Alan Beattie reviews a stimulating cross-curricular course. This set of books represents the completion of an ambitious undertaking, to provide materials for a “comprehensive and coherent personal and social education course for pupils of all abilities at key stages 3 and 4” (the first two volumes were published in 1992). The author’s credentials will be well known to many teachers familiar with his previous work in such series as Checkpoints and Lifelines, and an outstanding virtue of this new set is that it brings to bear on the five key cross-curriculum themes the insights of recent developments in social studies teaching.

PSE is too often marked by a “silent S” - focusing predominantly on individual pupils and their relationships, and failing to get much grip on the wider contexts within which they have to try to shape their lives and their futures. This resource is immensely helpful in this respect, offering a quietly sophisticated and intelligent way of moving pupils on from first-hand personal and everyday experience out into more distant topics in the environment, economy and industry, government and community health - while never losing sight of the importance of grounding in the familiar and challenging each pupil to review his or her own views and values.

The pupils’ workbooks are of a lively design, emphasising active learning on an individual, pair, group or whole class basis, and adding up at least three units of study on each of the five key cross-curriculum themes. Each double page spread supports a weekly PSE lesson, and the stimulus material provided for this is imaginative and well-researched, with a rich mix of pictures, stories, poems, vox pop quotes, profiles, case histories, social statistics, quizzes, and suggestions for individual follow-up work for pupils to build up their own files. They offer an opportunity for creative and critical as well as descriptive work, with a strong multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan orientation, and with many thought-provoking juxtapositions of personal, local and global issues.

The rhythm of “doing and discussing” is well-maintained, and a useful feature is that each workbook ends with a study unit which provides for a review of progress and future prospects on the part of the individual pupil - and in the case of volume 5, for an exercise in recording achievements. The pattern of work thus always returns to a “self-awareness and careers” strand. The teacher resource books offer valuable further support, providing notes on each double-page spread, with suggestions for development of the topics, copious references to further reading and sources of information, and a set of 20 copymasters for classroom work at each level of the PSE course.

Occasionally I wondered whether the books give sufficient encouragement to teachers to adopt and extend the stimulus materials (in some places they’re already dated). And while these volumes are said to be designed to complement work taking place in mainstream national curriculum subjects, I think it would have been useful to make fuller reference to possible overlaps and connections (which are there in plenty). Likewise the question of levels and progression through the five-year programme of study is not explicitly addressed (although volumes 4 and 5 obviously offer the pupils more challenging material).

I also find it disappointing that attention is not given to possible conflicts between the way the issues are dealt with in PSE and the way they may be experienced by pupils elsewhere in their lives - even perhaps in other aspects of the school or on work experience or visits and so on, and certainly at home, or in wider community settings. But overall this is an exceptionally valuable resource.