Understanding Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education in Secondary Schools

Jenny McWhirter, Nick Boddington, Jenny Barksfield

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473987913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

This book provides an overview essential for a proper understanding of effective approaches to PSHE education in secondary education and the valuable role it can play in promoting the health and wellbeing of adolescents.

Coverage includes:

• The importance and scope of PSHE education
• The theory and research evidence for effective practice in the secondary school
• School structures which support effective teaching and learning in PSHE education
• Assessment for, and of, learning in PSHE education
• The role of visiting experts in PSHE education
• Overlaps with pastoral and therapeutic support

1 Introduction

Aim

To introduce personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education.

Learning objectives

Through reading and reflecting on the content of this chapter you will begin to:

• understand PSHE education and how it relates to the other aspects of secondary education
• recognise the contribution PSHE education makes to young people’s personal development
• have an opportunity to reflect on your personal experience of PSHE education to date and consider how you can develop as an effective practitioner

Introduction

This book has been written for beginning teachers in secondary schools; that is, student teachers and those who qualified recently and are embarking on their career as teachers of 11–18 year olds.

It aims to give you a general grounding in the theory underpinning Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education, some practical approaches, and the evidence which supports these approaches drawn from a wide range of disciplines such as developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology and neuroscience. As well as learning about adolescent development (Chapter 2), you will find some chapters that deal specifically with effective approaches to teaching, learning and assessment in PSHE education (Chapter 3–6), and other chapters that deal with specific topics for which you may not feel adequately prepared – and which are sometimes called ‘sensitive issues’, such as mental and emotional health (Chapter 8) drug education (Chapter 9) and relationships and sex education (Chapter 10), but also risk education (Chapter 7) and economic education (Chapter 11). Each chapter will encourage you to think about the evidence in terms of effective practice in the classroom and provide examples from schools and classrooms to help you to reflect on what you observe and do in your classroom.

As you embark on your professional career as a secondary school teacher you will have good knowledge in your chosen subject(s). You will have completed degree level study and may have postgraduate qualifications and be working towards or have recently completed teaching qualifications. You may also have relevant professional or vocational experience acquired before or after qualification which you bring to your specific subject. In addition you may be a parent with children of your own or be part of a family where there are younger siblings still at school. You will draw on all of this as you become an effective teacher of PSHE education.

Alongside your formal teaching role, you will also find yourself with responsibility for the welfare and safety of young people both as a subject teacher and probably also as a form tutor. Both will provide you with a great deal of fulfilment and satisfaction, as well as a range of challenges! With more senior colleagues, you will also share the responsibility for the pastoral care of students. We will explore the overlap between this and PSHE education in Chapters 12 and 13.

Through your teacher education you will already have some understanding of how young people develop, and some of the different ways they learn. You will develop teaching skills and strategies to maximise the learning for young people. Importantly you will learn how to assess their learning needs and plan for their next steps. This book will help you understand how PSHE education fits into all this. It will help you to see the vital role PSHE education plays in the personal and social development of the young people you teach.

Getting started

We believe PSHE education is an exciting and challenging part of the curriculum in secondary schools. It may be that your training has not included a great deal about PSHE education so far and your own experience at school will colour your expectations. Try to keep an open mind and use this book to hold up a mirror to the wide range of practice you will encounter in the different schools with which you will be involved in your first years as a teacher.

A word about terminology

In this book we refer to 11–18 year olds as ‘young people’ or as ‘adolescents’. Chapter 2 will explore what it is to be an adolescent – and what that means for PSHE education. By referring to ‘young people’ rather than pupils or students, we hope to emphasise that while we have responsibility for their learning, young people are entitled to expect us to respect their rights and needs as individuals.

You will also find that PSHE education has different titles in different schools and even sometimes different titles in different year groups in the same school. So you may be teaching ‘Lifeskills’ or PSD (Personal and Social Development) or PESHE (Personal, Economic, Social and Health Education) or PSHCE education (combining PSHE education and citizenship within the same programme) or recently ‘character education’.

It is increasingly common to refer to sex and relationships education (SRE) as relationships and sex education (RSE), to reflect the emphasis on relationships rather than purely the biological process of sex. We prefer and have used RSE in this book unless referring to another source.

Character education

At the time of writing ‘character education’ (or education for the development of personal ‘characteristics’ or ‘traits’) is receiving a great deal of attention, led by the Department for Education (DfE) and some academy chain and independent school leaders and academics. While being clear that there should be no one single definition of character and encouraging schools to take their own approaches, the DfE has described character as a set of traits, attributes and behaviours such as: perseverance, resilience and grit; confidence and optimism; motivation, drive and ambition; neighbourliness and community spirit; tolerance and respect; honesty, integrity and dignity; conscientiousness, curiosity and focus (Department for Education, 2015).

There are clearly some overlaps between the aims of character education and those of PSHE education, but currently there is a great deal of evidence for what works in PSHE education and very little clarity about what character education is or does. Just as with PSHE education, it is not just what young people are taught in the classroom but the sum of their experiences at school that contributes to the development of traits such as resilience, critical thinking, autonomy and perseverance. However, where PSHE education differs from many character education programmes is that PSHE education does not seek to define how young people should feel, what choices young people should make or even what they ‘need to decide’.

