🌱 What Is the Primary PSHE Curriculum?

PSHE stands for Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education.

In primary schools, PSHE helps children learn how to:

• 💬 Understand themselves and others They explore feelings, friendships, and how to get along with others.

• 🛡️ Stay safe and healthy They learn about healthy eating, hygiene, safety at home and online, and making good choices.

• ❤️ Build confidence and resilience Children learn how to express emotions, solve problems, and ask for help when they need it.

• 🌍 Respect differences They discover how to celebrate diversity, understand fairness, and treat everyone kindly.

• 💡 Prepare for life Older primary pupils begin learning about money, growing up, and how to be responsible citizens.

PSHE is taught through stories, games, discussions, and real-life situations — helping children grow into thoughtful, caring, and confident individuals.

💬 What Is RSE in Primary School?

RSE stands for Relationships and Sex Education. In primary schools, it helps children learn how to build safe, respectful relationships and understand how their bodies grow and change.

🌱 What Do Children Learn?

👫 Friendships & Families Children learn about different types of families, how to be a good friend, and how to show kindness and respect.

🧠 Feelings & Communication They explore emotions, how to talk about their feelings, and how to ask for help when they need it.

🛡️ Staying Safe They learn about personal boundaries, safe and unsafe touches, and how to stay safe online and in real life.

🧍‍♂️ Growing & Changing Older primary pupils learn about how their bodies change as they grow, including puberty, in a gentle and age-appropriate way.

🌍 Respecting Differences Children learn that everyone is different — and that’s something to celebrate. They learn to treat others with fairness and respect.

❤️ Why It Matters

“PSHE & RSE helps children grow up confident, caring, and safe — ready to build healthy relationships in life.”

Our Learning for Life Curriculum

At Mapplewells we teach these aspects of the curriculum as Learning for Life.

Our Personal, Social and Health Education (P.S.H.E) together with our Relationships and Sex Education (R.S.E), enables our children to become healthy, independent, aspirational and responsible members of a diverse and ever-changing society.

We strive to help our pupils understand how they are developing personally and socially, and support them to tackle many of the moral, social and cultural issues that are part of growing up.

An important part of Learning for Life is the ability to discuss and debate issues with clarity, and listen to peoples points of view, whilst understanding that you do not have to agree with them but recognise their point of view.

We strive to provide our pupils with opportunities to learn about their rights and responsibilities and appreciate what it means to be a member of a diverse society.

Our children are encouraged to develop their sense of self-worth by playing a positive role in contributing to school life and the wider community.

We aim to have a positive impact on both academic and non-academic outcomes for all pupils.

Learning for Life Showcase

Picture News

We use the Picture News resources as a comprehensive way of teaching children about the events of a the world in a very honest and factual way, but in an appropriate 'child friendly' way.  We believe it is important for children to be aware of things that happen in our world, even if they are not always positive events. It helps them to build a better understanding and respect of different people's ways of life and how events can impact people and their families. 

Picture News is always current and is taught weekly - as with other areas of the curriculum there are links to British Values, the 9 Protected Characteristics and the United Nations Rights of a Child. 

Please head over to our Picture News page (Part if the 'Children' section) which is updated weekly, with the most current news article. 

Floor Books - Learning for Life

Our Learning for Life curriculum is taught from F1 right through to Year 6 and covers a wide range of topics across 15 strands, these include things like a healthy diet, hygiene, road safety, what to do in an emergency, relationships, economic wellbeing and many more.

Children will often evidence their learning in the Curriculum Enquiry books, but sometimes their learning may lend itself better to the children doing a practical activity, taking photographs, creating artwork, videos or presentations.  Every class has their own 'Floorbook' to help capture some of the fantastic ideas and contributions that the children make during our Learning for Life lessons. 

These are displayed in class and the children are very proud to show them to visitors or to sit and look through them together, discussing some of the experiences and opportunities that they have had.

Careers

Children learn about career options as early as F1...our nursery children were discussing different jobs and we were lucky enough to have lots of visitors into school to share their experiences of their careers with us.   We had illustrator Karin Littlewood in to share stories and give children the opportunity to create their own illustrations. 

We also had Olive's daddy to talk about his days in the Navy and his new job as a train driver.  Eve's mummy came in to talk about her nursing career.  The children enjoyed looking at the artefacts and getting to handle the different objects that the visitors brought in.