PE
At our schools, we take the power of sport, physical education and activity very seriously and see it as an integral part of our curriculum, ensuring our children are physically and mentally healthy and develop to become successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens.
We have a passion for physical activity and sport – our target each year is for every child in the school to represent their school, at least once, at an inter-school sports event. From this, we have experienced terrific success in both developing our pupils’ confidence and self-esteem whilst also encouraging competitive spirit, kindness, respect, resilience, leadership and perseverance. In 2020/21, despite school closures due to COVID we entered the North Yorkshire Ultimate Warrior competition, the KS1 Multi-skills competition and the Virtual Football Skills contest.
We provide opportunity to develop and practise skills in preparation for these events through providing a minimum of 2 hours of physical activity each week in PE sessions, swimming and Forest Schools. Our curriculum is wide and varied, covering: striking and fielding, net and wall games, dance, gymnastics, multi-skills and athletics. To complement this, we give our pupils the best possible opportunities through drawing on outside expertise such as Skip2BFit, Drumba, sports coaches and professional dance teachers.
Children in KS2 attend a term of swimming lessons where they work towards the goal to swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres. Additional opportunities to play competitive sport are also provided through seasonal lunchtime and after-school clubs over the course of the year: including clubs in running, dance, football, cricket and many more.
We recently invested in MOKI bands to track exercise and fitness progress over time. They are individual step-trackers which also record the amount of high intensity movement and their initial impact has been excellent in developing children’s awareness and enthusiasm for health and fitness.
We have a team of pupil ‘Sports Leaders’ who play an important role in keeping our children active and they plan and deliver games and sport at playtimes and lunchtimes. They also reward positive attitudes and physical activity by giving out certificates at our weekly Community Celebration Worship.
Through careful monitoring, termly pupil voice questionnaires and discussion with our school council we monitor the impact of our initiatives and our progress in developing confident, courageous and healthy pupils.