Physical Education (PE) & Sport

At Lakeview School, we hold PE in the highest regard due to its ability to offer children a unique learning experience outside of the classroom where cross-curricular links are plentiful and because it offers ample opportunity to embed other values such as respect, sportsmanship and determination.

PE promotes an understanding of a child’s body in action. It involves thinking, selecting and applying skills, and it promotes positive attitudes towards a healthy lifestyle, thus enabling children to make informed choices about physical activity throughout their lives.

PE at Lakeview School aims to be active, fun and challenging whilst offering the children the chance to apply their cognitive and social skills in a range of new and different sports and activities.

PE lessons

We use a variety of teaching and learning styles in PE lessons. Our principal aim is to develop the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding, and we do this through a mixture of whole class teaching and individual or group activities. Teachers draw attention to good examples of individual performance as models, and we encourage children to evaluate their own work as well as the work of others. Within lessons, we give learners the opportunity both to collaborate and to compete with each other, and they have the opportunity to use a wide range of resources.

In all classes, children have a wide range of physical ability. Whilst recognising this fact, we provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this through a range of strategies:

1. Setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of results;
2. Setting tasks of increasing difficulty, where not all children complete all tasks;
3. Grouping children by ability, and setting different tasks for each group;
4. Providing a range of challenge through the provision of different resources.

Specifically, our P.E. curriculum:

• Allows children the opportunity to master basic movements including running, jumping, throwing and catching, as well as developing balance, agility and co-ordination before combining these skills rather than just using them in isolation.
• Gives children the opportunity to apply these skills within a range of sports and activities (including outdoor and adventurous activity), using what they have already learnt and applying it to different contexts whilst working independently and within a team.
• Enables children to apply skills learnt in previous year groups to different contexts. E.g. net/wall games are taught in a wide range of year groups but children in Year 4 learn through games of tennis whereas children in Year 6 have the opportunity to learn through games of badminton.
• Teaches children the values of respect, teamwork, cooperation and resilience by participating in team games, developing connections with peers through a common goal.
• Affords children the chance to become independent thinkers in a number of ways: through creativity in dance and gymnastics, creating, applying and adapting tactics for attack and defence, by leading warm-ups and stretching or by comparing their performances with previous ones.
• Encourages a lifelong love of activity through competitive representative opportunities, home-school Active Lifestyle bags, ‘Healthy Lifestyles’ education.
• Enables our most gifted athletes to feel challenged within lessons with our least confident children feeling supported and encouraged to participate.
• Affords children the opportunity to learn how to swim and perform safe self-rescue with statutory swimming lessons in Year 3, as well as non-statutory swimming lessons in Year 5.

Keep On Moving Week

At Lakeview School, we recognise the national importance of promoting Healthy Lifestyles through a variety of different subjects. The profile of PE remains high throughout the year and is bolstered with the annual ‘Healthy Lifestyles Week’ whereby we educate and promote a healthy lifestyle and physical activity. Children engage in different workshops, activities and sports, and the week culminates with our school sports days for EYFS, KS1 and KS2.

Bedfordshire School Sports Partnership

• We have joined a cluster of primary schools in Bedfordshire and our membership gives us access to:
• Specialist PE teaching staff with a wealth of experience who will work alongside our teachers to improve PE teaching.
• A network of schools for continued professional development opportunities and shared good practice.
• A wide range of sports festivals at a competitive level to increase children’s participation in national school games competitions and expose children to new sports and activities that they may not have encountered previously.
• Throughout the academic year, we aim to afford 90% of our Year 1 to Year 6 pupils with the opportunity to represent the school in some form of sporting competition or festival. We believe that these opportunities are valuable for everyone, no matter their sporting ability.
• However, we also have various opportunities throughout the year for our most able athletes to compete and win in high-level competition and we signpost these.