PSHE, Careers & Citizenship Education
The Personal Development curriculum at Thornhill Community Academy provides students with a broad and rich, Careers, Citizenship, PSHE and RSE education. It seeks to equip students with the opportunity to develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to manage their lives in Modern Britain both now and in the future. Through the Personal Development curriculum, students learn how to stay healthy and safe, whilst preparing themselves to make the most of their life and work. The curriculum aims to allow students the opportunity to improve their own physical and mental health and their emotional and social well-being.

The Personal Development curriculum aims to equip students with a sound understanding of risk and with the knowledge and skills required to make safe and informed decisions. It offers a place in the curriculum where difficult or challenging questions can be tackled within a safe and supportive context. It provides opportunity for students to learn, understand, discuss and debate different world topics such as relationships, drugs and alcohol, peer influences, gangs, extremism, and radicalisation. The curriculum provides opportunity for students to enquire, solve problems and think critically. The Personal Development curriculum provides students with opportunities to reflect on their own beliefs, values and understanding in the light of their study.

The Personal Development curriculum has been designed in line with statutory documents including; DfE Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education policy, DfE Relationships and sex education Policy, Keeping Children Safe in Education (DfE 2024), PSHE Association programmes of study, Fundamental British values, Citizenship National Curriculum, Ofsted framework and Gatsby Benchmarks of Good Career Guidance. This ensures the curriculum goes above and beyond the statutory guidance.

The curriculum has been developed as a spiral curriculum to build upon prior knowledge of topics from Primary school. Schemes of learning are planned to ensure that students are exposed to a breadth of topics, with are built on year by year, in an age-appropriate manner. The Personal Development curriculum has been designed to be responsive to the needs of the local and wider community. It recognises the daily challenges which young people face and supports them to think critically and seek support where needed.

Key Stage 3
Personal Development is delivered through a fortnightly PSHCE lesson by a specialist teacher and a weekly Learning for Life lesson delivered by form tutors. 

Units of work across Key Stage 3 are sequenced to build incrementally on knowledge, year on year. Each unit has a specific theme in which students enquire into human questions about relationships, health and wellbeing and topics relating to living in the wider world, e.g., careers, finance, digital literacy. Schemes of learning are well sequenced to enable students to develop deep accurate representations of topics. The PSHCE curriculum enables learners to retain and deploy learning effectively.

Key Stage 4
Y10 & 11 students study a comprehensive Personal Development curriculum through weekly Learning for Life lessons, delivered by forms tutors. In addition, students benefit from Enrichment days each year. These days are made up of both guest speakers and specialist staff led sessions. As an Academy, we strive to welcome as many outside agencies as possible to give our students a broad and balanced offering. We are proud to welcome in high-profile companies and charities, all delivering sessions which engage and educate our students on topical issues. All Enrichment days have focuses linking to the DfE Statutory RSE Guidance, Gatsby Benchmarks, Religious Studies themes and areas of identified student need (Kirklees Student Survey, Student Voice & Community areas of concern).  

Further Information
The SHARE MAT Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) policy can be viewed on the Policies and Documents page of our website.

Curriculum plans for Personal Development can be viewed from the links below.