Relationships and Health Education

“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.” A.A. Milne

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” – Harper Lee

At St Jérôme school, our PSHE curriculum enables children to become healthy, happy, independent and responsible members of society. Our curriculum aims to help children develop personally, socially and spiritually. It is our intention to have a school where we build character, emotional health and resilience in pupils so when they leave St Jérôme, they will do so with the knowledge and skills to be able to play an active, positive and successful role in today’s diverse society.

The HeartSmart programme, which we use as a platform for delivering PSHE, aims to build resilience, strengthen emotional intelligence and develop active empathy. Fundamentally, it teaches our children to love and accept themselves as well as loving and respecting each other. Children will show compassion for others and learn how to build and maintain relationships. Children will learn how to deal with conflict and offer forgiveness and move on from disagreements. Children will experience a sense of community as they feel they are a special and unique part of a class, school and Christian family. They will be hopeful and excited for what they will have to offer the world as they grow and learn. Our HeartSmart programme helps to thoroughly embed our school values, putting them into real contexts that can be practiced not only throughout their time at school, but into their futures.

The main focus of HeartSmart is to ensure that children are looking after themselves by educating their hearts, as well as their minds. Through our PSHE curriculum, children’s wellbeing, happiness and safety are our first priority, and PSHE is the key vehicle to deliver this. As they feel comfortable and confident with themselves they will learn to understand mistakes are part of learning and build the resilience to accept and move on from mistakes. HeartSmart teaches all of our children how to express what’s happening in their hearts, what they’re feeling and the correct language to help explain this. This will help them to be clear communicators and feel confident communicating in a variety of contexts. They also learn about the diversity of the society we live in and celebrate differences as well as similarities.

We follow the HeartSmart programme to enhance our learning building resilience, emotional intelligence and active empathy in the hearts of our children.

The HeartSmart programme has 5 different units, whose main areas of focus are:

Relationships
Health and wellbeing

Living in the wider world

With the help of Boris the robot, we follow these themes over the year:

Don’t Forget to Let Love in (Autumn):

We want our children to know that they are valued, that they are one in a million and that they are loved. We want them to consider who in their life makes them feel safe, valued and loved as well as understanding that God is a God of love who created them to be loved by Him. This assembly explores the way in which they understand that they’re loved by looking at the 5 love languages. We want children to reflect on their value and grow in self-acceptance and love.

Too much Selfie Isn’t Healthy (Autumn):

There are 7.4 billion people in the world. We want the children to know that they are loved but being Heartsmart is about loving others too, as Jesus says, “love your neighbour as yourself”. We want our children to explore the happiness that comes by thinking about themselves less and considering others more. We want to create a culture defined by empathy.

Don’t Hold on to What’s Wrong (Spring):

We want children to know that when they get hurt they often want to get even. The drive to make things fair is strong. They want to rub it in, get their own back, let that person know that they’re not ok. But this ends up hurting themselves. The only way through hurt is to rub it out. Forgiveness is the best gi3 that they can give themselves and it’s an important theme in the Bible, it even finds it’s way into the LORD’s prayer.

Fake is a Mistake (Spring):

We want our children to consider why they tell lies and the consequences when they do. Telling the truth requires courage, nevertheless we want children to choose to resolve to tell the truth always. We want them to understand that this not only shows love towards others but also towards themselves and to God. Telling the truth is the cornerstone of true friendship.

‘No Way Through’ isn’t True (Summer):

We want our children to know that when they face challenging situations, they don’t need to give up. We want them to know that there is always a way through. In every situation, Maths, reading, friendship there is an opportunity for children to respond with hope. We want them to know that the first part of finding the solution and way through is by believing that there is one. We want the children to grow in perseverance and to put this into practice in the classroom.