Pupils call for better PSHE education
Wednesday 21st October 2015
This week the PSHE Association have released the report:
Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education – a curriculum for life
Young people have again expressed a need for lessons to help them negotiate life’s challenges and opportunities. 967,000 young people voted in this year’s UK Youth Parliament (UKYP) campaign to choose UKYP’s priorities for the year ahead. The results were released last Friday, with a ‘curriculum for life’ and ‘compulsory mental health education’ voted as two of the three most important topics amongst young people.
Wiltshire young people have also asked for PSHE education to be improved in their schools.
Wiltshire Assembly of Youth (WAY) plan to work with teachers during the next year to highlight particular aspects that need a more effective focus and improve the role of pupils in developing and evaluating lessons. A recent survey of Wiltshire young people highlighted a range of topics with which students would like more support as part of PSHE education.
The most requested topic for primary pupils was cooking skills, almost double the number for any other topic.
Most requested from secondary girls was help with stress management, getting fit, losing weight and money management.
For secondary boys the most requested topics were cooking skills, money management, getting fit and stress management.
See Ethos 26 for some comments from Wiltshire young people about PSHE education including:
“In PSHE lessons, there should be more about preparation for the workplace, and finances. Currently, we have sex education, and the dangers of drink/drugs, but most of the information is repeated every year. In year ten, we still haven't had any information about how to write CVs, or how tax works, when many of us will be leaving next year. We know more about Pythagoras's theorem than university, and if we don't know how we should manage our money, how will we know how much we need to spend?” Rebecca
