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Bishop’s Hatfield Girls’ School


		11-16 schools

		6th form schools

		Colleges

A committed team of volunteers teaches a Life Skills programme of inter-locking units.

The school

Bishop’s Hatfield Girls’ School is an 11-18 comprehensive school with 720 students. It provides for students across the ability range, although attainment on entry is average overall.

The programme

Citizenship, PSHE, sex and relationship education and careers guidance are combined into a single programme called Life Skills.

The programme consists of a set of components that fit together to represent ‘the whole person’. To emphasise this to students, each ‘self’ is shown as a piece of a jigsaw which is an essential and integral part of the whole.

Sex and relationship education, careers, and citizenship are recognisable within the units as discrete areas of work. There are also links mapped between different areas which help to make learning more coherent. For example, resisting peer pressure is addressed in:

sex and relationship education
drugs education
alcohol and tobacco education.

Contributions to careers education and guidance from the wider curriculum are identified, mapped and planned into the programme, particularly the careers information and guidance provided by Connexions, citizenship activities, and cross-curricular aspects of health education. The school is a member of the Healthy Schools Programme and has been re-accredited as a ‘healthy school’. Where identified topics occur they are addressed in several areas within the Life Skills programme and in the wider curriculum. For example, drugs and alcohol and tobacco education are also part of science.

Citizenship is delivered partly through discrete units of work within the Life Skills programme, and partly through mapped links across the curriculum.

Teaching and learning

Students at key stage 4 have one weekly, 50-minute Life Skills lesson taught by a member of the Life Skills team, all of whom have volunteered to be part of the team.

All the staff involved in Life Skills attend one or two days’ INSET annually in a residential setting. This is protected time in which they can view the coming year creatively and structure the planning processes for the Life Skills programme. In addition, they all attend half-termly planning, assessment and evaluation meetings.

Assessment

Each student completes a self-assessment sheet for various aspects of their work in the Life Skills programme, including elements addressed in other subjects. The students compile this self-assessment report on each unit through a discussion with their form tutor.

Awards to recognise student achievement in voluntary work are offered through the Millennium Volunteers programme. Students can gain a 100-hours award, and subsequently the award for excellence, which recognises 200 hours of voluntary work.

Student participation

Students complete an evaluation form each term. These are used by the team to review the design of the programme. Life Skills staff also complete their own evaluations on a termly basis.

From September 2004 the school is setting up a Curriculum Planning Group, which will include student representatives from every year group to give input into schemes of work and lessons.