‘Our Class’ is a series of educational resources to help teach primary school children in Key Stage 2 about friendships and peer relationships.

Building and maintaining friendships can be difficult, as can negotiating some of the trials and tribulations of these relationships and recognizing when they are healthy/unhealthy. This is an area where children are particularly likely to benefit from support.

The new Department for Education statutory relationships education curriculum became mandatory in September 2020. Within this revised guidance, educating children about friendships forms an explicit element (see Caring Friendships). Primary school children are expected to learn about caring friendships, and the characteristics of healthy friendships. They are also expected to know how to recognize unhealthy friendships, and deal with the ups and downs of friendships. These areas are sensitive, and tricky for educators to tackle in an authentic and meaningful way. Providing advice and guidance to teachers is therefore important to help them address this new area of the curriculum effectively.

It is increasingly expected that teachers’ practice is informed by research evidence, and we know that teachers report lacking confidence and wanting more guidance and training about teaching pastoral topics. Whilst there are some existing resources to help teachers deliver a range of topics in Personal, Social and Health Education, there are limited materials focusing explicitly on friendships. Alongside this, available resources are not necessarily evidence-based, or previously trialed with appropriate stakeholders. They are also not currently mapped against the new DfE guidance so that schools can be sure they are covering the required content. There is therefore a need for high quality evidence-based learning resources that have been properly piloted and evaluated to ensure their suitability, and potential to foster change/positive outcomes.

This project is therefore timely and important. The ‘Our Class’ resources will help primary school teachers to deliver part of the new relationships education curriculum effectively, and improve their confidence doing so through detailed guidance and lesson plans, and knowing they are using materials that have been developed and piloted properly. The materials are mapped onto the Relationships Education statutory requirements for the ‘Caring Friendships’ Unit, and the PSHE Association Programme of Study. These are detailed in the guidance materials at the start of the pack when you download the resources.

In our launch event, we talked about the background to the materials and how they were developed. We also had a guest speaker, Victoria Pugh, who provided her expert perspective on the resources having used them herself: