The new academic year is upon us, and we have several exciting updates to our products to announce. We pride ourselves on being responsive to the needs and wants of our school partners. Based on their feedback, our team has worked hard over summer to make several product updates to reflect these wants and needs. 

Confidence & Empowerment

We get regular feedback from partner schools in many different forms:

  • Through termly check in calls
  • Through school visits
  • Through focus groups
  • Through surveys 

Based on the feedback from our partners all the changes and product updates can be encompassed in one theme: Confidence & Empowerment. 

We then brainstormed and started to implement product updates and changes to help our partner schools feel more confident and empowered.

The product updates can then be separated into 3 distinct categories: Staff Confidence, Student Behaviour and Assessment & Evaluation.  


Update 1: Improving Staff Confidence


Staff confidence is one of the main barriers to the effective teaching of RSHE. This can be for many reasons:

  • There is a high staff turn over which means a continual intake of new staff to support and upskill which is challenged for PSHE leads. 
  • Teachers don’t have time for in depth training outside of inset days. Inset days are barely enough for all the training.
  • Schools don’t have large budgets for CPD.
  • Ofsted wish to see ongoing professional development of RSE teachers and you need to be able to evidence this during Ofsted inspections. 
  • In person training is great but the Life Lessons team cannot get to all schools on inset days.

Therefore, we needed to come up with a scalable solution which would address all of these problems.  

To help we have developed x2 new resources to aid in building staff confidence.

  1. Online CPD training courses
  2. Staff training packs

Our online CPD training courses have the following characteristics: 

  • We have purposefully made them 20 minutes to help you fit them into your busy schedule 
  • Staff can pause their progress and come back to the course later on
  • There is audio accompaniment throughout to make them more accessible
  • These are relevant to all members of staff in schools

Our first 5 courses to go live are:

  • Creating safe spaces
  • Distancing techniques
  • Managing difficult questions
  • Facilitating discussion
  • Inclusive language

With many more courses to follow!

Our second new resource to help build staff confidence are our staff training packs.

  • Designed for PSHE Leads to deliver on inset days or other CPD opportunities through the term
  • Fully planned slides to empower you and your team to deliver and engage with CPD throughout the year 
  • Video delivery from the team as optional
  • Worksheets and scenario based practice to use a a refresher or to imbed knowledge

Update 2: Student Behaviour 

When it comes to student behaviour, we noted the following points that we wanted to address:

  • Currently it is common in many settings to only punish unacceptable student behaviour. Ideally the student would reflect and understand in order to learn and behave differently next time.
  • School staff are not well supported to adequately address challenging behaviour.
  • SEND learners, due to their communication style, may need a different style of intervention to address their challenging behaviour.
  • Detention/isolation room time is usually wasted time (punishment not restoration).
  • Often parents do not understand why their child is being disciplined and may not understand why the behaviour is inappropriate in school.

Based on these issues; we have created 17 new behaviour intervention packs. The purpose of these packs are to help students understand unacceptable behaviour and equip staff with the tools and resources to adequately address challenging behaviour.

We have packs on the following topics:

  • Ableism
  • Anti immigration/ anti refugee
  • Antisocial behaviour
  • Bullying
  • Cyber bullying
  • Digital footprint
  • Gender identity discrimination
  • Hate speech
  • Homophobia
  • Image based abuse
  • Play fighting
  • Racism
  • Religion discrimination
  • Respect
  • Sexism
  • Sexualised language
  • Spreading misinformation online
  • Vaping

The packs divide into 4 stages:

Stage 1: Reflective Conversation

There is a discussion framework to help you guide this conversation with the student. 

We also have a comic strip reflection variation to support students who may struggle to have these conversations.

Stage 2: Education presentation

For staff to deliver to the student following the completion of a reflective conversation. This includes a slide deck which describes why that behaviour is a problem, any legal implications and better ways to express themselves. 

Stage 3:  Personal reflection worksheet

This section is for the student to complete on their own following a one to one intervention. There are guided questions to help students retain the information and reflect on their behaviour. 

Stage 4: Information sheet for home

To be shared with parents/guardians so they fully understand the intervention that their child has received based on the incident that took place. We are hopeful that these information sheets will support parents to feel confident in continuing the conversation at home. 

We hope these behaviour intervention packs will help students reflect on why their behaviour is inappropriate rather than being punished for their behaviour. 

Update 3: Assessment & Evaluation

From our partner schools we found that these were the main problems schools faced with assessment and evaluation: 

  • Generally it is rare to effectively quantify what students learn in RSHE/PSHE lessons.
  • Data would be helpful to inform your curriculum planning and to support SLT buy-in.
  • Students need to feel they are progressing in the subject and not needlessly covering the same content each year. 
  • Limited time for PSHE Leads to create assessment resources.

To help we have created these assessment tools which will aid in quantifying what students learn in PSHE/RSHE lessons and to gather this important data:

Our assessment tools aim to:

  • To gauge knowledge and understanding and identify knowledge gaps. Both at individual lesson and summative unit level
  • To gauge confidence in the application of that knowledge
  • To gauge long term progress and impact

Our summative assessment tools are designed for each curriculum unit and for every year group. They break down curriculum units to support the identification of knowledge gaps and build template end of unit forms that can be picked up or adapted for use. By using these impact tools, teachers will have a better understanding of their students’ progression. 

  • Support teachers understand progression

We hope you are as excited about these product updates as you are! For more information on becoming a Life Lessons partner; click here.

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