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Fun at Fairthorne

We have successfully navigated the first half term in our ‘new normal’. We’d like to say a special thank you to all of our families for their support and understanding in this difficult time. This week, our Year 5 and 6 children spent the day at Fairthorne Manor and Year 1/2 have been learning all about friendships and feelings.

Fairthorne Manor

This was meant to be our residential week but this was sadly cancelled due to the pandemic. However, our Year 5/6 and office teams managed to find an alternative, then plan and organise a day outing at Fairthorne Manor instead. The children had a wonderful time taking part in a wide range of outdoor activities – despite the very wet weather, especially on the Wednesday trip!

Friendships and Feelings in Year 1/2

Year 1/2 have had a busy week, too. Check out the photos and report below:

Year ½ are learning about lots of things like friendship and feelings. Three boys named Birt ,Etho and Shu are in a story called, On Sudden Hill, they play with boxes a lot and they have a friend problem which they sort out by making Birt a huge monster truck, as a sorry for leaving him out. We have been working together and doing many activities about the project like den building, bird feeders, secret messages with soap , marbles runs, car races, feeling monsters and hearing stories about funny grumpy frogs and bears! Today we have done spellings and we liked the rhyming words, like door/ floor/ because it has two OOS! And we like it! LEARNING IS SO COOL …WE LOVE IT! We do lots of mazes, messages and we made phones out of cups and string which were AMAZING! WE LOVE ALL OF OUR ACTIVITIES!

Relationships and Sex Education Policy

Back in February 2020, just before went into lockdown we shared our draft Relationships and Sex Education Policy in our blog for consultation purposes.

Thank you to all of the parents who contributed to the consultation and we now have a final version (click here). The guidance around this is now statutory with the main focus in primary schools being  on ‘relationships and health’.  I have included two extracts below from the government guidance, which hopefully will answer some of the questions I received.

Sex education is not compulsory in primary schools but the Department for Education states the following:

It is important that the transition phase before moving to secondary school supports pupils’ ongoing emotional and physical development effectively. The Department continues to recommend therefore that all primary schools should have a sex education programme tailored to the age and the physical and emotional maturity of the pupils.

Therefore, the main content of our sex education curriculum is covered in the latter stages of Year 6.

 

One of the other parental consultation questions was around the ‘right to withdraw’ their child from sex education. To clarify, parents and carers do have the right to withdraw their children from the sex education part of the curriculum but not the relationships or health content.

 

We also cover areas relating to relationships and sex education, as per the guidance, which states the following:

The content set out in this guidance covers everything that primary schools should teach about relationships and health, including puberty. The national curriculum for science also includes subject content in related areas, such as the main external body parts, the human body as it grows from birth to old age (including puberty) and reproduction in some plants and animals. It will be for primary schools to determine whether they need to cover any additional content on sex education to meet the needs of their pupils. Many primary schools already choose to teach some aspects of sex education and will continue to do so, although it is not a requirement.

A further question related to LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, bixsexual and Transgender. The new guidance states this:

Schools should ensure that all of their teaching is sensitive and age appropriate in approach and content. At the point at which schools consider it appropriate to teach their pupils about LGBT, they should ensure that this content is fully integrated into their programmes of study for this area of the curriculum rather than delivered as a standalone unit or lesson. Schools are free to determine how they do this, and we expect all pupils to have been taught LGBT content at a timely point as part of this area of the curriculum.

At Rownhams, we will cover this area, as it is appropriate, to ensure children are able to value our similarities and differences and understand the importance of equality and respect.

The following guidance was used to support the development of this policy

Statutory Guidance from the DfE:
Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education guidance

Guidance for Church of England schools on challenging homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying
Valuing All God’s Children

Remote Learning Policy

I talked about our Remote Learning Policy in a previous blog. I am pleased to say that we have now uploaded this to the website (currently found in the website footer) or you can click on the link here.

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