PSHE Association renews case for statutory PSHE education
Wednesday 21st September 2016
The PSHE Association report that the campaign for statutory PSHE education continues with Commons Women and Equalities Committee publishing a landmark report calling for statutory status for PSHE education as part of efforts to address sexual harassment in schools.
The Education Secretary Justine Greening was probed on the status of the subject the following day by the Commons Education Committee; after the committee session, the Telegraph and Daily Mail reported that the government was considering changing its position on the status of the subject.
On Thursday last week, the Commons Home Affairs Committee issued a report on female genital mutilation which amongst a range of recommendations called for PSHE to be made a statutory subject, while the front page of the Telegraph newspaper covered calls for compulsory lessons on resilience, character, identity and integration, citing PSHE education as the obvious place for such lessons to be delivered. Later the same day, a group of PSHE education campaigners visited Downing Street to deliver a letter to Theresa May calling for the subject to be made a statutory part of the curriculum – you can read more about this on the PSHE Association website.
With these developments in mind the PSHE Association has updated its ‘curriculum for life’ report which sets out the case for statutory PSHE education. As well as referencing the new calls for statutory status outlined above, it also sets out more detail on our expectations of what statutory status means, referring specifically to:
An entitlement which applies to all school pupils at key stages 1-4 in all state schools, whether they are academies or maintained schools.
A duty on all state schools which gives PSHE parity of status with existing statutory subjects and which applies to the whole of the subject, not any single component of it.
In addition to their own campaigning efforts, the Association is currently supporting the Sex Education Forum’s Write to Your MP campaign and Girlguiding’s petition to end sexual harassment in schools.
