Teaching PSHE is a statutory requirement from September 2021. At Thorogate School, we have have been teaching PSHE for years and think it is great that it is now statutory. The documentation from the DfE can be found here.

For primary schools, sex education is not statutory. However as with PSHE, we have been teaching sex education for years. This is an opportunity to formalise how we teach sex education and ensure parents are aware of how we approach it.

At Thorogate School we teach sex education predominately through the science curriculum. We ensure pupils have scientific vocabulary, being able to label body parts correctly and understand the changes that the human body goes through up to and including how a baby is conceived and born. Again, the focus is on the science rather than any act.

We have chosen to subscribe to a PSHE provider called Jigsaw. They have a very structured approach across the whole school. It includes Relationship, Sex & Health education.

• How do you feel about the vocabulary used? It is factual but may take parents by surprise the first time they hear their child use it. It is all about ensuring our pupils have the right factual vocabulary to keep themselves safe and understand the changes they are going through.

• In Y3 & Y4 the scheme refers to adults having sex to make a bay, this being something special between adults (no more details).

• In Y3 and Y4 there are some factual but detailed information about the female and male reproductive system. For copyright reasons we are not able to upload them onto the website, but we will show them to you during our parental consultation. We are proposing NOT to use them this year, until staff are more familiar with the material, and to use them from 2022.

• In Y6 there is a section on IVF, which we are not intending to teach. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with IVF, but we believe that the children will have the information they need before they leave for secondary school and that this is something that can be taught there.