Intent
Our curriculum is designed to
- Support all children to build their knowledge and understanding that a range of emotions are normal and that understanding them can help us to make sense of them.
- Enable children to grow their knowledge of the local and global community.
- Develop essential life skills and knowledge to promote mental and physical health.
Implementation
The delivery of this curriculum will ensure:
- A safe school environment for the children to share their thoughts and ideas on discussion topics.
- Staff support children to consider how values can inform their decisions.
- Teaching and Learning is drawn from Kapow to ensure progression and breadth.
Impact
By delivering the curriculum in this way
- We create well balanced and rounded members of society.
- Children will be able to communicate and express their ideas with others in a mutually respectful manner.
- Children will have resilience to manage challenges that may occur and hope for the future with confidence to achieve their aspirations.
- Children will aspire and have confidence for their future.
What has changed in the update for September 2026?
Here at Haughmond Schools, we will be following the new DFE statutory guidance from September 2026. We will be delivering the new PSHE and RSE lessons using the Kapow scheme.
What new content will you need to be aware of? Here are five important examples.
- There’s a greater focus on online safety and wellbeing. For example, pupils will:
- learn about online financial harms such as gaming, video game monetisation, scams and fraud – as well as the reasons for age restrictions on online content such as gambling websites and social media. The new guidance also includes content on helping pupils to critically engage with what they see online and recognise their rights – for example in relation to privacy, consent and personal data (with new learning around the importance of location settings for instance).
- Within health education, there’s still an emphasis on helping pupils understand their bodies and the changes they might experience — and now, this includes learning the correct names for body parts (including genitalia). This reflects established best practice when it comes to giving children the knowledge and understanding they need to stay safe, including the ability to identify and report signs of abuse, while reducing stigma. Many schools have been teaching this effectively for years as part of their approach to safeguarding, but this addition to the statutory guidance brings welcome clarification and reassurance.
- We’re really pleased to see the addition of ‘personal safety’ to the statutory content, with an emphasis on recognizing and reducing risk, in the context of fire and travel safety — for example around water, roads and railways.
- There’s new learning around change and loss, including bereavement; recognising that this can cause a range of feelings, and that everyone grieves differently.
- The guidance also includes an increased emphasis on skills as well as knowledge. For example, within relationships education there’s new learning around communicating effectively, and developing the ability to be assertive and to express needs and boundaries. There’s also an emphasis on skills for managing difficult feelings in the context of relationships, such as disappointment, frustration and loneliness — and these skills are highlighted in online contexts too. For example, pupils will now learn strategies for resisting pressure to share information or images online. And the guidance states that some schools may decide to cover image sharing or online sexual content in late primary, if this is something they know is affecting their pupils. The DfE emphasises that if schools choose to cover these topics, teaching should be “age appropriate and respectful of all children, including those who may have no familiarity with the topics under discussion”.