Our Curriculum Intent for PDL

At Fleet Infant School, PDL (Personal Development Learning), is embedded in all that we do to enable our children to become independent, responsible, healthy and confident members of society. Our PDL curriculum has been built with the aim to support the development of the ‘whole child’, by helping them to understand how they are developing personally and socially as well as promoting their social, mental and physical development. Children will be able to develop the skills and knowledge to tackle the moral, social and cultural issues that are part of growing up. Through discreet lessons, as well as our wider cross curricular approach to teaching PDL, children are taught how to keep themselves safe, physically and emotionally, resulting in the acquisition of knowledge and skills, which enables children to access the wider curriculum. We provide our children with opportunities for them to learn about rights and responsibilities and appreciate what it means to be a member of a diverse society. Our children are encouraged to develop their sense of self-worth by playing a positive role in contributing to school life and the wider community.

At Fleet Infant School we use a programme from Coram Life Education called SCARF (which stands for Safety, Caring, Achievement, Resilience and Friendship), which takes a three strand approach addressing children’s knowledge, skills and attitudes. This is a whole-school approach to developing children's health and wellbeing. It is a progressive scheme of work which is built of six half-termly units across each year group from Year R to Year 2. The half-termly units are Me and My Relationships, Rights and Respect, Valuing Difference, Being My Best, Keeping Safe, and Growing and Changing.  Our scheme of work fulfills all DfE statutory requirements for Relationships Education and Health Education and ensures that we meet the statutory requirements for children’s Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development, and Ofsted inspection criteria for personal development, behaviour and welfare.

Children’s PDL lessons are fun and engaging, the activities are varied and age-appropriate. Children meet Harold the Giraffe puppet (‘Healthy Harold’) and his friends. The children learn about their feelings and ways to manage them, ways to keep themselves healthy, about the body, about friendship and being a friend, ways they can keep themselves safe, about families and relationships, who can help them when they need help and how choices and behaviours can affect children’s health and education outcomes. Assemblies are used to reinforce and discuss the PDL half-termly units that the children are learning about in the classroom.