The deadline for spending Primary PE and Sport Premium funding carried over from last academic year (2019-20) is the end of this summer term (2021).
This ringfenced funding is designed to help give children an active start in life by supporting schools to improve the quality of their PE, physical activity and sport provision. Being active helps children to become mentally and physically healthier and leads to improved behaviour and academic achievement.
With so many tools, techniques, resources and support available, it can be difficult to decide where best to invest the funding. Here are four ways to ensure you and your pupils get the most from the grant.
Carry out an audit
Look at the whole-school PESSPA offer – what do you offer each year group and how is it delivered? This includes auditing staff competence and confidence, identifying what activities are taught well and those that aren’t. The Youth Sports Trust has a very useful audit tool to help you do this.
You can use your PE and Sport Premium funding to invest in staff CPD including auditing your provision and staff competency.
Create your vision – what you want you want your school PESSPA to look like?
Be ambitious about what you want your PESSPA to look like. What are the strengths and what can you build on and develop? Include your PE and physical activity day-to-day offer and children and staff attitudes to PESSPA. How valued is the subject and how embedded is it across the whole school?
Consider what your short and long-term aims are. Does your ambition require a culture change or just a few tweaks? What steps do you need to put in place to get there? Think about what you want the legacy of your Sport Premium to be. How far have you come since the introduction of the funding? Consider what you have achieved so far and how far you have to go to achieve your goal. What are the best next steps to move you forward?
A legacy could be to have a highly skilled team. Funding can be used to support your colleagues to develop skills in a new area such as outdoor learning or to address whole-school motivations and relationships with physical activity. Or you can use it to access external support to enhance the quality of your programmes.
Identify what you need to focus on
Be really honest about where you are and what you need to focus on. As well as thinking about what you want to develop, remember to consider what your children need. How can you embed this? Be ambitious with your ideas and then look realistically at the steps that need to be taken to get there.
Involve children in shaping your PESSPA programme. It is an opportunity to engage children in activities that may not have been part of your PE curriculum but would help develop fundamental skills.
5 key indicators – are they all equal?
Do you really need to focus on all 5 key indicators, or would it be better for your pupils to address one of them really well? Is there anything within your school improvement plan that you can link your activities to? Look at how your PESSPA offer supports academic attainment or behaviour and social development – raising the expectations around behaviour and attitudes of particular groups of children.
You can use your funding to embed successful physically active learning approaches and programmes that support areas such as behaviour or developing an active curriculum.
Go Well has an extensive PESSPA support programme, from in-school training and delivery to activity packages that will help you and your teams improve the quality of PE within the school and support more children to develop an active lifestyle.
