The Importance of Physical Education
Physical education develops pupils' physical competence and confidence, and their ability to use these to perform in a range of activities. It promotes physical skilfulness, physical development and a knowledge of the body in action. Physical education provides opportunities for pupils to be creative, competitive and to face up to different challenges as individuals and in groups and teams. It promotes positive attitudes towards active and healthy lifestyles.
Pupils learn how to think in different ways to suit a wide variety of creative, competitive and challenging activities. They learn how to plan, perform and evaluate actions, ideas and performances to improve their quality and effectiveness. Through this process pupils discover their aptitudes, abilities and preferences, and make choices about how to get involved in lifelong physical activity.
Intent
We have a planned sequence of lessons to help teachers ensure they have progressively covered the requirements of the PE National Curriculum. This scheme of work ensures that children have a varied and well mapped out PE curriculum. It provides the opportunity for progression across the full breadth of the PE National Curriculum for KS1 and KS2 for both indoor and outdoor PE. This progression is clearly identified on progression maps and each lesson has been carefully planned to match these. In KS1, the focus of the PE curriculum is on the development of the fundamental skills that will be built upon in KS2 when they are applied in specific sports. It is our intention to develop a lifelong love of physical activity, sport and PE in all young people. We aim to help ensure a positive and healthy physical and mental outlook in the future and help young people to develop essential skills like leadership and teamwork. Within each lesson, we strive to give every child the opportunity to develop skills in PE, consider the impact on their health and fitness, compete/perform and evaluate. These elements are always clearly identified both in lesson plans and on progression maps. All lessons are carefully differentiated which helps to ensure that learning is as tailored and inclusive as possible. It is also to ensure that every child has access to at least 30 minutes of physical activity every day.
Implementation
Our detailed lesson plans ensure that all teachers are equipped with the secure subject knowledge required to deliver modern, high-quality teaching and learning opportunities for all areas of the PE National Curriculum. Our overarching aim is for teachers to have the knowledge and skills they need to feel confident in teaching all areas of PE, regardless of their main areas of expertise. Lessons are planned alongside subject-specific progression maps to ensure that children are given the opportunity to practise existing skills and also build on these to develop new or more advanced skills. There is a structure to the lesson sequence whereby prior learning is always considered and opportunities for revision and practise are built into lessons. However, this is not to say that this structure should be followed rigidly: it allows for this revision to become part of good practice and ultimately helps build depth to the children's knowledge, skills and understanding in PE. Interwoven into the teaching sequence are key assessment questions. These allow teachers to assess the different levels of understanding at various points in the lesson and also allow time to recap concepts where necessary, helping to embed learning. Assessments will be carried out on an end of term/end of block basis and will show children ARE, BARE and AARE. The Amaven tracker should also show next steps and identify children. We aim to have 30minutes active in every classroom by active lessons, shake awake or golden mile.
Impact
Each unit is mapped against the progression documents to ensure that learners develop detailed knowledge and skills across the full breadth of the PE curriculum through engaging and age-appropriate curriculum content. This all helps to make the learning memorable, allowing links to be made and ultimately creating a higher level of engagement and understanding. Attainment and progress can be measured using our assessment spreadsheets. The high quality and consistent approach to PE teaching, should significantly improve attainment in knowledge and skills in PE.
The impact of using specialist coaches and Amaven, will increase the profile of sport, PE and physical activity across the school.