I want to tell you a little bit about our model at Bearsden academy. Our first-year pupils have two periods of PSE a week. One is PSE and one is transition, because we are mindful that the transition from primary to secondary still takes a little bit of getting used to. Those transition lessons, and lessons about the community and the environment around the pupils, go on until about October or November, when we merge into two periods of PSE, in which pupils look at the S1 profile.
We are launching—in fact, we have launched—My MerIT, which allows us to use pupils’ achievement profile online. They log all their achievements and celebrate success through PSE. It is a really positive thing that that relationship starts early on. The school celebrates with its young people success in the learning that is going on in other classrooms and draws in that cross-curricular activity, with pupils knowing what everybody else is doing in their classrooms. We can feed into that, within that timeframe.
Classes in S2, S3 and S4 have one period each. Classes in S5 and S6 also get a dedicated period of PSE with us. Just now, that is looking at the Universities and Colleges Admission Service and at colleges, but it also dips into mental health, which is an issue that the pupils have brought to us, along with, for example, sexual health and the sixth-year holiday. The Student Awards Agency for Scotland is coming in, and we also work with the Teenage Cancer Trust, which will come in and speak to us as well. Anthony Nolan was in last week. If you follow our Twitter feed, you will see what is going on—and we are using Twitter more from the angle of introducing a pupil voice.
We took a wee snapshot of what S1 and S2 thought that PSE should be about. All the pupils were really positive about having that discussion. That is what pupils want—they want to be actively involved.
Yesterday, I spoke to a fifth-year class about how, next year, between August and November or December, when they are filling out their UCAS and college applications and are thinking about their positive destinations, we will use one of the weekly PSE periods to guide them. We use the time to good effect.
When I asked the pupils what else they wanted, they told me that they are not equipped to go out into the big wide world. They want to look at buying a house, finance, mortgages and setting up a proper bank account—not just the squirrel account or whatever they still have. Those are all issues of the day on which they are not getting advice anywhere else, and they want to get it in the PSE class. We are able to look at that in my school. I hope that other schools are able to do that, and to ask their students to tweet about what the current issues are and what they are learning in PSE, because that would be a great conversation to have.
Furthermore, as soon as the safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible and included—SHANARRI—indicators come through from primary, we have an interview with the first years and ask them how they are feeling and to rate whether they feel safe using a score of 1 to 5. We interview them again at the end of their first year, so we can gauge if someone is struggling and has not quite transitioned properly into secondary and pick that up with them.
We were not lucky enough to be able to keep our school counsellor, but we wish that we had been. I think that we had a school counsellor in Ross Greer’s time but, unfortunately, the service was cut. We are feeling the effects of that with more and more mental health issues coming through in our young people. Self-harm is becoming a little bit more prevalent in our society, as are stress and anxiety—indeed, a lot of anxiety is caused by exam pressures—so it would have been great to have a counsellor in our school.