At Northern House Academy, our PSHE curriculum is built around and underpinned by our school values. Our approach is designed around understanding the needs of each individual child, is unapologetic in its high expectation, knowing that our children are not defined by their needs but instead viewed with the positivity they need in order to be nurtured both emotionally and academically. It is consistent to enable a safe environment where our pupils are empowered to take risks and experience success, and it must be a PSHE curriculum that promotes the simple pleasure of happiness.
Our pupils are some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in society. Their barriers to learning are numerous and varied; for example, past reduced timetables and inadvertent social isolation often compromise their provision prior to moving to Northern House Academy. Ironically, measures that are typically employed to support students who are expressing a social and emotional development need often end up further restricting their opportunities to interact with their peers and to learn and grow, both personally and academically. As such, many students arrive at Northern House Academy having had tumultuous educational journeys and reduced social and emotional learning opportunities. These formative experiences of education heavily influence and shape our pupils’ perception of school, and of themselves as learners and people. Consequently, a ‘typical’ student may arrive at Northern House Academy with feelings of mistrust and low self-esteem, with a negative perception of education and the adults that deliver it, a lack of confidence, low resilience, and significantly impaired social and emotional understanding. To compound this, when pupils arrive at our academy they do so from a range of different locations from across the county, meaning that their experience of community in relation to education has also been reframed, and that social relationships and having the skills to develop these, are even more significant for our pupils. As such, we deem PSHE (Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education) to be a core subject within Northern House Academy and attribute its equal weighting to our other core subjects of Maths and English. Consequently, our PSHE offer provides not just the fundamentals of a rich PSHE national curriculum but is also restorative and holistic, seeking to heal any damage that being unsuccessful in mainstream education may have caused. It is an offer that provides our students with repeated opportunities to be reflective, analytical, and introspective. It is designed around our pupils’ EHCP outcomes and meets the individual needs of all our learners, enabling every child to experience success.
PSHE (Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education) is embedded in everything we do at Northern House Academy. The structure of our day, with reflective/celebration time embedded daily, the implementation of our Gallery Toolkit, and the use of restorative practice to ensure that every misjudgement is viewed and treated as an opportunity to reflect and learn, all contribute towards a culture that supports and promotes pupils’ personal development.
We strive to promote pupils’ self-esteem and emotional well-being through our curriculum, school environment, and ethos. Through PSHE, we help pupils form and maintain worthwhile and satisfying relationships based on respect for themselves and for others. PSHE is an integral part of Northern House Academy’s ethos; thus, we encourage and support our children to adopt a ‘can do’ attitude, be focused and resilient, challenge and question, be independent learners, and be respectful, well-mannered, and caring.
Our PSHE curriculum at Northern House is designed so that each week pupils have access to three specific sessions:
1. A session delivering the DFE RSHE statutory requirements promoting positive behaviour, mental health, well-being, resilience, and achievement through the use of SCARF: Safety, Caring, Achievement, Resilience, and Friendship.
SCARF is an online resource from the Coram Life Education. It is the UK’s leading charity provider of PSHE and wellbeing education in primary schools. It provides us at Northern House Academy with a whole school approach to health and wellbeing giving teachers half-term units of work to support the DfE statutory requirements for Relationship and Health education. Teachers use the SCARF program as a starting point to plan and differentiate learning for this session. The program aligns with our ethos of improving children’s wellbeing and mental health and therefore provides a strong foundation for our PSHE offer. The SCARF program is broken down into six key themes:
o Being my best
o Me and my relationships
o Valuing difference
o Keeping myself safe
o Rights and responsibilities
o Growing and changing
Pupils explore and develop these skills every year, building a toolkit of strategies which they can apply in scenario-based lessons, thus providing the children with the opportunities to practice these skills in a safe and caring environment.
2. Structured Social Development: A high number of our students have experienced social marginalisation or isolation prior to joining the school. Where this is the case, students arrive at Northern House Academy having missed part of this integral development and may not have gained the essential skills they need to make and sustain relationships, develop behaviours for learning, and maintain healthy mental and physical development. An EHCP Outcomes Audit reflected this need within our cohort and in response, we dedicate a session each week on ‘Structured Social Development’.
In these sessions, pupils are set a Social Development Target which is specifically linked to one of their EHCP Outcomes. These targets are bespoke to each student and range from more formative play-based skills such as playing alongside others, sharing resources, or taking turns within a game, to more sophisticated skills such as resolving disagreements and conflicts, ‘not winning’ successfully, or developing their ability to debate and construct a rational, calm argument. The sessions run weekly and the objective is reviewed each week and updated when necessary. Targets are clearly communicated to students during these sessions and this enables them to understand what success looks like for them in relation to their own social development. The end of the sessions involves a reflection on the time they have spent with their friends and they are encouraged to talk about how the actions of their classmate made them feel.
3. Target Time: This session provides all students with an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate achievements from the previous week. Well-structured and well-paced, it allows all pupils to benefit from productive 1:1 reflective time with class adults. Effective questioning by staff facilitates target setting in line with students’ priorities and EHCP Outcomes, leading pupils to reflect and co-construct their own goals. Appropriately designed tasks, linked to gaps in pupils’ learning, are prepared and resourced, and students engage with these tasks independently when not target setting with an adult. As well as enabling students to reflect on their personal development in line with our values, these sessions also strengthen the bonds of the class community and provide a safe space to discuss differences and misunderstandings.