Skip to content ↓

Personal Development

Personal Development Curriculum Intent

'Our mission for the Personal Development curriculum is to ensure students are well equipped for life beyond school, with detailed understanding of the issues young people face today and how to keep themselves safe on and off-line. We want to develop empathetic and well-rounded individuals who are responsible global citizens that can thrive in the world beyond school and make their voice heard.'

Personal Development (PD) involves three key disciplines:

  • Careers education
  • Personal, Social, Health Education (PSHE), including Relationship and Sex Education (RSE).
  • Citizenship education.  This can be studied further at GCSE if students opt for this subject.

All three disciplines are taught as a spiral curriculum, which involves revisiting core concepts and ideas over time, at an age-appropriate stage in a young person’s development.  The different nature of the three disciplines mean that the key concepts and ideas vary:

Careers education is an area for development over the coming year. We are driven by the Gatsby Benchmarks and in particular the need to allow young people the ability learn from career and labour market information, providing encounters with employers and employees and as well as supplementing and linking in with the interdependent personal guidance in careers provided to young people at Bradfield School.

Citizenship education involves the following key concepts and ideas at Bradfield: democracy, government, law, justice, rights and responsibilities, participation, community, equality, identity, and diversity

PSHE is structured around allow young people to make healthy and safe choices. It applies this to different contexts and settings and is often driven by identified safeguarding needs in the school. We focus on key ideas and concepts in terms of:

  • Mental health and wellbeing
  • Growing and changing, including puberty.
  • Personal safety.
  • Relationships and sex education.
  • Bullying and discrimination
  • Money management
  • Media and digital literacy, including online safety.

 

 

Key stage 3 Areas of study*

*The order of study will change year-on-year depending on need

Year 7

  • Finding yourself
  • Equality
  • My voice locally
  • My body and me
  • British values
  • Online safety

 

Year 8

  • Drugs and alcohol
  • Mental health and wellbeing
  • Social action
  • Careers
  • Online safety
  • Finance

Year 9

  • First aid
  • Healthy relationships
  • Careers
  • Online safety
  • Active Citizenship

 

Key stage 4 Areas of Study*

*The order of study will change year-on-year depending on need

Year 10

  • Careers
  • Social justice
  • Online safety
  • Relationships
  • Careers
  • Democracy

 

Year 11

  • Careers
  • Health and wellbeing
  • Relationships
  • Mindset and preparing for exams
  • Online safety