PSHE campaign - epetition response

8 January, 2008 in PSHE
Tags: PSHE

The Downing Street - epetition site has a response to the petition that:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) a foundation subject in all primary and secondary schools in England and Wales.”

The response reads:

The Government is committed to the provision of Personal Social, Health Education (PSHE) in schools and recognises its valuable contribution to the personal, social and moral development of pupils. High quality PSHE is also key to meeting the five Every Child Matters national outcomes for children

In England, Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) is already taught through the non-statutory framework at Key Stages 1 to 4. In addition, many aspects of PSHE, including sex and relationship education drug education and careers education, have a statutory basis within the curriculum. Furthermore, there are a number of requirements on schools which support PSHE, including the new duty to promote wellbeing introduced in September 2007, and the requirements for policies on bullying and child protection.

Currently there are no plans to change the statutory status of PSHE. The Government does not believe that making PSHE a foundation subject will automatically lead to improvements in its teaching and learning. Such a move would also run counter to the recently announced reforms to the secondary curriculum introduced to give schools greater flexibilities.

A number of steps are being taken to improve the effectiveness of what is taught through PSHE. These include: ensuring teachers have access to high quality continuing professional development (CPD) through the National PSHE CPD accredited programme; continuing to expand the National Healthy Schools Programme which requires schools to have high quality PSHE programmes; providing schools with additional guidance; and, supporting the recently established PSHE Subject Association to provide advice to PSHE practitioners.

Educational matters for Wales are dealt with by the Welsh Assembly Government. Personal and social education forms part of the basic curriculum at Key Stages 1 to 4 and by law all schools must teach it. In addition, there is a compulsory requirement to teach sex education at Key Stages 3 and 4.

I think that for many of us involved in this area the response will be a disappointment.

As was pointed out to the government only recently by the Labour peer Baroness Massey there are schools dropping PSHE altogether and according to research by the University of Manchester the amount of PSHE being taught in schools has been going down.

All this while at the same time PSHE has now become PSHE education (Personal, Social, Health and Economic education).

It seems to me that without the signal, that making PSHE education a statutory subject would give, pupils are getting at least a quart squashed into a pint pot.

Baroness Massey also pointed out the scale of the issue around the continuing professional development of PSHE teachers.  She said:

there are 26,000 schools and we are training 2,000 teachers a year to deliver PSHE. Some of those trained will change job, retire, or have breaks from teaching. At this rate it will take 50 years to train teachers in PSHE, by which time the turnover will have caught up with the training.

I don’t think that anyone in the Drug Education Forum thinks that making PSHE statutory is the silver bullet for improving the Every Child Matters outcomes that PSHE addresses, but somehow the government does need to give schools and other educational settings a strong signal that this shouldn’t be the subject that doesn’t matter on the curriculum.