Game Changers

Teachers’ lack of confidence in PE can mean lessons devolve into an aimless kickaround, but new training schemes are helping to transform the subject, finds Liz Lightfoot...

Saving the world sounds like a topic for geography or science so why are the children running around the classroom in shorts?

Well, a volcano has exploded churning out blocks of rock and if the children can’t get them back into the crater in time, there will be another eruption.

It’s obviously not science and it doesn’t look much like English or maths either. This is PE being taught by the first primary teachers to have qualified with a PE specialism as part of a pilot scheme.

Stories, fairytales and even films such as Spiderman and Despicable Me are being used as tools to inspire young children to work together on learning basic moves they will use in sport.

Of course, some schools are doing it already, but at others PE is characterised by the “get out the equipment, run up and down, throw a ball, kick a ball” approach to physical exercise in which the hallmarks of good classroom teaching do not apply.

Now some are questioning whether the coaching approach – many schools have used the money from the Government’s sports premium to bring in coaches – is the right way to go. Instead there is a move towards treating PE as any other subject, starting with basic skills and with lesson plans, progression and encouragement for the children to work, self-assess and improve together.

Dedicated training

Though PE is part of the national curriculum, students on primary PGCE courses are lucky if they get more than a few days of instruction on the subject. Most learn on the job, drawing on what they enjoyed – or did not enjoy – as children, or their own sports interests.

But last summer a pilot scheme funded by the sports premium was launched to provide specialist PE primary teachers. Based at three training primary schools, the year-long course leads to qualified teacher status and 60 credits towards a Master’s degree. Students spend half their time on PE and the rest covering other curriculum subjects. It will run again this year.

Richie Hannon, 32, a sports science graduate, joined the pilot at Belleville Primary in Clapham Junction, south-west London, because he wanted to move away from coaching to teaching. “A lot of people think PE teachers have an easy job – give the children a ball and let them kick it around – but it is a lot more than that. You teach it as a subject like any other, working first on basic moves just as you would teach letter and sounds in literacy,” he says.

His PE lessons have the same formats as those in other subjects. “You have lesson plans, warm ups, start ups and feedback and progression. With the younger ones I don’t say ‘you are going to learn about football’ – the challenge is to get that ball over there so how are you going to do it?”

Richie uses stories to get the children involved and their favourite is the exploding volcano. “The bag is the volcano and the balls are the rocks and they have to get them back in a certain amount of time otherwise the volcano will explode. They have to save the world and figure out the best way to do it – run with the ball, pass the ball, etc.”

The next stage is to try and get the rocks back without running with them, because they are very heavy. So they work out passing the rocks to each other. Then the world is at risk again because if any of the balls hit the ground, there will be an earthquake. “They have to work out what went well and what didn’t work so well. Perhaps they weren’t close enough to each other when they passed the ball, or they weren’t ready to catch it because they weren’t looking,” says Richie.

As a sports coach himself, Richie is keen to stress the difference between coaching and teaching. “A lot of coaches go in and say ‘this is how you kick a ball’ rather than ‘the ball has to go over there so how are we going to get it there?’. PE is not about the next Andy Murray, it’s about children gaining confident moves they can use for the rest of their lives,” he says.

Cinderella stories

Fairy tales and characters from TV and films are already used for PE in many primary schools in the north-east of England where teachers have received CPD training from Foundation of Light, the official charity of Premier League football team Sunderland AFC.

Spiderman and Despicable Me characters – goodies and baddies – have enlivened PE at Eppleton Academy Primary in Sunderland since reception teacher Jayne Rowell enrolled on the training sessions, which run over six weeks.

“I’ve been teaching for more than 10 years and have never seen the students as engaged or happy in their PE lessons,” she says. “The training really encouraged me to be more creative in the way that I teach basic skills and, by incorporating popular stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk and The Emperor’s New Clothes, I’ve now expanded that to include the use of high-level apparatus, as well as floor work, while also incorporating the use of ICT in lessons”

In one of her stories the children have to get through hoops, negotiate benches, dribble and throw the ball as the foxes try to capture the chickens. “It makes the topic meaningful to the children if you appeal to their interests and they develop basic skills without realising or worrying about it,’ says Jayne.

Quite a few teachers are “not very savvy” about PE says Ian Dipper, Foundation of Light’s Sports Development Coordinator. “They are very good at English, maths and science but they can shy away from PE, perhaps because they did not have a good experience themselves. They tend to look at PE as separate to the classroom, but when you sit down with them and discuss how their skills as a teacher can be applied to PE, they realise it is not such a daunting task. The skills are no different. They can use effective questions and open questions and build progression just as in any other subject,” he says.

It’s a different way of looking at PE, says David Walton Raine, who also did the Foundation of Light course. “We were encouraged to make cross-curricular links – something that, to be honest, I hadn’t done before,” added David, a teacher at South Hylton Primary School, Sunderland. “I don’t know why I hadn’t done it before because it is easy to incorporate numeracy and literacy, for example using point scores and transferring them to bar charts and frequency tables.” Even the children who say they don’t like PE forget about it and join in games based on stories, says Kelly Taylor, 22, who has just graduated from the PE specialist training at Belleville Primary. “People can get stuck in the ‘take them out and let them run around and play rounders’ attitude to PE and I don’t think that caters for what children need because they need to develop the basic moves. If you are teaching reception literacy, you wouldn’t tell them we are going to sit and write for 45 minutes, just like you shouldn’t get children to play a whole game of sport within one lesson,” she said.

With health experts predicting that child obesity could make children’s life expectancy shorter than their parents for the first time in history, a new focus on PE just might make a difference.

Top of the league

Ofsted’s report, Beyond 2012 – outstanding physical education for all, found the best PE lessons were taught in schools where…

* teachers and coaches had high expectations and lessons were planned so that no limits were placed on children’s achievement

* pupils were set personal, very challenging targets to aim for, and during practising received high-quality advice on what they could do to reach them

* in lessons, teachers routinely checked pupils’ learning by asking them to briefly explain what they were doing and identify what else they could do to improve