Miss Bicheno, Christ Church Junior School, Ramsgate has been a member of the Primary Resources subscription community since 2016.
Who decided to take out a subscription and why?
When I arrived at the school, teachers were following the SEAL programme but didn’t have any resources to back this up so were really struggling to plan and deliver effective PSHE lessons. I’d used the subscription before when I was working as a supply teacher in another school and found it really useful, so I recommended it to the headteacher.
Before purchasing, the headteacher looked at some of the free resources and spoke with the headteacher at my previous school to make sure he was happy with the resources. Happily he was, so we took out our first annual subscription in 2016.
How does the school use the Primary Resources?
I used the Primary Resources sample scheme of work as the basis for my own scheme of work and allocated lessons to each year group. The school also uses the Living and Growing resources to cover RSE. The lessons are often used in other subjects such as English and science lessons, for example the lesson Water: Our Most Precious Resource is used as part of a geography topic.
What are the benefits of the resources?
PSHE and Citizenship is unfortunately still non-statutory, so it can often get forgotten as most teachers don’t have time to plan and research lessons in addition to planning for core subjects such as English, maths and science. The library makes things easy for teachers as there’s a good range of lessons and activities to select from. The learning intentions are clear and you can see immediately how to teach the lesson without having to read reams and reams of information.
Unlike some schemes, the lessons aren’t too prescriptive. The ideas and research is ready-made for you but teachers can edit or adapt the content of the PowerPoint presentations to suit the needs and interests of their own class. We use them as a stimulus to open door-ways that take children on a journey that can go in lots of different directions and encompass lots of different curriculum areas.
Pupils really enjoy the lessons and love the PowerPoints. The teachers sometimes add extra slides to link with local issues or topics the children have been learning about, for example I recently taught the lesson Charitable Giving through History and added a video clip from the musical Oliver as the children were fascinated by the Victorian workhouses, they also investigated some local charities in Ramsgate.
The lessons have also had a real impact on learning; our pupils now have a much better understanding of British values, especially our democracy.
