Advice from a Tree

Stand tall and proud

Sink your roots into the earth

Be content

With your natural beauty

Go out on a limb

Drink plenty of water

Remember your roots

Enjoy the view

Ilan Shamir

Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) Education incorporates Relationships and Health Education (RHE). Whilst RHE is statutory, other aspects of the PSHE curriculum are discretionary.  As both areas are interlinked, they are sequenced under one curriculum overview; however, for clarity, each is referenced under its individual heading.

Why do we study RHE?

Relationship and Health Education (RHE) became a statutory subject in all primary schools from September 2020, with the framework revised in July 2025. Today’s children and young people are growing up in an increasingly complex world and living their lives seamlessly on and offline. This presents many positive and exciting opportunities, but also challenges and risks. In this environment, children and young people need to know how to be safe and healthy, and how to manage their academic, personal and social lives in a positive way. The aim of RHE is to put in place the key building blocks of healthy, respectful relationships, focusing on family and friendships, in all contexts, including online. This will sit alongside the essential understanding of how to be healthy. RHE content is typically taught within the scheduled PSHE sessions.

Why do we study PSHE?

PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic) is a non-statutory subject, enabling schools to tailor their programme of study to meet the needs of their community. At the Opossum Federation, PSHE is part of the weekly timetable. It is a valued part of the whole school curriculum as it aims to equip pupils with a sound understanding of risk and with the knowledge and skills necessary to make safe and informed decisions. Within PSHE education, pupils develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to manage their lives, now and in the future. PSHE education helps pupils to stay healthy, safe and prepared for life and work in modern Britain. PSHE can also help pupils to achieve their academic potential as it develops confidence and self-esteem, which increases pupil wellbeing. It helps pupils to develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to thrive, physically and emotionally to become healthy individuals, family members and members of society. By developing their knowledge of healthy relationships, pupils will be able to make informed decisions regarding the friendships and relationships they form with others.

The statutory guidance for RHE states:

The focus for primary relationships education should be on teaching the skills and knowledge that form the building blocks of all positive relationships, supporting children from the start of their education to grow into kind, caring adults who have respect for others and know how to keep themselves and others safe.  Building children’s understanding and skills at primary is essential for preparing them for more complex content at secondary. For example, in primary, children will learn skills for managing difficult feelings in their friendships, like disappointment or anger. This prepares them to reflect on how to behave with kindness in more complex or challenging relationships at secondary.

Schools should be sensitive to pupils’ circumstances, recognising that families of many forms provide a nurturing environment for children, and can include single parent families, same-sex parents, families headed by grandparents, young carers, kinship carers, adoptive parents and foster parents/carers. Teaching should illustrate a wide range of family structures in a positive way, and care should be taken to ensure that children are not stigmatised based on their home circumstances.

Primary relationships education should be anchored in an understanding of positive relationships, but should also equip children to keep themselves and others safe, and to recognise and report risks and abuse, including online. This can be delivered by focusing on boundaries, privacy, and children’s rights over their own bodies and personal information. Pupils should be able to recognise emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Even very young children can be equipped to understand what counts as abusive behaviour and to trust their instincts about behaviour that doesn’t feel right. In addition, pupils should understand about bullying, and that this can include the use of derogatory terms relating to sex, race, disability or sexual orientation.

Pupils should know how to report concerns and seek advice. While teaching children how to stay safe, including online, teachers should be clear that being a victim of abuse is never the fault of the child.

The curriculum covers the following areas:

• Families and people who care for me
• Caring friendships
• Respectful, kind relationships
• Online safety and awareness
• Being safe

Health education in primary starts with the benefits and importance of physical activity, good nutrition and sufficient sleep, and supports pupils to develop emotional awareness. Schools should emphasise the relationships between physical health and mental wellbeing, and the benefits of physical activity and time spent outdoors.

The curriculum covers the following areas:

• General wellbeing
• Wellbeing online
• Physical health and fitness
• Healthy Eating
• Drugs, alcohol,  tobacco and vaping
• Health protection and prevention
• Personal safety
• Basic First Aid
• Developing bodies

The National curriculum states the purpose of PSHE is to:

PSHE education is a non-statutory subject but the DfE states that PSHE is an important and necessary part of pupils’ education. The programme on offer within schools should equip pupils with a sound understanding of risk and with the knowledge and skills necessary to make safe and informed decisions.

Through their study of the Opossum RHE and PSHE curriculum, we intend that pupils will:
1. Develop safe and healthy relationships.

Pupils learn what a relationship is and the attributes required to develop positive relationships; family relationships, friendships and relationships with other children and adults. Pupils will develop their knowledge and understanding of respect, honesty, personal space and boundaries, the right to privacy and consent and the importance of these within all relationships. Having secure knowledge within these areas will enable pupils to understand what a safe relationship is, equipping them with appropriate strategies when faced with challenges.

2. Gain knowledge and skills to make safe and informed decisions.

Through the RHE and PSHE curriculum, pupils will gain a wealth of knowledge for all aspects of their life (relationships, health and wellbeing, economic wellbeing, online presence and safety). Pupils learn how to use this knowledge to make informed decisions to ensure that they can keep themselves safe in all areas of their lives. Pupils gain confidence in articulating their decisions and will be able to use knowledge to give reasons for these.

