PSHE Curriculums: Teaching students about the wider world
Since the 2002 Children’s Act all UK schools are required to support the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of students. This legislation is premised on the belief that student wellbeing positively contributes to academic attainment. PSHE is widely considered to be the most effective mechanism to teach about topics that lie outside of traditional subject boundaries, but the subject remains non-statutory and the government does not provide standardized frameworks for teaching PSHE. The argument behind that is the idea that teachers are best positioned to assess what lessons their students require and that if teachers are afforded flexibility this will enable the delivery of high-quality PSHE lessons.
It is important to acknowledge that today many teachers are facilitating PSHE lessons without formal training to address those topics. This means that teachers are asked to run sessions on topics they are themselves not very familiar with and feel unconfident about their ability to facilitate certain lessons. This can also be connected to an increasing and steadily developing range of topics schools are seeking to address and the sensitive nature of some of these topics.
A teacher that is asked to run a session, for example on transgender identities, is without a strong understanding of this topic, rather likely to reinforce misconceptions or negative stereotypes about the trans community, despite every intention to foster respect.
In addition to topics being sensitive, some topics and the validity of them being taught in schools are also still actively debated publicly. In March of this year, Rishi Sunak called for a review of how RSE and health education are taught in schools. As such, a lack of clarity as to what can and should be acknowledged within classrooms pervades.
Next to the topics that are listed by name in the subject title, i.e., personal, social, health and economic education, PSHE lessons are today used to address a variety of topics. Many schools, following the Everyone’s Invited campaign that exposed rape culture in schools and amongst young people, are now trying to address and tackle rape culture. In light of the powerful online presence of Andrew Tate, there is an increased effort of schools to teach media literacy and encourage discussions about masculinity. Since Relationship and Sex Education as well as Health education have become statutory subjects in 2020, schools are required to teach students about LGBTQ+ topics. PSHE is being used to address harmful ideologies and varying forms of discrimination as schools are attempting to educate on difference and teach respect, which, unsurprisingly, is no easy task.
There are various challenges to running effective PSHE sessions. In addition to teachers having to run lessons without comprehensive knowledge on a subject, the formats in which PSHE is taught vary widely. Ideally, topics are not mentioned only once, but addressed at multiple stages throughout students’ years at a school, but working with spiral curriculums that build upon content from previous years and develop student knowledge require long-term planning, inter-year coordination and personnel stability. These formats and their organisational requirements are simply not realistic for most schools.
In light of these challenges there is an increasing number of educational projects offering PSHE sessions. External speakers come into schools to facilitate sessions on a variety of topics, such as sex education, violence against people of marginalised genders, masculinities and anti-racism. These speakers, ideally, bring a high topic-specific level of knowledge and training. Often they are distinctly positioned to facilitate the conversations they are generating due to their own positionality in connection to the subject. Examples of this are queer people facilitating sessions on the LGBTQ+ community or people speaking to their own experience with masculinity when running sessions on this topic. External speakers can speak confidently on the topics their organisations are centered around and are likely to meaningfully contribute to the understanding of students. This has to be understood as a private sector response to the deregulated state of PSHE education policy and the lack of training and resources available to schools and teachers. The extent to which schools can bring in external speakers is limited by available resources and in any case external facilitators can only ever complement and support existing school practices and PSHE curricula.
The Collective Futures Project offers sessions on topics of intersecting themes of social justice, because we believe that conversations around discrimination are important and should be made accessible to everyone. As a youth-led project our speakers have the ability to engage with students on the basis of a shared understanding of what it feels like to attend a school in the UK. We understand ourselves as a transitional solution and hope that our work will eventually cease to be necessary, as the training available to teachers and the frameworks for schools to build on when teaching their students about the world beyond the classroom advance. Acknowledging that teachers are well positioned to assess their students needs does not have to equate to the lack of resources and training that currently marks PSHE facilitation in the UK. The deregulation of PSHE does not only affect access to learning opportunities, but also the right of different marginalized groups to have their lived experience recognized in the classroom.