PE at St Mary's
Our vision
At St Mary’s, we believe that children should be inspired to succeed and excel in physical activity and competitive sport. Our physical education curriculum includes, challenges and supports every child. We understand the importance of developing the physical literacy, emotional and thinking skills of all children, and we hope to promote life-long habits of physical activity to positively impact physical and mental health and wellbeing.
Our PE curriculum is focused on developing key fundamental movement skills. Underpinning our PE curriculum are 6 ‘cogs’. We develop children’s multi-ability skills and specific learning behaviours, and we hope that it will help to shape our children into young people who will positively impact on the community. We believe that in developing children’s personal characteristics, social skills, cognitive abilities, creative skills, applying their physical abilities and health and fitness, children will have 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 competitive sports and activities. 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 and are taught how to be safe in water.
Through our PE lessons, we place emphasis on what children remember, as we regularly revisit prior learning to ensure that it is embedded in their long-term memory. This ensures that their knowledge, understanding and skills are progressive and build on each step. 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.
How we plan and teach PE
The design of our Physical Education curriculum is supported by the Real PE programme. 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. 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 our PE lessons are fundamental movement skills, which are practiced through a breadth of games and competitive activities. Each term, we focus on developing two specific fundamental movement skills, underpinned by one of the six multi-ability cogs which are linked to learning behaviours. These skills are progressive, and are revisited each year. Sustained physical activity is planned for in every lesson so that children develop and maintain their fitness over time.
Physical development is valued in our Early Years Setting as part of every-day learning, and weekly PE sessions. Through planned, purposeful play and through adult-led and child-initiated activity, children develop the building blocks of coordination, balance and agility needed to be successful in KS1. In EYFS, children begin to build their confidence as explore, think about problems and relate to others. Our teacher-led lessons for EYFS and Year 1 are typically themed, taught using story and song, with the aim of engaging all pupils, building self-esteem and willingness to contribute.
From Reception to Year 6, children receive two weekly PE sessions, one is teacher-led and the other is led by our PE specialists. The teacher-led lesson is taught through the Real PE resource, with each lesson comprising of four-parts. Each lesson starts with a dynamic warm-up and a review of prior learning, before teaching and practising a skill, applying the skill and finishing with a cool-down and review of learning. The second weekly lesson is taught by specialist PE coaches, who teach and deliver a broad range of sporting activities, where children are given the opportunity to practice and apply their skills to specific sports, whilst revisiting skills relating to the cog that underpins the term.
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
How we evaluate PE
Class teachers regularly assess children’s progress in PE. Each lesson, children are observed carefully and receive formative feedback to move learning forwards. Children know where they are in their learning as they engage with the colour tracking system linked to Real PE, and this allows them to see their progress, and know what they need to do to improve.
Teachers take a whole-class assessment at the start and end of each unit to assess progress made against the specific skills taught. As our curriculum is progressive, children revisit and practice these skills every 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 abilities to identify areas of strength, and areas to be improved.
Children are asked these questions during every lesson:
