Alison Heath-Taylor, Deputy Head at Lanesborough School has been a member of the Primary Teaching Resources community since 2015. Schools subscribe to use these resources to build inspiring and engaging lessons linking to citizenship and PSHE.
Who decided to take out a subscription and why?
As Deputy Head Teacher with responsibility for whole school PSHCE, it was my decision to take out a school subscription in 2015. I’d used the Primary Resources before for a number of years, when the programme had government funding and was free for schools, and had found the content and format of the materials to be very high quality. I’d also found the resources were accessible for teachers and engaging for children so I allocated some of my budget to pay for a subscription when the subscription stopped being a free resource.
How does the school use the Primary Resources library?
The resources are used from Reception right through to Year 6 during our PSHCE lesson time and in assembly time.
While I was planning our PSHCE curriculum, during the inception of our ‘Lanesborough Values’ and ‘Lanesborough Learning Habits’ which are attitudes, skills and key characteristics we are seeking to develop in the boys we teach, I met with one of the Young Citizens team, Victoria Quijada. We talked about linking some of the Primary Resources lessons with our value of the month and based our curriculum around the PSHE Association’s Programme of Study themes ‘Health & Wellbeing’, ‘Relationships’ and ‘Living in the Wider World’ (which the subsription lessons are also mapped to).
We also use NSPCC resources and other PSHE resources to provide extra materials to support topics such as drugs education and e-safety.
What are the benefits of the resources?
One of the main benefits is that the PowerPoints can be edited to suit your own class (we edit the KS1 PowerPoints to use in Foundation Stage and KS2 PowerPoints have even been used in Year 8) and they are so easy for staff to just ‘pick up’ and run with.
We also really like the fact that the lessons are regularly updated and refreshed to make sure content meets any new government guidance or address new topics. The lessons have been particularly helpful for teaching British values and there are lots of really good lessons to support relationships education.
