Relationships and Health Education
As part of your child’s educational experience at Halfway Nursery Infant School, we aim to promote personal wellbeing and development through a comprehensive programme of Personal, Social and Emotional Education (PSHE) that gives children and young people the knowledge, understanding, attitudes and practical skills to live healthy, safe, productive and fulfilled lives both now and in the future.
As you may already be aware, the Department of Education announced changes to the Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Health Education framework, following a nationwide consultation. These changes became statutory from September 2020, and all schools are expected to comply with the updated requirements. Relationships and Sex Education, along with Health Education, form part of the National Curriculum. The statutory guidance can be found at -
All schools providing primary education need to teach both Relationships Education and Health Education (please note that Relationships Education is not the same as Relationships and Sex Education). The new guidance for our children focuses on healthy relationships and keeping children safe in the modern world. It also covers a wide range of topics relating to physical development, mental health, wellbeing and safeguarding. Learning about the emotional, social and physical aspects of growing up will give children and young people the information, skills and positive values to have safe, fulfilling relationships and help them to take responsibility for their own wellbeing.
We have developed a Relationships and Health Education curriculum and also policy to both ensure that our RSHE provision is age appropriate for our pupils and to also meet statutory requirements.
Relationships and Health Education Policy
Skills Progression (PSHE including Relationships and Health Education
As detailed in our policy, age appropriate biological aspects are taught within the science curriculum, and other aspects are included in Religious Education.
Relationships Education focuses on teaching the fundamental building blocks and characteristics of positive relationships including -
· Families and people who care for me
· Caring friendships
· Respectful relationships
· Online relationships
· Being safe
These areas of learning are taught within the context of family life, taking care to ensure that there is no stigmatisation of children based on their home circumstances. We respect that children have different structures of support around them.
We have also developed a short age appropriate vocabulary list of words that we will be using and teaching the children in each year group which is included on the curriculum document. It is a statutory requirement and part of the science curriculum for children to name external body parts at Key Stage 1, and it is recommended that we start to use some correct terminology of body parts to promote safeguarding.
Parents/carers do not have the right to withdraw their child from any aspect of Relationship or Health education (i.e. the curriculum taught in our school, therefore the right to withdraw does not apply to children attending Halfway Nursery Infant School), although parents/carers do have the right to withdraw their children from the non-statutory/non-science components of sex education within Relationships and Sex Education (for older children).
We believe all parents/carers should be well informed about what their children are learning and we consulted with our stakeholders whilst shaping these documents.