Physical Education (PE) Curriculum at Geoffrey Field Junior School

During their time at Geoffrey Field Junior School (GFJS), children have the opportunity to experience a rich variety of sporting and physical activities. It is our belief that PE is vital to children developing greater physical confidence, as well as supporting their health, general fitness and mental wellbeing. As a result, we have created a curriculum that will broaden their experiences, in addition to providing the opportunity to develop a lifelong love of sporting activities.

Our PE curriculum

During their time with us, children will improve their running, jumping, throwing and catching techniques. These will be taught in isolation in athletics lessons, as well as incorporated into competitive games through our many team sports including lacrosse, tennis and cricket.

Once our children have obtained the necessary basic skills, they will be taught how to develop attacking and defensive principles. When attacking, they will explore the use of movement and communication to generate space as well as defensive principles including marking. These skills will be a focus of our hockey, netball, hockey and tag rugby lessons.

The children will enjoy developing movement patterns through dance units taught in every year group. Children will improve their flexibility, strength, technique, control and balance through   martial arts and gymnastics activities.  These lessons are taught by external providers to ensure the children maximise their potential to develop these important skills and strengths.

We strive to ensure the children develop their team skills throughout all activities but also through our OAA provision. Children develop their skills through completing challenges, comparing their successes and improving on their previous performances.

The Lessons

We produce lessons with a focus on:

• Children gaining an understand of basic rules for the sports they participate in
• Providing competitive learning in a safe environment
• Allowing children to join in at their own level of development
• Fun and competition – to allow children to experience success in sport
• Communication skills. Either working as a team or reviewing and analysing their own performance.

Each pupil receives two 45 minute PE lessons a week. This will typically consist of a dynamic warm up game, essential skills practice before developing into a fun, competitive game relevant to the sport played. The majority of lessons are taught by our teaching staff. Where it is identified that more specific knowledge of a discipline would benefit the children’s outcomes, we employ specialist coaches to support teaching. This year we have been pleased to offer Martial Arts, Gymnastics and Dance lessons supplemented by expert external providers.

Our staff have regular additional PE training opportunities to supplement their own knowledge and skills. These are organised termly and have seen staff improving their skills in developing engaging warm up activities, Lacrosse and Tag Rugby skills in recent years.

Active playtimes

We are fortunate to have excellent facilities within the school playground. Through effective use of the sports premium fund and our own PE budget the children have access to table tennis, the daily mile, basketball, netball and an adventure playground. We also have playground markings that allow for exploratory play.

We have rotas to ensure everyone gets a fair opportunity to use the more popular equipment and allow a team sport to be played everyday in the MUGA. In the summertime, we have a large school field allowing children to spread out and explore more team sports.

Swimming

Learning to swim is an essential life skill: potentially life-saving, great fun and a wonderful way to keep fit. This year, we have improved our swimming offer so that every child, in year groups 3, 4 and 5, will be offered lessons. This is in direct response to the limited opportunities children have had recently, not only due to Covid but also the cost of living crisis. During the lessons the children are supported by local swimming coaches as well as our own staff.

A number of Year 6 children will be offered swimming booster lessons, after their SATs exams, so that they too can have an opportunity to meet the national curriculum requirements:

• Swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres.
• Use a range of strokes effectively – for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke.
• Perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations.

Extra-curricular Sports and Clubs

We want our children to both enjoy their participation and excel in competitive sports and events. We strive to offer all children the opportunity to take part in competitive events within the Whitley area and beyond. This is in the form of local and national competitions as well as internal competitions like sports day. This helps them build character and learn important values. As of the end of Spring term 2023 over 160 places have been offered to children in sports competitions.

We have a well-established series of after school clubs for children to enjoy. They are chosen to supplement the sports children have been taught in lessons so they can explore their preferred choices further. This year we have subsidised sports places through our sports premium. We offered over 16 sporting clubs a term – free of charge. This has led to the offer of over 300 sporting places each term for children to enjoy.

The clubs selected are tailored to the students and reflect the feedback obtained in our pupil voice surveys. This year, we extended our football offer to accommodate the enthusiasm for the sport locally. In Spring term 2023, we offered football coaching weekly to over 90 children. We also separated boys and girls coaching to drive up participation.

During extra-curricular themed days (such as World Book day, Charity events and Languages day) as well as  our popular university courses, we endeavour to provide new and interesting sports as taster sessions. In the last year, the children have had the opportunity to enjoy American Football, Handball, Orienteering, Dodgeball and even Cossack dancing.

In the summer term, we offer a sports leader programme to Year 5 and 6 children in which they will be given time during the school day to prepare activities for Year 3.