Life Skills and Personal Development

What is Personal Development?

Personal development is both a subject and a school ethos. We want each child to leave the school feeling confident, unique and proud.

Our aim is to teach children how to navigate through life safely, happily and healthily. Children are growing up in a world that is constantly changing and it is the duty of all the staff at school, in partnership with the parents, to teach the children transferable life skills. We teach children about the world around them, relationships, emotions, reproduction and health, as well as skills to help with life. We consistently promote the British values and our school values.

How do we teach Personal Development at St Paul’s?

St Paul’s Primary School teaches personal development in a wide range of ways throughout the children’s school lives. For example:

• Our comprehensive Jigsaw PSHE and RSE programme supports pupils’ personal, social and emotional development, helping them to build healthy relationships, resilience and an age-appropriate understanding of well being.
• The Volunteer Programme provides pupils with meaningful opportunities to contribute to school and community life, developing responsibility, compassion and active citizenship.
• Life skills are assessed using bespoke key performance indicators, enabling staff to monitor pupils’ progress and identify areas where further teaching or support may be needed.
• Our termly aspirations curriculum introduces pupils to a range of careers, pathways and role models, raising ambition and broadening their understanding of future possibilities.
• Trips and visits enrich classroom learning through first-hand experiences, helping pupils to deepen their knowledge, develop independence and engage with the wider world.
• Enrichment Week gives pupils the opportunity to explore new interests and take part in creative, practical and collaborative activities beyond the usual curriculum.
• A wide range of extracurricular activities enables pupils to pursue their interests, discover new talents and develop confidence, teamwork and commitment.
• Pupil councils provide structured opportunities for children to share their views, influence school improvement and develop leadership and democratic decision-making skills.
• Our support for the foodbank helps pupils understand food poverty and social responsibility while enabling the school community to provide practical assistance to local families.
• The buddy system helps pupils form positive, supportive relationships across year groups, ensuring that younger or more vulnerable children have a trusted peer to guide and encourage them.

Life skills

At St Paul’s, we are committed to providing every child with an outstanding education. Alongside academic achievement, we place a strong emphasis on developing the values, knowledge and skills pupils need to succeed in further education, the workplace and wider life.

To support this commitment, we have developed age-appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each year group. These provide a clear framework for explicitly teaching, developing and monitoring essential skills, helping to ensure that every pupil benefits from a broad, ambitious and well-rounded education.

The Aspirations Curriculum

The Aspirations Curriculum is St Paul’s C of E Primary School’s answer to giving our pupils the best possible knowledge regarding what jobs might be available to them in the future. We hope that by looking at different jobs, researching famous people in their trades, bringing in speakers from these industries and having a go at role playing some of the roles, children will be inspired to work hard so that they can become what they want to be in the future.

We will be holding an Aspiration Curriculum day once every term, for a full day. Each term has a different job focus.

On the day we will study what the job entails, listen to a speaker, look at different role models and link the job to the wider community and how it can contribute to our role as a global citizen. The children will aim to produce a double page spread in their Aspiration Curriculum Journal which moves through school with them so that when they leave us, they have a record of all the roles they have looked at throughout their time at St Paul’s.

Below is the suggested planning timetable that each class may following this year.

*Climate Action (CA)

*British Values (BV)