The National Curriculum for physical education aims to ensure that all pupils:
- develop competence to excel in a broad range of physical activities
- are physically active for sustained periods of time
- engage in competitive sports and activities
- lead healthy, active lives.
At Barford Primary School we are passionate about the teaching of PE.
A high-quality physical education curriculum inspires all pupils to succeed and excel in competitive sport and other physically-demanding activities. It provides opportunities for pupils to become physically confident in a way which supports their health and fitness. Opportunities to compete in sport and other activities build character and help to embed values such as fairness and respect
PE develops the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding, so that they can perform with increasing competence in a range of physical activities. These include dance, games, gymnastics, swimming and water safety, athletics and outdoor adventurous activities. PE promotes an understanding in children of their bodies in action. It involves thinking, selecting and applying skills, and it promotes positive attitudes towards a healthy lifestyle. Thus, we enable children to make informed choices about physical activity throughout their lives.
The aims of teaching physical education in our school are:
- to enable children to develop and explore physical skills with increasing control and coordination;
- to encourage children to work and play with others in a range of group situations;
- to develop the way in which children perform skills, and apply rules and conventions, for different activities;
- to show children how to improve the quality and control of their performance;
- to teach children to recognise and describe how their bodies feel during exercise;
- to develop children’s enjoyment of physical activity through creativity and imagination;
- to develop an understanding in children of how to succeed in a range of physical activities, and how to evaluate their own success;
- providing specialist support where individual children have particular gifts and talents
We use a variety of teaching and learning styles in our PE lessons. Our principle aim us to develop the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding, and we do this through a mixture of whole-class teaching and individual or group activities. Teachers draw attention to good examples of individual performance as models for the other children, and we encourage the children to evaluate their own work as well as the work of other children. Within lessons, we give children the opportunity both to collaborate and to compete with each other, and they have the opportunity to use a wide range of resources.
We recognise that in all classes children have a wide range of physical ability, and we seek to provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this by:
- Setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of results (e.g. timed events, such as an 80m sprint);
- Setting tasks of increasing difficulty, where not all children complete the task (e.g. the high jump);
- Providing a range of challenges through the provision of different resource
Learning to swim is an essential life skill. During Key Stage 2, our children learn to swim at our local leisure centre through weekly swimming lessons.
We work in partnership with FABRIC to deliver a tailored Street Dance curriculum to our children in Key Stage 2.
Teachers assess the children’s work in PE by making assessments as they observe them working during lessons. Older pupils are encouraged to evaluates their own work and suggest ways in which to improve. Teachers record the progress made by children against learning objectives for their lessons. At the end of a unit of work, teachers make a judgement on whether the each child is on target, above or below and fill in their class assessment grids. Teachers record this information and use it to plan the future work of each child. These records also enable the teacher to make an annual assessment of progress for each child, as part of the school’s annual report to parents and carers. The teacher passes this information on to the next teacher and the PE subject leader at the end of the year,