Junior Cycle
Junior Cycle Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) is a 100 hour short course. The course is designed to support schools in providing the required 100 hours of learning in SPHE which is a minimum requirement for all junior cycle short courses.
Learning in SPHE aims to help students to:
Note: Students starting first year in September 2023 will be studying the 2023 specification.
- build self-awareness and positive self-worth.
- develop the knowledge, understanding, skills, dispositions and values that will support them to lead fulfilling and healthy lives.
- feel empowered to create, nurture and maintain respectful and loving relationships with self and others.
- enhance their capacity to contribute positively to society.
Note: Students starting first year in September 2023 will be studying the 2023 specification.
Junior Cycle Course Overview
This junior cycle course in SPHE is designed to support students in developing a positive sense of self and a capacity to care for themselves and others. It is designed around four interconnected strands and three cross-cutting elements.
Strand 1: Understanding myself and others.
- This strand focuses on developing self-awareness and self-esteem and building some of the foundational skills and dispositions needed for healthy relationships and to thrive in life, including communicating and negotiating, listening, showing empathy, respecting difference, and self-management/self-regulation.
Strand 2: Making healthy choices.
- This strand offers opportunities for students to consider how they can make healthy choices to support their wellbeing. It explores what being healthy might look like for a teenager, what helps or gets in the way of making healthy choices and how to access reliable information to support good choices. Students will also practice the skills needed for making healthy decisions and come to understand contextual factors, such as family, peer, media and social pressures, that influence decisions.
Strand 3: Relationships and sexuality
- This strand explores the cognitive, physical, emotional and social aspects of relationships and sexuality through a positive, inclusive, rights and responsibilities-based approach. The focus is on family relationships, friendships, romantic and potential sexual relationships in the future.
Strand 4: Emotional wellbeing
- This strand primarily focuses on nurturing emotional wellbeing and promoting positive mental health. It helps students develop problem solving and coping skills for dealing with the emotional ups and downs of life, explores how they can support themselves and others in challenging times and discusses where/how to find support, if needed. The four strands are underpinned by three cross-cutting elements that are foundational for effective teaching and learning in SPHE. These are:
- Awareness
- Dialogue
- Reflection and action.
Awareness
- Awareness is the ability to understand one’s own thoughts, emotions, values and behaviour. It includes understanding how different factors influence our sense of self and how we live our lives, including the influence of family, peers, the internet, gender, culture and social norms. This element also includes an awareness that to be human is to be in relationships and that we all share a common humanity and dignity, have rights and responsibilities.
Dialogue
- Through dialogical teaching and learning students are facilitated to engage with a diversity of viewpoints; discuss and reflect on their own perspectives, values, and behaviours and those of others; enlarge their understanding of topics of relevance to their lives; and come to informed, thoughtful decisions based on their personal values, with due regard to their own rights and responsibilities and the rights and responsibilities of others. Respectful dialogue is aided by presuming a diversity of backgrounds, identities, cultures and experiences in every classroom and seeing this as a resource for learning.
Reflection and action
- This cross-cutting element focuses on students reflecting on what they have learned and coming to their own personal insights and conclusions in response to their learning. It enables students to consider how the learning can inform their choices, behaviour and relationships, and discerning what it means for their lives now or for the future. Learning in SPHE is a ‘praxis’; an ongoing process of critical reflection and action, nurtured by dialogue with others.
Senior Cycle Course Overview
Senior cycle SPHE aims to support learners in making informed choices for health and wellbeing now and in the future. The framework is built around five areas of learning:
- Mental health
- Gender studies
- Substance use
- Relationships and sexuality education
- Physical activity and nutrition
For each area of learning, there is a rationale and a list of learning outcomes which identify what students should understand and be able to do. The learning outcomes draw on three interrelated perspectives which emphasise the multi-dimensional nature of health and wellbeing:
- Emotional and social health and wellbeing focuses on the knowledge and understanding, values, attitudes and skills students need to inform decisions about emotional, social and spiritual health and wellbeing
- Physical health and wellbeing focuses on the knowledge and understanding, values, attitudes and skills that students need to inform decisions about physical health and wellbeing
- Personal and group health and wellbeing focuses on knowledge and understanding of the wider influences on the health and wellbeing, an awareness of relevant supports and agencies in the community and the development of advocacy skills.