New report finds PSHE still valued by schools, despite perception of insufficient national support
Wednesday 3rd February 2016
The research report "Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) Education under the coalition government" (January 2016) concludes that while PSHE is still valued by schools, insufficient national guidance and support from the government was one of the main reported barriers to teaching PSHE.
Some of the conclusions of this report published by Centre for Education and Inclusion Research, Sheffield Institute of Education are:
"The diminished allocation of dedicated PSHE timetabled space, a lack of materials or teacher training, allied with a perceived lack of government guidance and support for the subject makes fragmented PSHE coverage almost inevitable.
As raised earlier, a clear implication of such variation in provision is that pupils are likely to be receiving inconsistent amounts of PSHE, particularly for the older year groups. Viewed positively, this presents schools with the potential to streamline a potentially bloated PSHE curriculum, to think creatively, and effectively tailor their PSHE coverage to their own local needs and context. Thereby aligning with the government's laissez faire approach to the subject and ever increasing school autonomy in relation to PSHE. An alternative interpretation would be that it leaves children vulnerable to not receiving sufficient and/or good enough quality PSHE.
Participants in our study universally agreed that PSHE was necessary to be taught in school and should be made statutory. Time in the curriculum, it is argued, is needed to ensure that positive messages are conveyed to young people in order for them to make safe and healthy life choices. However for this to be successful, there are a number of issues which need to be addresses as highlighted by this report. The below emerged as being particularly important:
-Schools need support at local and national level, as a lack of support can lead to very different approaches to teaching the subject, or even the subject not being taught at all in some schools, as this study has highlighted is the case with citizenship.
-PSHE should be taught by properly trained teachers, which means PSHE being re-introduced as an ITT subject and CPD being made available.
-Another issue which came across very strongly from all participants is the need for schools to take on a holistic approach to pupil wellbeing which PSHE forms one key strand of. Schools need to reinforce messages given out in PSHE across the entire curriculum wherever possible, as well as through their ethos and policies to ensure PSHE forms part of a whole school culture."
