School Curriculum: PSHE

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The national curriculum creates a minimum expectation for the content of a curriculum in maintained schools. Quite deliberately, it does not represent everything that a school should teach. It would not be possible to cover all that when there are so many groups wishing things to be included in the curriculum, but many schools already choose to include CPR and defibrillator awareness as part of their PSHE teaching. We will work with the British Heart Foundation to promote its call push rescue kit to schools, including through our social media channels and the summer term email.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, what work is being done with teacher educators to ensure that there is a good supply of properly qualified teachers to take this agenda forward, particularly in view of what my noble friend Lady Massey said about it being a whole-school enterprise and not a specialist subject?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right in her observations. High-quality professional development for teachers is an essential part of raising standards in schools. The PSHE Association has some excellent resources, which we signpost for schools. They include an online CPD course, which explores assessment policy writing, creating schemes of work and SRE education. Teachers can of course benefit from the national PSHE CPD programme.