About Our Life Skills Curriculum

Across the school, we teach PSHE and RSHE through our unified Life Skills curriculum. Fully compliant with the updated Department for Education (DfE) statutory guidance, our curriculum is heavily enriched by Pol-Ed, an expert educational framework written by teachers and quality-assured by policing professionals. Our ambitious Life Skills curriculum has the clear intention of increasing children’s self-regulation, enriching their emotional and social vocabulary, and putting what they learn into practice to develop a deep awareness of personal safety, citizenship, and the law. By doing so, we aim to remove social barriers, enable social equity, and improve our children's overall life chances.

The Pol-Ed framework sits under four core umbrella topic areas which progressively underpin our teaching of Life Skills from EYFS through to Year 6, fully capturing the breadth of modern statutory expectations:

• Relationships: Understanding positive attachments, managing peer pressure, developing assertiveness to express personal needs or boundaries, exploring consent in friendships, and identifying grooming or bullying.

• Keeping Safe: Recognizing personal risk across both physical environments (including road, rail, and water safety) and digital contexts (navigating online privacy, location settings, in-game monetisation, fraud, and scams).

• Understanding the Law: Developing a strong sense of social responsibility, exploring children's rights, and understanding the legal frameworks regarding property safety, regulations, and anti-social behavior.

• Wellbeing: Developing physical health, personal hygiene routines, emotional resilience (including explicit strategies for managing loneliness, change, loss, and bereavement), and a proactive understanding of mental wellbeing.

At the Federation of North Walsham Infant and Junior Schools, we aim to provide a rich experience of Life Skills that enables our children to experience both depth and breadth in the concepts they cover. This is achieved through a carefully sequenced spiral framework where fundamental life skills are systematically revisited, built upon, and consolidated as children grow. From a foundational focus on emotional regulation, cooperative play, and using accurate anatomical terminology for body parts as a core safeguarding tool in the Early Years and Key Stage 1, the curriculum progressively advances. By Year 6, children participate in deep-dive sessions regarding law, media literacy, addiction, human reproduction, and transitioning to high school. 

The methodology for teaching Life Skills at the Federation of North Walsham Infant and Junior Schools is to provide opportunities for children to develop their questioning skills, ignite curiosity about their role in society, and widen their knowledge of how the modern world works. We want our children to respond proactively and positively to real-world challenges, utilizing visible toolkits such as our Active Bystander Training (Direct, Delay, Distract, Delegate, Document) to actively challenge harmful language within our school environment.

We recognise our responsibility to prepare pupils thoroughly for the opportunities and responsibilities of modern life, ensuring they are fully equipped with the independence, resilience, and critical thinking skills required to make safe, informed choices. This is brought to life both through regular lesson delivery and signature experiences, such as our annual Futures Week, which explicitly introduces children to a wide range of professions and broadens their horizons.

We also recognise that Life Skills encompasses a broad range of subject knowledge and draws on disciplines from the wider world such as science, computing, mathematics, and PE. We believe making these curriculum connections are essential components that help to engage and connect our children with the opportunities Life Skills provides.

By the time our children leave the Federation of North Walsham Infant and Junior Schools, they will have the skills, knowledge, and experience to have a level of independent thinking, high self-esteem, and social confidence to carry through to their future education and into their lives beyond the classroom.

For further information on the curriculum please read the Subject Overview below.