PSHE is Essential - Here's Why
Author: Matthew Dagnall
Schools and colleges across England are beset by serious challenges requiring decisive intervention. Improving PSHE provision could help the fight on multiple fronts, including teacher retention, narrowing the disadvantage gap, and ringfencing schools’ resources for teaching and learning - here’s how.
Ask one hundred educators what the biggest challenge facing UK schools and colleges is and you’ll receive a hundred different answers. But few would smile and tell you everything’s fine.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) have published a manifesto for 2024’s general election, in which they’ve eloquently distilled the education sector’s woes down into three key areas.
We believe improved PSHE provision can help with each – that’s why we’re bringing our game-changing life skills and SEL app Peerscroller to UK schools this September.
Let’s find out what the issues are, then take a look at how PSHE is part of the answer.
What are the biggest challenges facing schools and colleges?
Recruitment, retention, and – might we add – funding
We’ve written on our blog previously about the teacher recruitment and retention crisis that’s created a staffing shortfall across the country.
It shows no signs of abating – rather, it remains Sword of Damocles, hanging over the education sector, threatening a potential future tipping point where school and college staffing numbers collapse below the point of functioning at all.
In our article, we proposed a number of potential solutions, and the ASCL has provided its own advice on how the UK’s next government can act to mitigate the crisis.
Two suggestions in particular chime with what we’re hearing from teachers across the country:
1. “Much-needed investment”
2. “Meaningful action to reduce teacher and leader workload and improve wellbeing”
PSHE can be part of the solution - not only to supplement the above points, but also to support them in their own right.
But before we discuss how, let’s explore the other two biggest issues facing schools and colleges.
A widening disadvantage gap
Last Thursday, we marked Social Mobility Awareness Day with an article on the nature of the disadvantage gap and the difference PSHE can make.
The ASCL is calling for a number of much-needed reforms to tackle the inequality facing young people in the UK, including the ever-present issue of funding, implementing and building upon existing plans to improve to the SEND system, curriculum and assessment reform, and increasing the availability of high-quality apprenticeships.
This isn’t a problem that can be solved within school grounds. But in as much as it can, we believe PSHE will be a key tool.
Expanding expectations beyond teaching and learning
Finally, ASCL members have been telling the association exactly the same thing we’ve been hearing from educators: schools and colleges are having to support their learners more and more – far beyond, and sometimes eclipsing, teaching and learning.
Mental health, attendance, dental hygiene, and even being clothed and fed; to put these challenges together under one heading seems to diminish the breadth of societal issues landing at the feet of UK educators.
But they all have something in common: they don’t originate in schools and colleges, but nonetheless, that’s where the essential work is being done to pick up the slack.
And that means even more pressure on a system already at its limits.
These problems should not need to be solved within school grounds and won’t be in their entirety – but right now, schools and colleges don’t have a choice but to support their learners.
If accessible and effective PSHE education can make any difference, now is the time to act.
How PSHE can make a difference
While the laundry list of challenges facing educators in 2024 is seemingly never-ending, the ASCL’s top three issues gives us a good place to start.
So – what can PSHE do to help?
PSHE and the disadvantage gap
Let’s begin with tackling the disadvantage gap. As the ASCL cites, the disadvantage gap in achievement between richer and poorer children was narrow (albeit painfully slowly) prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, however, the attainment gap has begun growing again. 2022 showed the greatest widening of this divide since comparable records began.
This disadvantage can be understood in a number of different ways, including income poverty, free school meals status (FSM), lack of social and culture capital, and lack of autonomy over decisions that affect life outcomes.
A variety of factors play into these forms of disadvantage, including:
· gender,
· ethnicity,
· first language,
· special educational needs and disability (SEND),
· family history of disadvantage, and
· geography
Efforts to address the disadvantage gap can take place both on the level of supporting a disadvantaged individual and making efforts to reduce disadvantage intergenerationally.
A 2018 report from the Education Policy Institute highlights several ways that disadvantage can be felt by young people, which we believe can be addressed on the level of both a single and many generations through PSHE provision.
Career education, aspirations, and soft skills
The most basic sense in which PSHE can reduce inequality is by boosting the career prospects of an individual, which, in lifting them out of poverty will remove a source of disadvantage in both their own life and those of their children.
This is achieved by addressing a number of barriers.
Firstly, equipping disadvantaged learners with the soft skills that have been shown to have a bigger impact on life chances that academic qualifications.
The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has demonstrated how disadvantaged pupils are deprived of opportunities to develop these key skills and recommends action in tackle that deprivation as a vital step in fighting intergenerational disadvantage.
Secondly, by challenging stereotype threat and imbuing a sense of belonging in education and career through role model visibility – something that the kind of peer tutoring we’ve employed in Peerscroller is uniquely well positioned to achieve.
And finally, by addressing the issue in direct terms via careers education. At present, disadvantaged pupils are less likely to receive careers guidance than their more affluent peers, a gap which is disproportionately harmful to those already lacking in social networks to support in career development.
Physical health
Secondly, PSHE serves to reduce the effect of poor health in exacerbating the disadvantage gap.
On the time scale of a single life, disadvantaged pupils are disproportionately more likely to suffer from poor health and lack a nutritious diet.
Aside from being essential to good living in their own right, there are also strong links between health and academic achievement.
Though children and young people may lack the autonomy to be entirely in control of their own health and wellbeing, no progress can be made in their lifetime unless they are equipped with essential knowledge on these areas.
Similarly, other factors (such as poverty) can impact health, regardless of the level of health literacy, and this will not be addressed through health education alone. Nonetheless, a link exists between societal disadvantage and poor health literacy that PSHE can address.
