PE

My name is Mr Tanner and I am the PE Lead here at St Leonard's. We aim to provide a PE curriculum in which children enjoy a wide variety of activities to help them develop their health, fitness and well-being. We intend to provide a curriculum that inspires all children to succeed and excel in physically-demanding activities and competitive sport.  Opportunities to apply learned skills in competitive situations and other activities will build on the school values which support the Spirit of the Games values.

The national curriculum for PE 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

Hello, I am Mr Tanner, the PE and Sports lead at St Leonard’s. I believe in maximising opportunities for our children in lesson, extra-curricular clubs and in sporting fixtures, of which we have many.  The knowledge-rich curriculum provides our children with the ability to achieve success across a wide range of activities. I’ve led staff training on teaching progressive sequence of lessons to our staff and how ensure maximum participation within lessons.

What do PE lessons look like at St Leonard’s? 

We use our PE progression map to ensure that all children firstly broad range of activities and builds on the depth of knowledge and skills taught each year. This ensures that our children progress into well rounded PE students that are ready for the challenges of PE at Secondary school. This is achieved by each PE lesson performing warm-up activities, in which the benefits and effects of exercise on the body are taught, a number of skills or concepts within each activity is taught weekly, building up the skills and concept taught in the previous lesson. Followed by opportunities to evaluate and improve the performances of themselves and their peers using sport specific criteria.

We are introducing schemas: carefully designed webs of knowledge that the children use as a map, linking everything they learn in a unit. They can use these schemata to talk about what they’ve learnt and help them move the knowledge into their long-term memory. Here’s an example from Key Stage 1: 

PE lessons are not just about having fun, although we do have lots of fun. We aim to equip children with the core skills required in a wide range of sports and activities, as well as teaching key concepts of attacking and defending to outwit their opponents in team sports. Children will develop these concepts in isolation as well as small sided games. We focus on having discussions in PE to explore why we do things the way we do in team games, dance and gymnastics and through critical thinking find ways to improve our own and others performances. We are all going on a riding a bike in the learning journey of PE rather than being passengers on a bus. Each student contributes to their own learning on top of what is taught.

Activities taught

At St. Leonards, we aim to deliver a progressive PE. Along with the traditional activities and sports taught, such as Gymnastics, Dance, Football, Netball, Tag Rugby, to name a few. We also have alternative sports such as Ball tag, Dodgeball, Badminton and Table Tennis within the curriculum to expose as many different activities to our children, so that ALL children can find an activity that they develop a love for to help harness that desire to live a healthy, active life.

How do we make sure every child succeeds?   

The PE curriculum is child focused and has been designed in collaboration with pupil voice. Pupils are identified with PE interventions to ensure that all pupils make good progress in PE.  Pupil Premium children are targeted for extra-curricular PE clubs as a priority. Throughout the year, PE enrichment opportunities are provided for the least active children at Secondary schools and Exeter University to help develop self-confidence and a love for physical activity. I am proud to say that St. Leonards Primary School currently has the Gold Mark sports award and enters as many competitive and non-competitive sporting events as we can, providing all our children with at least one opportunity a year to represent the school.

Most importantly… 

Our children love PE and we aim to develop our children to life healthy active lives. One day, we hope we will see a child from St Leonard’s grow into adults that either love playing, participating, coaching or officiating in sports.