Maynards Green Community Primary School PSHE

At Maynards Green we believe that all children have the potential to become well-rounded, mindful and balanced members of the community.  Our aim is to facilitate this by nurturing their spiritual, moral, social and cultural development in a safe, open and positive learning environment. They will learn to be aware of their current emotions and feelings and be able to share them with no judgement or pressure.

Intent

Our school holds children at its heart, and its cohesive vision helps children understand and value how they fit into and contribute to the world. With strong emphasis on building resilience and nurturing mental and physical health, Jigsaw, the PSHE scheme we use, properly equips our teachers to deliver engaging and relevant PSHE within a whole-school approach. Jigsaw lessons also include mindfulness allowing children to advance their emotional awareness, concentration, focus and self-regulation.

Implementation

Apart from EYFS, our school uses the Jigsaw programme. The most relevant statements in EYFS for PSHE are taken from the following areas of learning: ● Communication and Language ● Personal, Social and Emotional ● Physical Development ● Understanding the World (please see progression document below). 

For the rest of the school, Jigsaw is a whole-school approach and embodies a positive philosophy and creative teaching and learning activities to nurture children’s development as compassionate and well-rounded human beings as well as building their capacity to learn. The programme includes all the statutory requirements for Relationships and Health Education, and Sex Education in the Changing Me Puzzle (unit). Jigsaw has two main aims for all children:

• To build their capacity for learning
• To equip them for life

Jigsaw is designed as a whole school approach, with all year groups working on the same theme (Puzzle) at the same time at their own level. There are six Puzzles (small term units of work) and each year group is taught one lesson per week. All lessons are delivered in an age- and stage-appropriate way so that they meet children’s needs. 

The table below gives the learning theme of each of the six Puzzles (units) and these are taught across the school; the learning deepens and broadens every year.  

At Maynards Green Community Primary School we allocate 1 lesson (approx. 45mins to 1 hour) to PSHE each week in order to teach the PSHE knowledge and skills in a developmental and age-appropriate way. The lessons are taught by the class teacher.

These explicit lessons are reinforced and enhanced in many ways:  

• Discrete PSHE lesson throughout the school following the Jigsaw scheme of work
• Developing mindfulness by  learning to use breathing and awareness exercises
• Regular whole school and class assemblies linking to the School and British Values
• Positive reward systems for appropriate behaviour including house points which can be awarded by all school staff members
• Listening to or reading books, songs or stories with SMSC content

Impact

Our teachers use Jigsaw to help children know and value who they really are and how they relate to other people in this ever-changing world. 

This also supports the “Personal Development” and  “Behaviour and Attitude” aspects required under the Ofsted Inspection Framework, as well as significantly contributing to the school’s Safeguarding and Equality Duties, the Government’s British Values agenda and the SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social, Cultural) development opportunities provided for our children.  

We can see the impact of Jigsaw through:

• The behaviours and attitudes of the pupils within school and their relationships with each other.  
• Evidence of class work in the form of a floor book for each class

The grid attached outlines a selection of lessons from each year group (F1 to Year 6) where safeguarding and/or consent are covered – implicitly or explicitly.