Health education compounds intergenerationally as well. Not only does it set up the next generation to begin life in a household with strong health literacy, perinatal health also has a lifelong impact on cognitive outcomes.
PSHE can educate on factors affecting this, such as stress in pregnancy, smoking in pregnancy, and breastfeeding.
Psychological health and wellbeing
Finally, disadvantaged learners are significantly more likely to be held back by poor mental health and wellbeing.
Children from low-income families are four times as likely to face mental health difficulties. And, while SEND constitutes a disadvantage in its own right, there is significant overlap between a disadvantaged background and educational difficulties, with over a quarter of learners eligible for free school meals having been identified with SEND.
While poor mental health disproportionately affects disadvantaged learners, this challenge is by no means limited to this group. In fact, the PSHE Association cites research by SHEU and the Cabinet Office in declaring poor mental health to be “the key emerging risk for children and young people”.
There is strong evidence that social, emotional, and/or behavioural education can benefit pupils’ mental health, along with a number of related factors such as social skills, antisocial behaviour, positive self-image, and prosocial behaviour.
The causes and effects of the disadvantage gap are broad, wide-reaching, and complex. These three examples of the potential beneficial impact of PSHE education are by no means exhaustive, but serve to demonstrate how improving PSHE provision can help to tackle this key concern of UK schools.
How PSHE can support academics
Next, let us turn to those “ever-expanding expectations” on schools and colleges.
The ASCL describes how schools and colleges have been forced to stretch their already limited resources by “providing mental health and counselling support, employing more pastoral and attendance support staff, employing their own educational psychologists”.
As discussed previously, there is strong evidence that PSHE education can improve leaners’ mental health, alleviating these burdens.
The ASCL also flags that schools and colleges are providing services such as “food banks and uniforms for children living in poverty”.
This is not an issue we ought to expect educators to resolve.
However, the benefits of PSHE in addressing the disadvantage gap will at least serve to ameliorate some of the detrimental effects of poverty on young people’s life chances, even if it will not resolve them all.
These are only two specific examples of how institutions are required to go above and beyond their core purpose of teaching and learning. In reality, until young people’s lives are free from challenges, extracurricular concerns will always have an impact on education.
PSHE, however, is an opportunity for schools and colleges to tackle these kinds of issues head on in a focussed way, rather than attempting a scattergun approach that allows them to affect all lessons.
How PSHE can help teacher recruitment and retention
Finally, we will address the teacher recruitment and retention crisis. The ASCL makes a number of suggestions for addressing this deep-rooted concern, but we will focus here on the two highlighted earlier, funding and staff wellbeing.
School funding issues
This one may seem like a stretch. True, no amount of PSHE education can change the fact that school funds are struggling to keep up with staffing costs, let alone improve teacher and leader pay to the point of affecting retention.
However, as demonstrated previously, PSHE has the potential to play a central role in address the range of demands on underfunded schools: as a low-cost multitool that can reduce the cost burden in other areas, like mental health and wellbeing.
Similarly, a major evidence review by Pro Bono Economics found “very strong evidence” of PSHE’s positive impact on academic attainment. Programmes that build the kinds of social and emotional skills developed by PSHE boost attainment, attendance, and behaviour, all of which come together to result in an 11% improvement in academic achievement.
Given the broadly poor state of PSHE provision in schools across the country, this is a relatively low-hanging (and potentially low-cost) fruit that has gone underutilised as schools funnel resources into directly attempting to boost attainment.
Staff wellbeing in schools and colleges
How can PSHE improve staff wellbeing?
There are a number of factors affecting the exodus from the profession, with the most cited reason being heavy workload, followed by underappreciation and constant changes to pay structures and assessments.
Besides these, however, 25% of teachers responded to a survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers saying that difficult behaviour had made them consider leaving teaching.
In fact, Ofsted found that students in England currently lose up to an hour of learning every day to bad behaviour. This demonstrates how tightly interwoven each of the issues discussed here is: if PSHE can address learner behaviour, it will benefit attainment, cost-effectiveness of attainment measures, and staff wellbeing, to name but a few.
So, the question is, can it?
In short – yes. As well as the potential of social, emotional and behavioural programmes to help reduce antisocial behaviour and promote prosocial behaviour, a Cochrane Review of the World Health Organisation’s Health Promoting Schools programme showed a beneficial impact on the prevalence of bullying.
The same career-boosting soft skills offered by PSHE, such as social skills, team-working, and self-esteem, also promise to benefit classroom behaviour and thus teacher and leader wellbeing.
Our conclusions: Why PSHE Matters
So, there we have it. The top three issues facing schools and colleges, and our case for how PSHE can help.
Are we claiming PSHE to be an education panacea? No – or, not without more evidence, at least. And even in the most effective implementation of PSHE, a wider approach incorporating improvements on poverty, disadvantage, and school-funding is likely necessary.
But PSHE education certainly serves to ameliorate any key factor in the challenges facing the education sector to some extent.
And, as we have seen, these issues are tightly bound together, such that resolving one can serve to support the others.
The end result of this is that any intervention that, like PSHE, can target many areas of school life has the potential to prove far greater than the sum of its parts.
Our sources:
https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EPI-Annual-Report-2018-Lit-review.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pits.21641
https://pshe-association.org.uk/news/pshe-education-supports-academic-success-says
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21291449/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-30802474
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD008958.pub2/pdf/full
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/study-into-non-educational-barriers-to-top-jobs-published
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/social-and-emotional-learning-skills-for-life-and-work
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/special-educational-needs-in-england-january-2017
https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/jan/27/five-top-reasons-teachers-join-and-quit