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Mulberry School for Girls


		11-16 schools

		6th form schools

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A reorganisation which focuses on student needs and student participation creates a new specialist department for personal development.

The school

Mulberry School is an 11-18 comprehensive school for 1,400 girls in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Its intake is predominantly from the local Bangladeshi community.

A radical reorganisation

Until 2001, PSHE at Mulberry School had been devised by heads of each year and taught by tutors. The tutors had no sense of ownership of the schemes they taught, and the quality of the lessons varied widely. The school decided that the way forward was to appoint a specialist team of teachers to form a new department to take over the teaching and coordination of the personal development curriculum.

Eight posts in the new team were advertised internally. Appointments were made by matching staff experience to the selection criteria and also by observing their PSHE teaching. This ensured that the team was made up of teachers with a real interest in and commitment to the subject.

A needs-led approach

The school wanted to tailor its new personal development curriculum to the needs of the students. The first step was to build a picture of the ‘Mulberry girl’ – her characteristics, background, interests and priorities, and what she should be entitled to. In the light of this, schemes of work were drawn up with the help of the Tower Hamlets LEA framework Preparation for Adult Life, which links together PSHE, sex and relationship education, citizenship and careers guidance.

The personal development team found that this approach worked better for them than beginning with an audit of which aspects of personal development were already being taught.

The new personal development programme: a whole-curriculum approach

The new personal development curriculum combines citizenship, PSHE, sex and relationship education and careers into one programme called Citizenship. The Citizenship Programme is divided into four themes:

active citizenship
sex and relationships
careers
drugs awareness.

Members of the specialist team teach the Programme to all students in a weekly 50-minute lesson. The citizenship element of this lesson prepares students for the Citizenship Studies short course GCSE.

The Citizenship Programme lessons are coordinated with key activities and units of work in specific subjects. This means that personal development takes place across the curriculum and also through extra-curricular activities. The Citizenship Programme lessons emphasise the citizenship theme; the activities elsewhere emphasise the other themes of the Programme.

Student participation

Students were consulted about the new curriculum from an early stage through their newly established school council. Students and teachers evaluate each module as it is completed.

Successful strategies

The school believes that the key elements of success were:

setting up a department with equal status to other departments in the school
recruiting teachers committed to this area of work
generating a sense of ownership of the programme by involving teachers in planning and sharing their own schemes of work
using specialist knowledge both in and from outside the school to develop high-quality schemes of work
enabling students to participate in the design and evaluation of the programme.