My second day at Safe Ground began slightly late as I wasn’t able to get my bike on the first train because it was so busy! When I got here it was straight to work starting with a meeting about the Family Child programme. It was trialled in schools during the development of the custody based Family Man programme but has not been delivered since. Safe Ground is interested in reviewing the programme to explore the possibility of schools delivering it as part of Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) lessons around Citizenship. The feedback from the students who took part in the trials was really positive, and it could contribute to David Cameron’s Big Society too. It’s all about thinking about family relationships, roles within families and how we can meet the needs of family members without causing problems.
So I spent the majority of my day working on Family Child – reading and reviewing lesson plans, researching how it ties in with the current national curriculum for Citizenship and PSHE, thinking about what the potential hitches are and how they could be resolved. I’ve also written a draft lesson plan that Safe Ground could develop for teaching school children about how we make decisions, how we vote and why democracy is good. It’s been a really interesting day, and something I think I can contribute to because I’m still at school.
It’s complicated because of the way the curriculum works. Citizenship and PSHE are technically two different subjects, although most schools seem to teach them together. There are requirements for each at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4, but I haven’t quite managed to work out how they are assessed. Family Child covers about half of the Citizenship course if you include the democracy lesson plan I wrote and quite a bit of PSHE too. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to find out more information about how Family Child can be assessed in the same way that the rest of the curriculum is and think about how to implement more of the Citizenship curriculum into the programme.