Relationships & Sex Education and Health Education
In September 2020, Relationships and Health Education became compulsory subjects for all state-funded primary schools. The Department for Education (DfE) also recommended that primary schools include age-appropriate Sex Education in their curriculum.
The DfE’s rationale for introducing the new Relationships & Sex Education (RSE) and the Health education curriculum was to:
- Provide schools with up-to-date guidance in an area of the curriculum that was last updated 20 years ago.
- Make children’s safety both on and offline a key priority.
- Ensure children are taught how to keep themselves safe and to know how and where to seek help.
- Enable children to make their own healthy choices.
- Nurture tolerance and respect for all.
- Empower children to grow up happy, healthy and safe.
At Fircroft, we were excited to learn of the introduction of RSE and immediately embarked upon a consultation process with the school community which took place between September 2019 and March 2020. The valuable input from Fircroft parents and carers helped to shape our approach to these subjects and arrive at our RSE policy, which you can read here.
Relationships and Sex Education Policy.pdf
To support our teaching of RSE, we decided to use the highly-regarded scheme-of-work: ‘Teaching RSE with Confidence in Primary Schools’ created by the Christopher Winter Project (CWP). The scheme is used by many local schools and has been awarded the PSHE Association Quality Mark.
RSE at Fircroft is taught within our own bespoke Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE) curriculum and careful consideration has therefore been given to ensure the RSE lessons fit within our different PSHE themes. The CWP scheme is predominantly focussed upon the Relationships component of RSE with only one lesson (for Year 6) being designated as a Sex Education one. The biological aspects of RSE are taught within the science curriculum. With the exception of the Year 6 lesson, which parents have the right to excuse children from, all RSE learning is compulsory. Please refer to our policy for further details.
We strongly value the continuing engagement of parents and carers with our RSE curriculum and recognise the importance of a partnership approach in ensuring pupils get the most from this area of their learning and development. We will therefore always inform parents of upcoming learning in RSE to enable discussion of the content at home. Please see below for information regarding lesson content for all year groups.
