Intent

At Maidenbower Infant School and Nursery, we believe in an ambitious and well sequenced PE curriculum that:

• Promotes the importance of physical health and wellbeing
• Physically engages all students and involves our local community
• Inspires everyone to care for their body and to improve their fitness and health
• Helps children to improve their physical skills through their time in our school

We aim to provide the foundations for developing a love for sports and physical exercise throughout an active curriculum, not only in our PE lessons but also throughout our wider school experiences. This is important to us as a school as we believe that ‘what happens early, matters for a lifetime’. We pro-actively seek opportunities for children to experience sports that they may not get the opportunity to try out of school and promote sports and physical exercise as being enjoyable, having a positive impact on our physical and mental well being and challenging our bodies.

We aim to carefully plan physical enrichment opportunities every half term, for all year groups, to promote curiosity about sports and seek opportunities to involve our local community in promoting a love of physical exercise.

Our PE curriculum also provides opportunities for children to compete in sport via our locality fixtures, lunch time clubs, after school clubs and through a whole school Sports Day. These activities build character and support children to develop and embed values such as fairness and respect, whilst also inspiring all children to want to achieve and succeed.

Implementation

As a school, we have created a bespoke knowledge and skills progression document which carefully breaks down the key knowledge and skills that the children are required to know and demonstrate in PE, from Nursery, to the end of Key Stage One. This is guided by the National Curriculum but we have made this document bespoke to meet the needs of the pupils in our local community. Our PE planning and delivery is also guided by the resources of the Teach, Learn, Grow PE website; a resource we use to aid children’s understanding of skills taught through video examples and to support teachers’ assessment and adaptations of lessons.

The skills we develop throughout the children’s time in our school covers all of the different aspects of Physical Development, including Gymnastics, Dance, Athletics, Fitness, Games and Health and Self Care.

Our half termly enrichment workshops go above and beyond our PE curriculum offer and supports what makes our school PE curriculum unique. Our PE subject leader is in contact with a wide range of physical clubs, sports and activities within the locality and promotes these types of exercise throughout workshops for all children throughout the school, from Nursery to Year 2. Over the past few years, we have had fencing, Basketball, golf, dance, ParkRun to name a few of the taster workshops we have organised. We also promote the clubs and activities in our newsletter as a follow up to the workshop to provide guidance to the parents and carers about how to pursue their child’s curiosity in taking part in the sport outside of school.

During our weekly celebration assembly, we also encourage children to share the sports competitions or achievements they have outside of school. We regularly celebrate the trophies, medals and certificates that children have achieved from Irish Dancing, Football and even Rock Climbing!  

Impact

Throughout a carefully planned physical development curriculum, enrichment opportunities and promoting sports and exercise within our wider curriculum will result in children leaving Maidenbower Infant School and Nursery:

• Being confident to show their abilities in movement and sports
• Confidently able to demonstrate the required knowledge and skills in our PE curriculum
• Ambitious to beat their own personal targets
• Curious to try out new activities and seek opportunities to try different situations
• Able to look after their body and improve their fitness
• Respectful towards others they play with or compete against

We ensure that our PE curriculum is achieving all of the above by assessing all children’s skills and abilities half termly, by using our bespoke knowledge and skill progression document and the resources from TLG (Teach, Learn, Grow). PE is a practical subject in which teachers use formative assessment strategies to gauge a child’s ability and next steps within their physical learning. We identify children who need additional support and put provision in place to ensure that all children achieve and experience success.

Below are some photos of our PE workshops that run throughout the year, organised by our PE subject leader and outside companies.