3. Gain knowledge about how to keep themselves physically and mentally healthy.

Pupils must be physically and mentally healthy if they are to achieve well throughout their education. Knowing how to keep themselves physically and mentally healthy is fundamental and will have a direct impact, both now and in later life. Knowing and applying strategies to maintain all aspects of health supports pupils to thrive; they have opportunities to practise these strategies and discuss the impact of them on their physical and mental health.

4. Develop financial knowledge and understanding to support them in later life.

We intend that pupils develop secure, age appropriate, financial knowledge, which will support them in later life. By learning about what money is, the different methods to pay for things, choices of how to spend and save money and how spending decisions can affect others, pupils will be able to make informed financial decisions.

5. Gain confidence and self-esteem.

Through the RHE and PSHE curriculum, pupils gain knowledge and understanding, which supports them in revealing who they are and the attributes that contribute to a positive and safe society. Identifying their personal strengths and areas to further develop enables pupils to make informed decisions, which in turn develops confidence and self-esteem. Having strategies to support positive physical and mental wellbeing will also promote pupils' self-esteem.

6. Become active citizens who will be aware of and take action on local, national and global issues

Through the study of PSHE, pupils gain a wealth of knowledge on relationships, physical and mental health, economic wellbeing, online presence and safety. Using this knowledge, pupils will develop an understanding of how they can impact the environment in which they live, locally, nationally and globally. Through this, we intend for pupils to become consciously-minded of the world around them, understand others, and work towards making the entire globe a better place, beginning with issues which are relevant to their local communities.

Opossum Values

Through their study of PSHE and RHE, Opossum values are realised.

Being Respectful – demonstrating respect for themselves and others in the relationships they form

Being Aspirational – an expectation that pupils set high standards for themselves now, and in the future

Being Caring – demonstrating empathy within their relationships and demonstrating care for

their own physical and mental health, and that of others

Having Integrity - using factual knowledge and understanding to make informed decisions for themselves and others

Being Creative – using creative skills to enhance their mental health and wellbeing      

Being Community Minded – recognising that their actions have a local, national and global impact

Scope and sequence

EYFS

Learning in the EYFS forms the bedrock of the RHE and PSHE curriculum for KS1 and KS2. Children’s personal, social and emotional development (PSE) is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives, and is fundamental to their cognitive development. Underpinning their personal development are the important attachments that shape their social world. Strong, warm and supportive relationships with adults enable children to learn how to understand their own feelings and those of others. IN EYFS, pupils are supported to manage emotions, develop a positive sense of self, set themselves simple goals, have confidence in their own abilities, to persist and wait for what they want and direct attention as necessary. Through adult modelling and guidance, they will learn how to look after their bodies, including healthy eating, and manage personal needs independently. Through supported interaction with other children, they learn how to make good friendships, co-operate and resolve conflicts peaceably. These attributes provide a secure platform from which children can achieve at school and in later life. This is key learning for the development of RHE and PSHE within KS1 and KS2.

KS1 and KS2

The Opossum RHE and PSHE curriculum has been designed using the Oak Academy programme and unit plans as the base structure, supplemented by other resources, such as 1 Decision materials.

A careful and purposeful sequencing of our curriculum content underpins its design, ensuring that pupils are able to build on and make links with existing knowledge. At its simplest this means ensuring, for example, that when teaching First Aid, pupils are taught to be able to make an emergency call and deal with common injuries, before building their knowledge to be able to administer CPR and explain the purpose of a defibrillator.

Attention is paid to vertical coherence via threads, which map the developments of concepts over time. For example, in the thread ‘Wellbeing’, pupils learn about basic self-care, emotions, and how to understand their own feelings and those of others. As they advance, they delve into more complex topics such as mental wellbeing, strategies for managing stress, and resilience. This includes teaching pupils how to recognise and talk about their emotions, understand the importance of physical health, and develop First Aid skills.

We use threads to signpost groups of units that link to one another, which together build a common body of knowledge over time. We use the term thread, rather than vertical concepts, themes, or big ideas because it helps to bring to mind the visual concept of a thread weaving through the curriculum.

Our RHE threads are:

• Community
• Relationships
• Online safety
• Wellbeing
• Growing up

By using these threads in our RHE curriculum, we ensure pupils are prepared to successfully navigate a wealth of real-life situations. For example, the threads on ‘wellbeing’ and ‘relationships’ teach pupils the appropriate vocabulary to name their own emotions, with the curriculum later developing how pupils might manage these emotions in different contexts.

In our primary curriculum pupils are taught relationships and health education (RHE). Sex education does not form part of our primary curriculum.

The important role that knowledge, and vocabulary as a particularly important type of knowledge, plays in learning is recognised. We identify and map vocabulary across the curriculum, both in terms of the introduction of new vocabulary and the necessary repetition of vocabulary that has gone before. New vocabulary, called keywords, are signalled in bold in our lesson materials to indicate their importance.

1 Decision- a teaching resource

1 Decision is the main supplementary resource used to teach RHE and PSHE, focusing on using scenarios (videos) to promote knowledge and understanding through whole class and small group discussions. Pupils are encouraged to ask questions and discuss varying viewpoints within lessons. Other resources include those which have been created within the federation.