidance. But schools mustn’t stop short of covering the remaining 10-20%.

To give your school a better chance of doing well in Ofsted inspection and – more importantly – to meet the needs of your pupils, the school needs the rest of PSHE education, comprising economic wellbeing and careers education.

This might not be obvious at first, given there are just these specific mentions of PSHE education in its entirety in the new Ofsted framework:

the descriptors for the ‘Strong standard’ in ‘Personal development and well-being’, state that the school will need to show that “Pupils develop secure and detailed knowledge across the personal, social, health and economic education, relationships and (where relevant) sex education programme...”
the section on post-16 provision says that inspectors will consider the extent to which “leaders provide a suitable range of wider opportunities and non-qualification activities, including personal, social, health and economic education…”.

However, there is a strong focus throughout the toolkit on the school’s careers education programme, and economic wellbeing content has crossover with areas such as safeguarding when it comes to child financial harms:

Careers education

The careers focus is on the secondary phase (although we know that this needs to start in primary, which is why it is part of the primary PSHE curriculum). Whilst individual careers advice and guidance will take place outside of PSHE lessons, it is through the PSHE education curriculum that universal careers education should (and in the majority of schools, does) take place.

Indeed, Ofsted itself, in its ‘Independent review of careers guidance in schools and further education and skills providers’ (2023), found that “the available evidence does suggest [careers education] can be more effective when it is specifically timetabled within the PSHE curriculum”.

This is due in part to the considerable crossover between careers education and other elements of PSHE – such as relationships, challenging stereotypes and discrimination, mental health, and economic wellbeing – as well as the skills developed through the rest of PSHE (such as communication and negotiation, teamwork skills and decision making).

So, whilst the framework might not explicitly state that careers should be part of PSHE education, your school will be better placed to succeed in this aspect if it is.

Economic wellbeing

Economic wellbeing is the other crucial key element of wider, non-statutory PSHE education at primary and secondary phase. The new RSHE statutory guidance includes aspects of this, in particular relating to financial harms such as gambling, chance-based transactions in gaming, scams, and money laundering (most of which include significant safeguarding risks too).

But these topics can’t be effectively taught without the foundational learning in personal finance that’s at the heart of ‘economic wellbeing’. And pupils want this too — the Children’s Commissioner’s ‘The Big Ask’ 2021 survey of 4 to 17-year-olds found that, “Children and young people also highly value broader PSHE education learning opportunities, like financial education...pupils reported that the most helpful topics in PSHE / RSHE were economic wellbeing (with 88% saying this was helpful) and budgeting (87% said this was helpful)”.

It is also important that this learning on personal financial education and economic wellbeing complements, rather than duplicates, the financial education that might be taught through other subjects such as Citizenship (which is best suited to exploring the societal aspects of money) or Maths (which is best placed to explore the numerical). The decision to make Citizenship statutory in key stages 1 and 2 from 2028 – including aspects of financial education – should further strengthen schools’ approach to this area.

In summary

To be prepared for your next visit from Ofsted, think about — and discuss with your team and SLT — these five key considerations:

Do the PSHE education, Citizenship, RE and other relevant curricula, together with additional experiences and opportunities, combine to promote your pupils’ personal development?
Is a robust PSHE education curriculum, that includes — but is not limited to — statutory RSHE, at the heart of personal development in your school?
Are the PSHE/RSHE curriculum and teaching at the same standard, and taken as seriously, as all other curriculum subjects, with appropriate CPD opportunities for teachers?
Is the link between your PSHE curriculum and safeguarding made explicit? And can you show how you ensure all pupils, including those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, have SEND, are known (or previously known) to children’s social care, or who face other barriers to their learning or well-being, can effectively access the PSHE education curriculum they need?
Do your pupils benefit equally from all elements of broader PSHE education, including economic wellbeing and careers education?

For more support, why not join one of our live online CPD courses on ‘Getting Ofsted-ready!’. And join us for our annual conference on the 12th March, when Ofsted’s Dr Polly Haste HMI will be one of our keynote speakers.