Curriculum Intent- What do we want children to learn?

Within our broad and balanced curriculum, Holbrook strive to ensure that every pupil, irrelevant of their needs, develops a passion for being active through our varying and plentiful opportunities for Physical Education. We aim to provide the environment for children to flourish in sporting opportunities, and build their confidence and enjoyment when being active and taking part in sport. At Holbrook Primary, it is our aspiration that every pupil will become proficient in their sporting skills, wholeheartedly driven in both competitive and non-competitive sporting opportunities and lead a healthy, active lifestyle.

Through fostering the enjoyment that taking part in physical activity and sport can bring, we focus on building up children’s confidence to explore sport and physical activity both independently, and with others in a social context. We hope that this enjoyment and passion, will enable our children to develop and explore physical skills with increasing control, and through practice, understand how to improve the quality and control of their performances. Holbrook’s PE curriculum encompasses both teaching and applying ‘fundamental’ skills in sporting activities, and providing the opportunities to use these skills in competitive and non-competitive sporting events. These events also provide great opportunities for pupils to deal with competitive successes and losses, and allows time for them to evaluate their own performances and reflect on their practice. Reflection and resilience are interwoven throughout our PE curriculum. 
 

At Holbrook, we value our thematic curriculum as it provides endless opportunities to develop the children’s enjoyment of physical activity through creativity and imagination, role play and communication. Our thematic curriculum also ensures that children’s learning is well sequenced to enable revisiting of core knowledge, skills and understanding, to deepen conceptual awareness before demanding application across the whole curriculum.

Please see the PE Progression of Skills documents (held in school). These outline how key skills are developed, revisited, assessed and built upon from EYFS to Year 6. From September 2020 this document will be used as a bespoke whole school assessment tool for measuring attainment and progress for this subject.

Implementation- How are we going to achieve our intent?

In all classes, children have the opportunity to participate in 2 hours of physical activity per week, with our ‘Daily Mile’, break and lunch time play equipment/ Play Leader activities, Forest School time, residential/non-residential educational visits, masterclasses, Gardening Club and extracurricular opportunities being used to supplement these active opportunities further.  As required in the National Curriculum, we teach dance, games and gymnastics at Key Stage 1. In Key Stage 2 we teach compulsory dance, games and gymnastics, plus two other activities: swimming and water safety, and athletics.  Our Outdoor and Adventurous curriculum is fulfilled through curriculum time, Forest School sessions and during residential weeks for children in upper Key Stage 2.  Swimming and water safety lessons are delivered through Years 3, 4, 5 and 6.

PE sessions develop the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding and encourage them to perform with increasing competence and confidence in a range of physical activities. PE promotes an important understanding of children’s own bodies in action. It involves carefully selecting and applying the skills needed to complete a task, and promotes an awareness and positive attitude towards a healthy lifestyle. With this in mind, we encourage children to make independent and informed choices about their levels of physical activity and lifestyle within their school and personal lives.

Within PE sessions at Holbrook, we as teachers aim to develop the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding through a mixture of whole class teaching and individual, pair or group activities. Teachers draw attention to good examples of individual performance as models, and encourage the children to evaluate their own work as well as the work of other children. Within lessons, we give the children the opportunity both to collaborate and to compete using a wide range of resources.   In all year groups children have a wide range of physical ability, which is challenged individually within curriculum sessions. We work hard to ensure children have access to suitable learning opportunities for all children, by personalising our curriculum intentions to meet the needs of each child.  This is often done by (but not limited to):

• Setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of results (e.g. timed events or small competitions)

• Setting tasks of increasing levels of challenge, where not all children complete all tasks as they are tailored to each child’s ability and progress (e.g. building up their skills towards the high jump)

• Grouping children by ability where necessary to develop their specific challenge needs and skills (e.g. individual challenges within an activity for specific children)

• Providing a range of challenge through the provision of different resources (e.g. different gymnastics equipment)

Curriculum planning in PE is carried out in three phases (long-term, medium-term and short-term). The long-term plan maps out the PE activities covered in each term during the key stage. This is planned by phase leaders to ensure that PE sessions are linked to their thematic curriculum where possible. In upper KS2, the PE subject leader adds to this plan following analysis of the ‘competition calendar’ for the following year. The subject lead has devised her own Progression of Skills Grid that tailors NC delivery to out River of Knowledge curriculum. Class teachers complete a short term plan for each PE unit of work. This lists the specific curriculum intentions and expected outcomes and gives details of how the lesson is to be taught.  We plan all PE activities so that they build upon the prior learning of the children and link units of work, as far as possible, to the wider sporting events and competitions that the school are entering.

EYFS Physical Development is a prime area of learning in the Foundation Stage.  Development in this area involves providing opportunities for young children to be active and interactive; and to develop their coordination, control, and movement. Children are also helped to understand the importance of physical activity, and to make healthy choices in relation to exercise and food. We aim to deliver this through planned, purposeful activities, with a mix of adult-led and child-initiated activities (see EYFS policy for more detailed information).

Impact- What will it look like when we achieved our intent?

There are so many ways we can demonstrate the excellent impact our curriculum design has on our pupils. Here are some examples:

• The school offers a broad range of extra-curricular provision to support our curriculum, such as boys & girls football, running, street dance, netball, basketball, rugby, athletics, tennis to name a few!

• ‘Taster sessions’ prior to the commencement of the club promote interest.

• Intra-school competitions introduce the children to ‘competing’ against those they know, and inter-school competitions see pupils compete against other schools, at local, regional and national levels.

• As a result of these growing opportunities and strong sporting provision, we are able to boast an amazing Gold School Games Mark Award, for the first time in 2019. This is an incredible achievement and is one way we have demonstrated our commitment to sport and being active.

• With obesity growing as a serious health concern for children living in the UK, it is an inherent part of our school ethos to ensure Holbrook pupils are equipped with the strongest knowledge and tools to make healthy lifestyle choices. Alongside the other key areas of our curriculum (Forest School, Food for Life and Pupil Voice), children are encouraged and supported in making and promoting healthy lifestyle choices. For example, our Sports Committee planning a ‘Daily Mile’ which is now fully in action, a gardening club, Food for Life ambassadors, and Play Leaders. The Play Leaders have designed an activity/equipment rota to promote active play and sports at lunchtimes, which has been a great success and brought a great ‘buzz’ to the playground!

• Whole school Skip2bFit workshops with a trained coach leading to regular participation in skipping and healthy competition between pupils and staff during break times

• Xtra Sport coaches leading structured games with whole year groups twice weekly

• School have continued to enter virtual School Games events during the Coronavirus lockdowns

P.E and Sports Premium Report

Holbrook Primary School receives PE and Sport Premium Funding based on the number of pupils in years 1 to 6. We use this funding to make additional and sustainable improvements to the quality of PE and sport we offer. This includes developing the PE and sport activities that we offer, and making improvements now that will benefit pupils joining Holbrook in future years. Please see the below Evidence and Impact document which details how we spend our funding.