Secondary PSHCE

Year 7 - Developing Skills and Aspirations

At the beginning of the second half of the term, in PSHCE, the Year 7 students started by looking at how an individual can develop skills and aspirations. They started off by analysing and appreciating their talents and the different gifts they have. The students discussed their views on how to appreciate these talents and ways to nurture and better their skills by completing tasks on what makes them unique.

The Year 7 students focused on questions such as: ‘What factors make our unique identities?’ and ‘What factors affect or influence our aspirations?’ They then progressed to how personal qualities, attitudes, skills, and achievements are valued and how they can affect confidence and self-esteem. I was really impressed that everyone was willing to share how they felt and were very positive and respected their peers’ opinions. 

They also looked at how some aspirational individuals across the globe managed to be where they are now and how they are keeping up with the developing world.

Finally, the students narrowed this down by creating vision boards. Their vision boards were based on their goals and aspirations for life after high school.

The boards did not have to reflect only on education and career aspirations. The students were very creative and included images from magazines, their own ideas and descriptions to explain how they would achieve their goals.

Ms Onyango

Year 8 - Emotional Well-being and Mental Health

This term, we have been looking at Emotional Well-being and Mental Health.

We discussed attitudes that we may have towards mental health. This led to a conversation about myths and stigma and how we can challenge them. We also discussed digital resilience and the importance of managing our emotions. We discovered that as humans, we tend to form unhealthy coping strategies which might lead to more harm. We agreed that it is important to have a well-being plan that contains healthy coping strategies.

In one of the sessions, we looked at some of the factors that would contribute to emotional and mental health struggles. These factors are listed on the pictures in alphabetical order.

These discussions were invaluable and it is amazing to see the level of awareness that our students have in matters of emotional and mental health.

Ms Yvonne

Year 9 - Setting Goals

This half term the Year 9 topic for PSHE was setting goals. We looked at how to set goals and targets for the future by focusing on the positive things we want in the future. To accomplish goals, however, one needs to know how to set them.

The students learnt how to create steps to help them achieve their goals and after a series of discussions that included role plays, they now know not just the steps to follow when setting goals but also how to turn steps into targets. They also learnt the importance of setting goals and how they are essential when planning.

Goal setting is a process that starts with careful consideration of what you want to achieve and ends with a lot of hard work to actually do it. In between, there are some very well-defined steps that transcend the specifics of each goal. Knowing these steps will allow you to formulate goals that you can accomplish.

Having created and mastered the steps to help them achieve their goals, the students turned the goals they had set earlier in the term into targets that were used to write down their plans for the future. They later shared their future plans in one of the PSHE lessons and created a jamboard where some displayed their dreams. Now that they have set their goals in writing, they will hopefully make an action plan and follow all the steps to achieve them.

Here are our five golden rules of goal setting:

1. Set Goals That Motivate You
2. Set SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound)
3. Set Goals in Writing
4. Make an Action Plan
5. Stick with It!

L.Mkok

Year 10 - Financial Decision Making

This last half of term, the Year 10s have learned a variety of different ways that they can earn money, how to budget for future use and where one can invest. They particularly enjoyed creating a budget for their spending and learning about good and bad debt. Here are some videos of them explaining a few of the things they learned.

By Ms Kihuha

Year 11 - Families, Fertility and Pregnancy.

This term has had Year 11 students focusing their PSHCE lessons on the topic around families, fertility and pregnancy.

We started our lessons by being able to identify and evaluate the different types of long term commitments that one may choose to enter into and the law in relation to each. We went ahead and recognised the unacceptability of forced marriages and identified support for people who may be at risk. Students were also able to share their knowledge and learnt more about why people might choose to marry and why marriage must be freely entered into.

Heated debates raised when the topic about the roles and responsibilities of parents was being explored. The students exchanged their views about the roles of parents as well as the challenges they face at each stage of their children’s lives. We moved on to discuss fertility changes over a person’s lifetime and some of the factors affecting this as well as other routes to parenthood that include fostering, adoption and coparenting.

Year 11 students were curious to learn about the possible outcomes in the event of an unplanned pregnancy and to pick out where and how to access impartial advice and support in relation to pregnancy. Abortion after an unplanned pregnancy was the next topic of discussion and students learnt about the laws relating to abortion and the suppport available, in some countries, for women who choose that route.

We are looking forward to being able to learn more about identifying healthy relationships in our last week of term. It was a great pleasure for me to teach the Year 11 students PSHCE this term.

Miss Barasa

Students’ voice

I learnt about parenting, also responsibility in which a parent should take to raise their child, some of them are : - Having time for your child, motivating them in any small thing they do, teaching them to live all lives either poor or rich so that one day when you are not in the world they can be able to to overcome it and being responsible. In addition, we also talked about marriage : -Forced and arranged marriage , also their consequences. Lastly, we talked about early pregnancies and choices that someone can take which include giving up for adoption, keeping it or going for legal abortion (in countries where it is legal).

Lyrix

In PSHE I learnt about marriages; arranged marriage, forced marriage and civil partnership etc. We were also taught how to spot differences between arranged and forced marriage. We also focused on different ways you can choose to be a parent some examples include; adoption, fostering and via surrogacy. We learnt about abortion in detail. In conclusion, these PSHE lessons have been very interesting and useful for me.

Rhea