Intent
‘Dream Big, Be Extraordinary and Change the World’. Our Personal Development Curriculum focusses on embracing the challenges of creating a happy and successful adult life. We believe that Personal Development is a fundamental part of a pupil’s education. Every child needs the knowledge that will enable them to make informed decisions about their well-being, health and their relationships. We believe that pupils with better health and well-being will achieve academically throughout their educational journey. Our four core values: co-operation, kindness, resilience and respect are reflected throughout our Personal Development curriculum and our daily life at Ashfield. The children at Ashfield are encouraged to recognise and develop our four core values through the process of working on their Super North Star Map following their dreams and ambitions. Pupils reflect on their experiences and understand how they are developing personally and socially, tackling spiritual, moral, social and cultural issues. It is our intention that all children will have the opportunity to experience a programme of Personal Development at a level which is appropriate for their age and encourage all our pupils to be empowered to grow up healthily, with resilience and a well-rounded understanding of the world we live in.
Implementation
At Ashfield, Personal Development is taught through Compass for Life, The Jigsaw scheme of work, our Relationship and Health Education curriculum. These have been carefully designed to teach children a range of skills and knowledge within Personal Development and the Jigsaw scheme of work has been adapted to meet the needs of the children at Ashfield. The teaching of our school values are key and they are taught explicitly in our Personal Development lessons throughout the autumn term. To support our Personal Development curriculum, we also use a range of workshops and initiatives (Big Anti-bullying assembly, Anti-bullying week, NSPCC workshops etc) to engage children and support their personal development.
Compass for Life
As part of our Personal Development Curriculum, we follow Compass for Life. This scheme helps children to develop a motivating purpose for their learning, together with direction for the journey through life; a bright, shining North Star and no matter what obstacles get in their way, they are always able to see their Super North Star and think of the achievable goals they have set to reach their potential. The children work through a set of activities to complete their own personal map, which with all of the additional steps, will lead them to reaching their Super North Star and some of these key steps include:
- Their values
- Their support team around them
- The milestones and actions they can take
- Their mental health and well-being
- Their Magnets and potential obstacles
Teachers and students work through the same Yearly Overview for Compass for Life, ensuring that there is a whole school approach and theme for each half term. The programme supports the teachers with the journey through navigating the map and using the cardinals of the compass to help children aspire, plan a strategy and develop the right attitude to learning.
Jigsaw
At Ashfield Junior School, we teach our Personal Development curriculum through Jigsaw. However, this has been adapted to meet the needs of the children in our school (further details are listed below). This programme ensures that our curriculum includes a full coverage of Personal Development including; Personal, Social and relationships, Health, emotional and spiritual education and looking at how our bodies change through age. Children’s mental health and wellbeing are important to our children at Ashfield and we feel that Jigsaw offers an approach to learning that takes this into consideration. We use Jigsaw to support our teaching and learning as it designed as a whole school approach, revisiting the same unites each year and these progress and develop in detail and depth as the children move through each Year Group.
Each lesson plan follows the same process; Connect us, Calm me, Open my mind, Tell me or show me, Let me learn and help me reflect. These child centred steps to each Personal Development lesson allows our children to begin with feeling safe and secure in their surroundings before recapping on their previous learning, feeling able to learn and engage on their new lesson content before reflecting and having safe closure from their learning.
- Improve their social skills to better enable collaborative learning (Connect us)
- Relax their bodies and calm their minds to prepare them for learning (Calm me)
- Help the brain to focus on specific learning intentions (Open my mind
- Initiate new learning (Tell me or show me)
- Facilitate learning activities to reinforce the new learning (Let me learn)
- Support them in reflecting on their learning and personal development (Help me reflect)
We have adapted the Jigsaw scheme of work to suit our school and needs of our children. Adaptations have been made in autumn 1 where in addition to learning about rules and responsibilities, lessons will also be taught on the school values. We have also adapted the Jigsaw scheme of work in the summer term. The ‘Changing Me’ module of Jigsaw is covered in a range of ways at Ashfield to best meet the needs of our pupils. During a parent forum, the Relationship and Health Education (RHE)/Puberty Education was discussed and it was agreed that the Jigsaw content wasn’t necessarily age appropriate for LKS2. As a school board, we decided to implement the ‘Changing Me’ puzzle as our RSE module in the below format (Please see RSE Policy for more detail).
From Years 3-6, the National Curriculum for Science includes subject content covering related areas, such as the main external body parts, the human body as it grows from birth to old age (including puberty) and reproduction in some plants and animals.
In Year 5 and Year 6, the Personal Development Curriculum ensures that both boys and girls are prepared for the changes that adolescence brings both emotionally and physically and it draws on knowledge of the human life cycle set out in the national curriculum for Science – how a baby is conceived and born. Below is attached the RHE overview from our police at Ashfield and how we ensure that the ‘Changing Me’ puzzle is covered across our curriculum.
Impact
Our children connect and engage with our well round Personal Development curriculum enabling them to learn, engage and reflect on the events and changes in our developing world. We want the students at Ashfield Junior School to feel safe to ‘Dream Big, Be Extraordinary and Change the World’ through our varied curriculum and our integrated core school values.
We would like to be able to see that the children have a good understanding on how to:
- Confidently be themselves in changing environments
- Celebrate difference in our diverse world
- Dream and have personal goals for themselves
- Live a healthy life, both mentally and physically
- Build and develop healthy relationships with others around them
- Understand the changes they will go through as part of growing up.
The implementation of Compass for Life within our Personal Development Curriculum aims to instil a range of positive attitudes in our children. The ability to create their own maps and journeys to their personal Super North Star enables them to develop:
- Excellent moral and social attitudes
- A commitment to learning and being aspirational
- Excellent conduct and attitudes towards their actions
We will be able to monitor their progress and their subject knowledge through pupil voice interviews, through learning walks and lesson observations to see how the children are engaging with the content and by looking at the work that is being produced. Not only will these methods enable us to monitor the impact of Personal Development at our school but we also hope it will show us that they are able to make their lives and other’s better by following our core values of kindness, respect, resilience and co-operation.