St Mary's Catholic Primary School appreciates the contribution of PE to the health and well-being of its children. We also acknowledge that a broad, balanced, high quality curriculum and extra-curricular activities have a positive impact on concentration, attitude and achievement.
The school is committed to ensuring that all pupils receive a minimum of 2 hours of PE per week, delivered by well-trained and enthusiastic coaches and teachers. The Sport Premium funding is allowing us to develop a sustainable improvement in teacher confidence and a new curriculum based on developing children’s physical literacy skills. Regular staff training opportunities will be provided for teachers and teaching assistants (TAs) to keep them up to date with new initiatives.
Every year we plan and organise inter house sports competitions at the end of each half term. At the end of the school year the house that has won the most points will be presented with winners shield and staff will organise an end of year celebration for the members of that house. In the academic year 2020 – 2021 this was impossible due to Covid restrictions. However, we plan to resume the competitions in the academic year 2021-2022.
We run a Sports Week every year including competitive races for KS1 and KS2. Teachers and TAs and our playleaders provide a wide range of after school sports clubs, both for team and individual sports. In Summer 2021 we had to organise Sports Day in key stage bubbles.
What is the Sports Premium?
In March 2013 the government announced that it was to provide additional funding of £150 million per annum to improve provision of physical education (PE) and sport in primary schools in England - The Primary PE & Sport Premium.
This funding - provided jointly by the Departments for Education, Health and Culture, Media and Sport - is allocated to primary school head teachers. The funding is ring-fenced and therefore can only be spent on provision of PE and sport in schools.
Purpose of funding
Schools must spend the additional funding on improving their provision of PE and sport, but they have the freedom to choose how they do this.
The four objectives of the Primary PE and Sport Premium funding are:
- To improve the quality of existing PE teaching through continuing professional learning in PE for generalists, so that all primary pupils improve their health, skills and physical literacy, and have broader exposure to a range of sports
- To increase participation levels in competitive sport and healthy activity of pupils, and maintain these into adolescences
- To increase the quality of initial teacher training in PE and sport, and to promote PE specialisation in primary level workforce
- For schools to show that they understand and value the benefits of high quality PE and sport, including its use as a tool for whole school improvement
Sports Ambassadors
At St Mary’s every year we appoint sports ambassadors from each class of Year 3 to Year 6. Their roles were selected due to their exceptional commitment to sport in school.
A Young Ambassador’s role is to:
- Increase participation and healthy lifestyles in their school
- Promote the positive values of sport in and through sport
- Be a role model in advocating PE and school sport
- Be the young people’s voice on PE and school sport in their school
- Help organise teams, promote playground games and collect in the sports equipment after break times.