We would argue that PSHE education, taught in line with the evidence for effective practice, focussing on the development of skills and personal attributes through different contexts of knowledge and understanding, is all ‘character education’ – and a lot more.

So what is PSHE education?

PSHE education is a planned programme of learning through which children and young people acquire the knowledge, understanding and skills they need to manage their lives now and in the future. As part of a whole school approach, PSHE education develops the qualities and attributes pupils need to thrive as individuals, family members and members of society.’ (PSHE Association, 2016)

Taking a closer look at these statements we can see that the PSHE Association sees young people as learners but that their education is – and should be – personal. For a beginning teacher this can seem one of the most daunting aspects of the subject. You may wonder if this means you are expected to take on the personal issues for every young person in the class. How do you keep your own personal views about such issues as drugs or sexual relationships separate from your responsibility as a teacher? What do parents expect of a curriculum that is intended to develop personal understanding, attitudes and skills?

What ‘personal’ means in the context of PSHE education is ‘relevance to the person’. Starting from where young people are (see Chapter 5), you can make the most sensitive issues appropriate and relevant to the young people you are teaching this year – who will, of course, be different from the young people you will teach next year and every year hereafter! ‘Personal’ also emphasises the importance of identity to young people and their health and wellbeing. Learning to know oneself is an important psychological task, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout adolescence and on into adult life (see Chapter 2). Young people of secondary school age will undergo one of the most amazing physical, intellectual and social transformations of their lives – and you will have the privilege of helping to guide and shape that transformation, alongside many other influences, not all of which are benign.

PSHE education also supports young people in developing intra-personal skills and attributes so that they are resilient in the face of adversity, can manage change and develop a realistic sense of their own worth and capability.

Key intrapersonal skills developed through PSHE education include:

1. Critical, constructive self-reflection (including being aware of own needs, motivations and learning, strengths and next steps for development, how we are influenced by our perception of peers’ behaviour).
2. Learning from experience to seek out and make use of constructive feedback.
3. Setting challenging personal goals (including developing strategies to achieve them and knowing when to change them).
4. Making decisions (including knowing when to be flexible).
5. Recognising some of the common ways our brains can ‘trick us’ or ‘trap us’ in unhelpful thinking (including generalisation, distortion of events, deletion of information, misconceptions or misperceptions about the behaviour of peers).
6. The skills that contribute to resilience (including self-motivation, adaptability, constructively managing change including reframing setbacks and managing stress).
7. Self-regulation (including managing strong emotions, e.g. negativity and impulse).
8. Recognising and managing the need for peer approval.
9. Self-organisation (including time management).

And finally, ‘personal’ means drawing on the young people’s existing knowledge and experience so that they can relate what they are learning in the classroom to their real lives, real families and real communities. One of the most important parts of any PSHE education lesson is that space, usually towards the end, where young people have the opportunity to reflect on what they have learned to do or say, perhaps as part of a group activity, and to think about what it means to them ‘personally’, as individuals.

PSHE education is also social. This means it is fundamentally about relationships, whether with friends and staff at school or with family members. Relationships between people underpin every aspect of our lives, for good and bad. Some relationships can always be relied upon to be strong and nurturing, some may be fun but brief, and others, sadly, may have the potential to damage a young person’s health and wellbeing. Peer relationships are hugely important in adolescence, but not to the exclusion of all others, as we shall see in Chapter 2. The relationships young people develop with their peers during secondary school may last a lifetime; they may get young people into trouble through excessive risk taking or be a real source of support and encouragement in difficult circumstances. The attitudes, understanding and inter-personal skills young people can develop through effective PSHE education will help them to enjoy the best and deal with the worst of life’s challenges and include:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One
• 2 Understanding Adolescent Development
• 3 Theory, Evidence and Practical Approaches to Effective Teaching and Learning in PSHE Education
• 4 The Organisation of PSHE Education in the Curriculum
• 5 Starting ‘Where Young People Are’: Planning Learning in PSHE Education
• 6 Assessing Learning in PSHE Education
• Part Two
• 7 Understanding Risk During Adolescence
• 8 Understanding the Role of PSHE in Promoting Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing
• 9 Understanding Drug Education within PSHE Education
• 10 Understanding Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) within PSHE Education
• 11 Economic Wellbeing and PSHE Education
• Part Three
• 12 PSHE Education and School Policy Matters
• 13 Understanding the Relationship Between PSHE Education, Pastoral Care and Therapeutic Interventions
• 14 Selecting PSHE Education Teaching Material and Resources and the Effective Use of Visitors to the Classroom
• Part Four Appendices
• Appendix I Using Story, Case Studies and Timeline in PSHE Education
• Appendix II Summary of Organisational Models for the Teaching of PSHE Education
• Appendix III Baseline Assessment Tools1
• Appendix IV Key Data on Adolescence in 2015
• Index