PE

Subject Co-ordinator: Mr M. Neasham

At Woodhouse Primary Academy we recognise that physical and mental health are crucial aspects of a child’s everyday life and an essential factor in their future well-being. We want our pupils to understand the importance of health and fitness as a fundamental life skill and to experience the benefits of social interaction, teamwork, cooperation and resilience. We want children to have the chance to compete at a variety of levels and apply their skills individually and in teams. 

Physical activity is an area of difficulty for some of our children, we have organised our daily timetable and curriculum to support this progressively throughout school. Our children struggle with both fine and gross motor skills as well as visual perception.   For this reason, it should be noted that progress within this curriculum is not linear and children will work through the progression of skills at a rate that is right for them and therefore we focus on the child’s stage of development rather than their age.   We target this through daily physical activities at break time. 

During a pupil survey children highlighted unstructured times as something they found challenging and asked for more structure at these times so we have built in purposeful physical activities and targeted activities to support e.g the purchasing of mud kitchens and sand pits into KS1 and 2 funded through INEOS funding.

We are also aware many of our children struggle with being physically active and we have therefore ensured this is part of our daily routine each day through Activ 15.  This is an activity which takes place instead of an afternoon break for our children.  It aims to give them 15 minutes of fast paced physical activity daily. 

In EYFS children access physical development time daily.  In EYFS focus on a range of fine and gross motor skills activities through a planned programme of activities. Every child in Key Stage 1 and 2 accesses two hours of PE weekly including swimming (Key Stage 2).

We aim to develop physical skills throughout our broad balanced curriculum in subjects such as Design Technology, Art and Music. We also run sports clubs to encourage children to be active and after school sports clubs are funded free to our pupil premium children to encourage physical activity.  We have House Teams across school and our Upper Key Stage 2 children lead these as House Captains.

We also recognise children’s development in broader terms and target this through various activities such as handwriting lessons, the correct use of cutlery at lunchtimes, fastening laces, buttons etc. to develop independence.  We recognise that our physical education curriculum is interlinked and entwined with many other curriculum areas and where possible make these linked explicit to children.

We have recently reviewed our PE curriculum and moved to a scheme to support staff expertise and confidence  using The PE Hub as the basis for our planning with staff adapting this to meet the needs of our children.   Again the purchase of this scheme and support and development of staff has been a focus of our sports premium spend. Our PE curriculum is plotted on a two-year cycle (Cycle A and Cycle B) with each mixed age cohort covering the key aspects of the National Curriculum, which builds progressively on skills across key stages within different strands of PE. We have built in several opportunities for children to participate in inter and intra sports competitions such as Dance Festivals, Football tournaments, Gymnastic Demonstrations and Cricket Competitions.

We know that good mental health is integral to pupils’ development and for their progression throughout school in general. We want children to experience the benefits of exercise and to understand how regular exercise can lead to healthier and happier futures for all.  We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods: 

• Images and videos of the children’s practical learning (Initial assessment and final assessment)
• Asking the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).
• Termly Lesson observations where there is the opportunity for a dialogue between teachers.
• Verbal feedback of work during lessons.
• AFL grids in weekly planning, followed by termly summative assessment.