5. Safeguarding in our Curriculum

At Aston Rowant School, safeguarding is woven throughout our curriculum to ensure that every child develops the knowledge, confidence and resilience needed to keep themselves safe—both in school and beyond. Using the Kapow Primary scheme, we deliver high-quality lessons in PSHE, RSE, and online safety, all aligned with the statutory expectations set out in Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2025. The latest KCSIE guidance requires schools to teach content that enables pupils to understand relationships, personal safety, sexual harassment, harmful behaviours, and ways to report concerns.

Our safeguarding curriculum supports this by ensuring pupils learn age-appropriate strategies for recognising risks, seeking help, respecting boundaries, and understanding safe and unsafe situations.

 

PSHE and RSE Curriculum

Through the Kapow PSHE and RSE curriculum, pupils are taught about:

· Healthy and respectful relationships

· Emotional wellbeing and resilience

· Recognising unsafe situations

· How to ask for help from a trusted adult

KCSIE 2025 requires schools to teach pupils about positive relationships, understanding safety, recognising abusive or harmful behaviour, and knowing how to report concerns.

Lessons include core RSHE content on consent, kindness, respect, discrimination, personal safety, and how to respond if something makes a child feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

 

Online Safety Education

Our online safety teaching follows Kapow’s structured digital safety curriculum and fully reflects the updated “Four Cs” model in KCSIE 2025—content, contact, conduct and commerce—now expanded to include misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories as emerging online risks.

Pupils are taught how to:

· Use technology safely and responsibly

· Recognise unsafe or inappropriate online behaviour

· Understand privacy, digital footprints and reporting tools

· Respond safely to online bullying or harassment

· Identify false or misleading online content

These lessons complement the school’s filtering and monitoring systems, as required under the updated KCSIE expectations for digital safeguarding and safe use of educational technologies.

 

Healthy Relationships

Safeguarding education places strong emphasis on developing children’s understanding of what healthy and respectful relationships look like. Kapow’s RSHE programme supports this by teaching:

· Respect, empathy and kindness

· Positive friendships and social dynamics

· Understanding personal safety in relationships

· Recognising controlling, coercive or unsafe behaviours

KCSIE 2025 requires schools to help children recognise harassment, abuse and harmful behaviours in peer relationships, including sexual harassment and peer-on-peer abuse.

 

Personal Boundaries and Body Autonomy

Through PSHE and RSE lessons, pupils learn:

· The importance of personal boundaries

· That they have the right to say “no”

· How to identify safe and unsafe touch

· What to do if someone makes them feel uncomfortable

These teachings align with KCSIE’s strengthened expectations around empowering children to understand consent and how to report concerns.

 

Early Help Awareness

Children are taught that it is always okay to ask for help. This supports a culture of early intervention, echoing OSCB’s guidance that early help should be offered when emerging concerns arise.

Pupils learn:

· How to recognise worries or early warning signs

· Who they can talk to in school if they feel unsafe

· How trusted adults and the wider safeguarding team can help

This complements our child-friendly reporting systems such as the Worry Box and Worry Monster and the open-door culture promoted by staff.

 

Recognising Abuse and Knowing How to Report Concerns

Age-appropriate teaching helps pupils understand:

· Different forms of abuse, including emotional, physical, sexual and online

· What bullying and harassment look like

· That harmful or inappropriate behaviour is never their fault

· How to tell a trusted adult

· What happens when they report a concern

 

KCSIE 2025 emphasises that children must be taught how to recognise abuse, understand their rights, and know how to report concerns safely and confidently.