Best Practice

Bereavement: Learning about loss

Pastoral issues PSHE Pupil wellbeing
Bereavement is a sensitive area for teachers and schools to tackle, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Ahead of Dying Matters Awareness Week, Alison Penny offers her advice

Dying Matters Awareness Week takes place in May with the theme of “What can you do?”

This is a key opportunity for schools to think about how they address change, death and bereavement in the curriculum.

Earlier this year, the government consulted on the content for statutory relationships and sex education (RSE), and PSHE. The Childhood Bereavement Network (CBN) opened a survey on Twitter to gather people’s views on whether PSHE should include topics on loss, death and bereavement. The majority of respondents wanted these to be covered.

An important justification was the number of children who will experience bereavement during their childhood, or as one person told us, “all children will experience it at some point and they need opportunities to start to explore what it means before they are emotionally bound up in it”.

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