The Curriculum and Assessment Review ‘Call for Evidence’ is a crucial opportunity to make the case for PSHE education’s importance on the curriculum.
If you teach or lead PSHE education (RSHE and non-statutory personal financial and careers education) via a coherent programme and regular curriculum time, please respond with a few details about your approach and the advantages of doing so, including for your pupils and school.
Alternatively, if you don’t have the benefit of regular curriculum time or a coherent programme, then your submission could focus on challenges this presents for you, your pupils or school.
We would encourage you to focus on a handful of questions of most relevance to you, drawing on your own experiences (you don’t need to answer them all). Read the consultation documents and complete the online questionnaire here by this Friday, 22nd November. Even if you have only 15-20 minutes to spare it could make a big difference.
We’ll be submitting an in-depth response, but have included a summary below of some of our main points. Feel free to draw upon it in your own submission if it aligns with your answers, but in your own words.
- We are not calling for new content, only for existing statutory (RSHE) and non-statutory (personal financial education and careers education) to be on the same statutory footing as part of a coherent PSHE education curriculum, guaranteed for all from key stage 1.
- This would reflect what schools with high quality PSHE/RSHE are already doing, but build on the success we have seen in raising standards and consistency since statutory RSHE was introduced. It would also recognise the overlap and interplay between statutory and non-statutory content (for example, the relationship between online safety and avoiding financial harms; the importance of effective relationship building and careers).
- This will allow greater consistency between schools and equality of access for all children and young people, not just some. Many schools of all types follow this approach successfully via the existing PSHE education Programme of Study, supported by our planning frameworks; but all of PSHE education is only compulsory for independent schools. This existing content needs to be a universal entitlement for all children, not some. A UCL study shows that financial skills of 15-year-olds from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds are four years behind those from advantaged backgrounds, and they are less likely to learn about money in school or discuss it with their parents. This is a deeply unfair situation that can only be rectified by making a universal entitlement to all PSHE education has to offer, including financial education and careers.
- PSHE education is already taught on the curriculum in the majority of schools, but it must be taught as a school curriculum subject in all cases – with at least one lesson per week on the timetable – to facilitate sequenced learning. This is in line with Statutory Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) guidance recommending ‘a planned programme of evidence based RSHE delivered in regularly timetabled lessons and reinforced throughout the whole curriculum’, and Ofsted’s sexual harassment review recommendation that content ‘should be carefully sequenced with time allocated for topics that children and young people find difficult’.
- Limiting PSHE education to drop-down days, assemblies or tutor time makes sequenced learning impossible and would not be tolerated for any other curriculum area.
- The current, 2019 RSHE guidance sets out in broad terms what schools must teach. It strikes about the right balance of content and prescription by outlining key content but, critically, enabling the flexibility for schools to tailor provision to pupils whilst also having the space to cover complementary non-statutory financial education and careers content within a lesson per week on the curriculum. Therefore statutory RSHE was both a big step forward, and a missed opportunity to make PSHE statutory in entirety (as the previous Labour government had attempted to do in 2010 before plans got lost in the pre-election ‘wash-up’).
- The Education Secretary can address this imbalance without further legislation, by using a power available to her under section 35 of the Children and Social Work Act to extend statutory status to existing PSHE content beyond RSHE.