PE at St Andrew's C of E Primary School.

PE is an essential part of the curriculum at St Andrew's. We use it to help children be more active, encourage good mental health and build teamworking skills. We also try to help the children to experience sports they wouldn't normally take part in. Recently, we have had sports providers Excel in to coach basketball, tag rugby, gymnastics and football.

We recognise that physical activity is important in the development of children, as a result, our curriculum is progressive, offering children the opportunity to develop skills they have learnt in previous years. The skills taught can transcend different sports, so children get the opportunity to use these skills in a variety of different sports, from hockey, football, netball and basketball through to tennis, short tennis and badminton. 

We encourage children to take part in all sports and can differentiate our lessons to support children of all abilities and challenge those who excel at certain sports.  Children also get the opportunity to work on dance patterns, either learning different types of dances or developing their own. In gym, they link areas of the curriculum to movements they make and work in groups to develop routines, sometimes working with apparatus.  

The school have used the Sports Premium money to bring experienced sports providers into school to teach a variety of different sports. As well as offering exciting and engaging lessons for the children, they have also given ideas to staff and helped develop their teaching of PE in school. 

We also encourage the competitive aspect of sport and the importance of working in teams through sports competitions within school and outside of school. Every summer, we host a hotly contested competitive sports day, where children are organised into Houses and compete against each other in different events. Outside of school we run successful girls and boys football teams, netball teams, a rowing team and enter the local swimming gala. We work with the Ashfield Sports Partnership, who organise a variety of events throughout the year. We have recently won a local tornament to represent Mansfield Town FC in the next round of the competition in Salford. 

As a school, we identified the need to continue our PE provision throughout Lockdown, we held a virtual Sports day, which encouraged children to do different daily activities and send in videos to school, we also sent out sports activities as part of weekly timetables. During the year, we have also completed the Getset Travel to Tokyo event, competing in different weekly activities and logging our results to see which class could travel the most distance. 

We have continued to place an emphasis on sport and fitness by introducing morning activities, involving a Daily Mile or dance routines to get the children active.

At St Andrew's, we will continue to provide a variety of different sports and allow children to experience things they might never have done before, so that they continue to be challenged and captivated by our creative PE curriculum.