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Frequently asked questions

Back to Personal and Social Capability

Is respectful relationships part of the Personal and Social Capability in the Victorian Curriculum?

Learning about respectful relationships will draw from content in both Health and Physical Education and the Personal and Social Capability in the Victorian Curriculum F–10. 

Through the Personal and Social Capability, students learn how relationships are developed and understand and develop interpersonal skills to establish and maintain respectful relationships.

The Health and Physical Education curriculum develops knowledge, understandings and skills to promote respectful relationships and safety. The focus areas of Relationships and sexuality and Safety provide the context for teaching about respectful and safe relationships.

Why is it important to explicitly teach the Personal and Social Capability?

The Personal and Social Capability describes social and emotional learning as discrete knowledge, understandings and skills, rather than a statement of pedagogy. This means that the content descriptions and achievement standards need to be explicitly taught, assessed and that student achievement needs to be reported. For example, just because a student completes a task as part of the team, this does not mean that they acquire the knowledge, understandings and skills necessary to work collaboratively with others. The knowledge, understandings and skills for working collaboratively, such as communication, negotiation, time management and conflict resolution, need to be explicitly taught.

Explicit teaching requires teachers to document specific content descriptions and achievement standards in unit/lesson plans and to use this as a focus for their teaching. The Personal and Social Capability curriculum represents a developmental continuum and therefore students' knowledge, understandings and skills should be identified to enable the teaching and learning programs to be planned in relation to students' actual learning level.  Teachers need to deconstruct and sequence teaching to focus on the steps that lead to new knowledge, deeper understandings and the development of more sophisticated skills. Successful social and emotional learning programs move beyond giving information to explicitly teaching and providing opportunities for students to practise interpersonal skills. These are skills that can then be applied in a range of social situations that they may encounter in their lives.