We place high importance on the teaching of PSHE. This is a regularly timetabled subject and key themes are followed up within assemblies. It is taught as a stand-alone subject, although meaningful links are made wherever possible, for example with science, PE and maths.

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We follow the statutory curriculum for relationships and health. In addition, we also include areas within our PSHE curriculum that we have deemed important for our pupils, despite these not being on the statutory curriculum. These include learning about personal safety, managing money and children’s rights and responsibilities. We teach the children about the protected characteristics through many of our PSHE topics, and children leave West Leigh with a clear understanding of these characteristics.

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We have chosen to teach relationships and sex education using Medway and PSHE Association age-appropriate materials as part of our PSHE provision. These materials are shared at a detailed parent consultation each year; parents are shown everything that will be used within the lessons so that they are fully aware of what their children will be taught. 

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Another area we have chosen to include in our PSHE curriculum is learning about jobs, careers and managing money. Southend-on-Sea has 7.3% of 16-17 year olds not in education or training, so we think it is important to provide our pupils with the information they require early in their education to begin making sensible choices about their futures. 

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We teach our children to thrive online by making as many lessons as possible relate to issues that they may experience in the online world as well as offline. We don’t want to demonise the use of technology – it is a very real part of what our children are growing up with, so we have planned our lessons to approach this in a sensible and informative manner.