St Mary's Catholic Primary School, Swindon

At St Mary’s, we believe that children should be inspired to succeed and develop a love for physical activity and sport, as our PE curriculum ensures that every child knows they are special, showing human dignity, a part of Catholic Social Teaching at our school. Through our Physical Education, we aim to nurture confident, resilient children who will strive for their personal best. We understand the importance of developing the physical literacy, social emotional and thinking skills of all children, and we aim to promote life-long habits of physical activity to positively impact physical and mental health and wellbeing for their future. We aim to ensure that our delivery of physical education allows all children to have the skills and mindset to leave primary school with the capabilities to be successful in their sporting challenges and active lifestyles at secondary school and beyond, positively impacting on their community.  We strive to educate both our children and families to develop a greater understanding on how to live healthy lifestyles and make healthy choices. We believe that our whole child approach will give our children increased competence and confidence in a broad range of activities, and they will build character. As our children progress through the curriculum, we ensure that children engage in physical activity for increasingly sustained periods of time, and all children are given opportunities to engage in a broad range of competitive sport and active experiences. At St Mary’s, we ensure that children are taught to swim competently, confidently and proficiently for at least 25 metres unaided by swimming instructors using a range of strokes. All children are taught safe self-rescue to enable them to be safe in the water. Through our PE lessons, we place emphasis on what children remember, as we revisit prior learning to ensure that it is embedded in their long-term memory. This ensures that the skills and knowledge gained are sequential and builds progressively. We aim for every child at St Mary’s to leave with positive memories and a love of physical education, so that they can take with them confidence and motivation for the next step of their journey.

The design of our curriculum is supported by Get Set 4 PE. This has been specifically chosen as it ensures that our pupils develop into confident, competent young people who are developed holistically, so that they serve a positive impact on our community, knowing that they are special. This could be in joining local sporting clubs, representing our school in sporting events and achieving success at both local and national competitions. At the core of PE lessons is developing the whole child. Every lesson has social, emotional and thinking objectives in addition to the physical objectives, all taught through a breadth of games and activities. These skills are progressive, and are revisited continually. Sustained physical activity is planned for in every lesson so that children develop and maintain their fitness over time. All children from Reception to Year 6 receive two weekly PE lessons, with one of the lessons supported by the PE specialists. Each lesson starts with a dynamic warm-up and introduction, including a review of prior learning, before teaching and practising skill development, and finishes with a review of learning. At St Mary’s, we are committed to providing a range of sporting and physical activity opportunities for children to participate in healthy competition, through personal challenges and competition against others, including tournaments with other local schools, and a yearly whole-school sporting week.

Class teachers regularly assess children’s progress in PE and understand when children are not meeting expectations due to the success criteria within lessons and the assessment checklist which is available for use. Each lesson, children are observed carefully and receive formative feedback to move learning forwards. Children know where they are in their learning as they regularly give one another feedback, and this allows them to see their progress, and know what they need to do to improve. As the curriculum is progressive, children revisit and practice their skills each year through increasingly challenging activities at an age-related expectation. At the end of each lesson, children have the opportunity to review their learning through peer and/or self-assessment, and children are taught to review their own abilities to identify areas of strength, and areas to be improved. At the end of each unit taught, teachers use the Get Set 4 PE platform to indicate children who are working towards expectations and those who are meeting expectations.