Intent 

PE at St Benedict’s is a vital part of school life and ultimately children’s future and well-being, allowing children to "Life in All Its Fullness" John 10:10. Therefore, our intent is to provide an inclusive, broad and balanced PE curriculum which ensures that ALL of our children will benefit and develop healthy ideas and hopefully healthy lives.

Through PE and well-being education, it is our intent at St Benedict’s to equip the children with the tools and skills needed to understand and make choices to lead a healthy lifestyle. This is achieved through enhancing existing skills, learning new skills and being introduced to new sports, clubs and teams.

Participation in sporting activities is a key element of developing a school in which pupils are proud of their local community. As community is one of our school values, we place a great emphasis upon additional sporting opportunities which go beyond the lesson within after-school clubs, intra-school and inter-school competition and festivals. We are keen to work with local sport clubs within Glastonbury and the surrounding area to positively engage with the local community and be active citizens within it.

Implementation

As a school we use the Real PE schemes of work which are fully aligned to the National Curriculum and Ofsted requirements and focus on the development of agility, balance and coordination, healthy competition and cooperative learning. Each unit of work is designed to enable all children to enjoy physical activity and to participate in PE at their own level of development. It has a different focus to develop the key abilities necessary for success in PE and sport and across the curriculum: creative, physical, health and fitness, personal, social and cognitive. The key knowledge and skills of each topic are mapped across each year group. This ensures that children develop their knowledge of games, dance, gymnastics, athletics and outdoor and adventurous activity progressively. The skills in these areas are developed systematically, with the programme of study for each year group building on previous learning and preparing for subsequent years.

The child-friendly assessment statements (Real PE cogs) are used in lessons to ensure consistency across the key stage and to ensure that pupils are aware of their own progress, strengths and challenges.  As well as securing and building on a range of skills, children develop knowledge of the basic rules of a range of games and activities. They experience positive competition and a strong focus is placed on developing good sporting attitudes. An extensive extra-curricular provision also provides further challenge the children and give them access to a range of physical activity.

PE is taught for two sessions per week wherever possible and lessons are planned to utilise cross curricular links, such as in maths and in outside learning, particularly in Forest School activities.

Impact

Children at St Benedict’s complete each aspect of PE with a high proficiency. In addition, the children are aware of the link between physical activity and good mental health and understand it’s significance as part of a healthy lifestyle. The school achieves well in a number of sporting activities and achieved a School Games Mark award at Gold level in 2021-22 in recognition of its PE provision and children’s access to competitive sports.

To conclude, we expect that every child will:

- enjoy PE lessons and physical activity - be able to achieve and succeed,

- be able to combine physical skills with fluency and apply them consistently to a broad range of physical activities and sports,

- have the opportunity to take part in competitive sport,

- be able to collaborate and communicate with others,

- understand and be able to articulate how they have made progress in individual PE lessons,

- understand how to evaluate and recognise their own success,

- be able to explain the importance of leading a healthy and active life.

In line with national requirements, we will measure how many pupils are physically active for at least 30 mins per day at school and how many are physically active for a total of 60 mins per day (including home and school activities).

Each year we will benchmark ourselves against schools nationally by completing the School Games Mark survey.