Developing character through PSHE

As part of a well-balanced education, the PSHCE curriculum at St Mary’s includes initiatives to help pupils develop social and emotional skills, personal confidence and self-esteem. These focus on pupils’ academic achievement, character and wellbeing, with a philosophy that the latter two elements can support the former (Bott et al., 2017). St Mary’s is a small, independent school for girls aged three to 18 years. Year groups consist of approximately 45 pupils. In Year 8, we aim to develop pupil awareness of character strengths, with a particular focus on their ‘signature strengths’. The goal of character strength programmes is not so much to force pupils to acquire specific traits that are deemed desirable by the norms in a given society (Bott et al., 2017), but rather to develop pupil understanding and use of the unique abilities and capabilities that help them to flourish and perform at their best (Wood et al., 2011). Programmes are based on the assumptions that charact