In September 2026, the Department for Education’s fully updated PSHE statutory guidance came into force in every primary and secondary school in England. Our Director of Education, Tor Desmond, has checked it line by line and updated the PSHE content to match across our assessment frameworks. She shares her thoughts on the changes and what it means for schools using Steps 4 Life, Progression Steps and Primary Steps.
Why this update matters
I want to be upfront that this isn’t just a compliance exercise for me. The fact that PSHE guidance gets reviewed as part of an ongoing cycle, rather than being written once and left to gather dust, is very much welcome. The government has built that into the guidance itself: a technical update every three years, and a full review every six, so it won’t be another seven years before this gets looked at again.
With our world changing at an ever-increasing rate, and how this affects our young people directly, we need to prepare them. New challenges will face them, some we can already see coming, and plenty we can’t yet name. Good PSHE content can’t just teach today’s risks; it has to build the underlying skills, judgement, resilience, knowing how and where to ask for help, that will still matter when the specific challenge is something none of us have thought of yet. The cycle of change will help us keep pace with that.
Key changes in the 2026 statutory guidance
There’s a lot here, but a few themes stand out:
- So much here about keeping our young people safe – Consent, sexual harassment and sexual violence, domestic abuse and coercive control, forced marriage, FGM, and (new this time) strangulation and suffocation all have direct, age-appropriate coverage that builds up gradually from the earliest years rather than arriving all at once in secondary school.
- Similar to the Digital Skills update, AI is woven through in a way the previous guidance could not have predicted – deepfakes, AI chatbots, and the risk of fake intimacy or bad advice from them, alongside gambling-like mechanics in ordinary games, sextortion, and online financial scams. Not one of these is hypothetical for the young people we’re supporting; a lot of them are already encountering this.
- Vaping is named in its own right – sitting alongside smoking, alcohol and drugs. A direct response to how quickly it has become a mainstream issue for this age group.
- A wholly new Personal Safety topic – looking at hazard awareness, assessing risk in increasingly independent situations, peer pressure, and, at the older end, weapons and exploitation.
- Broader, more honest mental wellbeing coverage – Gambling’s link to serious mental health harm, bereavement and grief, and the plain fact that mental health difficulties are common (including that early support helps) all now feature explicitly. This is a real shift towards normalising these conversations.
This update really does reflect what we now understand about how early some of these risks reach young people, and cements the importance of giving them the vocabulary and confidence to seek help.
The scale of the rewrite, in numbers
Across Primary Steps Plus, around seven in ten PSHE learning statements (70.7%) are newly written, reworded or replaced, with a wholly new Personal Safety strand added throughout. In Progression Steps Plus, Relationships Education content is largely stable (64% of primary statements carried over unchanged), while Physical Health & Mental Wellbeing has been substantially rewritten, more heavily so at secondary level than primary. Steps 4 Life‘s PSHE content has had the same treatment, with Personal Safety added as a brand-new topic and the heaviest changes landing in Being Safe, Online Safety & Awareness, and Physical Health & Fitness.
What this means for our frameworks
Every assessment statement across all three frameworks, Steps 4 Life, Progression Steps (Plus) and Primary Steps (Plus), has been checked against the new guidance, level by level, and rebuilt where it needed to be. This has been a substantial refresh, heavier at secondary level than at primary, and heavier in some topics than others. A good number of statements carry over completely unchanged, a significant share have been reworded, extended, or are entirely new, and a small number of topics, Personal Safety chief among them, didn’t exist in this form before at all. A handful of topics have also been renamed to match the guidance, so our terminology lines up with what schools and settings are working to directly.
The updated PSHE content is now live in Connecting Steps.
Reviewing this statutory guidance line by line has reinforced something I already believed: PSHE only does its job if it keeps moving with the world it’s preparing young people for, and that’s exactly the approach we’ve taken across our own frameworks too!
What this means for your school
- Your data will look a bit different. Assessment points have moved, been reworded or added, so some percentage completion figures may dip while pupils work through the new content.
- Your existing data is safe where content hasn’t changed. Any assessment point with identical wording keeps its history, with no need to reassess.
- A drop in one area isn’t always a loss. Some content hasn’t disappeared; it has simply moved or been renamed to match the new guidance.
- It’s worth reviewing your schemes of work, assessment records and any staff-facing guidance against the updated wording, particularly in the strands that have changed the most.
Take action
👉 Read the full comparison: what’s changed in Primary Steps (Plus)
👉 Read the full comparison: what’s changed in Progression Steps (Plus) – Primary
👉 Read the full comparison: what’s changed in Progression Steps (Plus) – Secondary
👉 Read the full comparison: what’s changed in Steps 4 Life – Post 16
👉 Read our full breakdown comparing the 2019 and 2026 government guidance
👉 Read the government’s RSE and Health Education statutory guidance
👉 Not using these assessment packs? Email sales@bsquared.co.uk for a quote on PSHE assessment in line with the latest government guidance
👉 Got questions? Book a FREE 15-minute support session
