PSHE lessons in schools are like the “Wild West” and are used to teach contested ideologies, an MP has claimed.
Miriam Cates, Conservative MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, said Personal, Social, Health and Education lessons have the potential to improve children’s mental health, and wellbeing, but claimed they are not being taught properly.
Speaking at a meeting of the education select committee held to examine children’s mental health and wellbeing, she said: “It seems to me at the moment that PSHE is a Wild West and it’s being used in various ways in various schools to teach contested political ideologies in many cases, rather than what we would have traditionally called the virtues – resilience, perseverance, humility, tolerance - the kind of things that actually do give children the foundation for good lifelong mental health.”
Mental health experts told MPs on the committee that PSHE lessons have the potential to teach skills and resilience that will help children with wellbeing and mental health.
Economist and mental health expert Baron Layard called for PSHE to be taught by specialist teachers.
He said: “It is incredible this is not a specialist subject in secondary schools. If you have to be a specialist historian to teach history you have to be a specialist life-skills person to teach life-skills.”
He added that a “sizeable chunk” of the time primary school teachers spend training should be spent on PSHE.
He said the best way of improving academic standards is to improve student’s wellbeing, adding: “PSHE is an enormous opportunity to do something really serious for children, if you have a really well designed curriculum with really good materials and teachers trained to use them.”
