Physical Education

At St Stephen’s we aim to develop the knowledge, skills and capabilities necessary for mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing in our children now and for their future. Physical fitness is an important part of leading a healthier lifestyle; it teaches self-discipline and that to be successful you must work hard, show resilience and have the determination to believe that anything can be achieved.

Intent:

At St Stephen’s CE School, we are aiming to develop the physical and mental health and fitness of our children. To enable this, we offer the pupils a broad and balanced experience of Physical Education – whether it is through sports lessons, out of school clubs or competitions. As a result, our pupils are able to succeed in physically demanding activities undertaken individually or in groups, being appropriate to boys, girls and to those from different cultures and home backgrounds.

Pupils are taught to become physically confident in a way which supports their health and fitness and exposed to opportunities to compete in sport and other activities which build character and help to embed values such as fairness and respect.

Implementation

We ensure that all children receive at least two hours per week of well-planned, high quality Physical Education. This includes one session every week with Benchmark Gymnastics and one weekly session with our full-time PE teacher. In Years 3 and 6, the children also receive regular swimming lessons to ensure they are confident and capable swimmers. In addition, we have extra sessions for rotating year groups in half-termly blocks, including cricket and tennis. All of these lessons are carefully planned and tailored to the needs of each learner, also ensuring a sequence which allows for progression as well as challenge.

In Nursery, the activities are organised to promote social skills and the development of scientific language and understanding. Teaching will be based on the objectives in the Framework for Reception, working towards the Early Learning Goals. This will prepare children for starting the National Curriculum in Reception.

Throughout the academic year, our children also have the opportunity to participate in different sports at our before and after school clubs. As well as the sports covered during Physical Education lessons, we have multi-skills, ballet, basketball, dodgeball, martial arts, highly-able gymnastics and mini-football for our school clubs, to name a few. Children are encouraged to attend these clubs as they help promote a healthy lifestyle, the children can continue to practice and consolidate what they have been learning in class and they have the opportunity to be in teams/groups with children from different year groups.

We also take part in and organise a range of different competitions for all our children. To find out more about our competitive sport, please click HERE to find out more.

Impact

• Year on year increase in pupil participation in PE, engagement levels are consistently high and pupil behaviour is excellent.
• Increased levels of competency as pupil’s progress up the school. This is now being tracked, to assist with the development of planning year on year.
• Increased participation of pupils in extracurricular clubs, therefore pupils are more active outside of curriculum PE.

Assessment

From Years 1-6, pupils will be formatively assessed at the end of every half term. This will be based upon the development of their performance through both activities based on learning technique and the effectiveness of their ability in games situations/compositions. They will be assessed using the national curriculum levels for Physical Education in KS1 and KS2.

To find out more about what is taught in our Gymnastics and Kick London sessions, please have a look at the links below.

National Curriculum – Physical Education

PE Gymnastics Program of Study 1-6

PE Overview

PE Policy 2023

Swimming Outcomes (2022-2023)

For swimming, we go to our local swimming pool Janet Adegoke, and our children take part in swimming courses. Our Year Three classes attended a ten-session intensive course and were given the confidence to swim in a full-size pool and taught the three basic strokes: front crawl, breaststroke and backstroke.

We also offer a swimming course to our Year Six children. They attended a five-session intensive course and were assessed against the National Curriculum standards. In June 2023 we found out that:

• 68% could swim confidently over a distance of at least 25 metres
• 86% could effectively use front crawl, breaststroke and backstroke
• 95% could demonstrate safe self-rescue in water-based situations.

To see the results from the previous year, please click HERE.