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SecondaryHealth & Wellbeing

Review – Jigsaw 11-16

At a glance
  • An impressive whole-school approach to PSHE
  • Uses mindfulness to empower students’ learning
  • Includes lesson plans with accompanying presentations and teaching/learning activities
  • The Jigsaw REST (Resilience and Engagement Scale and Toolkit) is a bonus and is included with the Jigsaw PSHE

Now more than ever, young adults need great PSHE and their teachers need great resources – not least because of the RSE content schools are now required to teach.

Quality PSHE provision requires a whole school approach, however; one that involves all areas of the school working together and committing to a unified vision, and it’s here that Jigsaw’s KS3/4 scheme of learning can help.

Accessed via an online portal, Jigsaw combines materials for teaching PSHE, emotional literacy, social and employability skills and RSE. Its approach is underpinned by mindfulness practice, whereby students are shown how to observe their own thoughts and feelings, regulate them more effectively and become more conscious of their learning, behaviour and lives beyond school.

The Jigsaw portal itself is brilliantly designed, beginning with a simple homepage that points you in one of two directions – ‘Materials’ and ‘Community’.

The Materials section contains a plethora of whole school resources, including an introductory overview, summative assessment workbooks and slides, leaflets for parents, journal templates for evidencing learning and a resilience toolkit.

Each age group is assigned its own colour-coded section, which contains all the materials needed across the whole academic year. These comprise six sequential units, which will see year groups working on the same theme or puzzle at the same time, taught via lessons that employ mindfulness practice scripts and audio files.

The materials in question are well written and provide considerable insight, depth and clarity. The portal’s Community Area, on the other hand, offers comprehensive support for teachers wanting to get the most out of Jigsaw, including documentation for keeping up with the latest developments in PSHE, together with various articles, mapping documents, audit tools and policy templates.

There’s also a distinct resources section, where teachers can easily review the mindfulness scripts and audio files used in the lesson, plus a COVID-19 Recovery Package with lesson plans specifically designed to support children in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as associated training videos.

Jigsaw PSHE has the potential to save teachers many hours of planning time that can instead be productively spent on honing their delivery and addressing students’ needs. PSHE skills need to be developed in a structured way across all year groups, and this is what Jigsaw succeeds in doing.

It sets out clearly how students learn best, and how to teach them the skills they’ll need to develop better social, emotional and mental health.

With Jigsaw in place and being used effectively, a school can make sure that its teachers are themselves fully prepared and ably supported in planning and teaching a subject that’s only going to become more important with each passing year.

To find out more and download some sample materials click here.

Verdict Reviewed by John Dabell
  • Open-ended and flexible resources to support young people’s mental health
  • Helps foster a more healthy and happy environment for pupils and staff alike
  • Develops personal awareness and promotes pupil voice
  • Empowers students to better understand and respect themselves, and develop self-efficacy and agency
  • Equips students with the skills needed to build character and become responsible citizens

Upgrade if...

You’re looking to rethink your PSHE provision and move from merely firefighting to offering a more proactive and mindful approach to improving students’ levels of resilience and mental health.

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