PE

Physical Education at St Josephs

At St Joseph’s Primary School, we have always taken pride in producing and maintaining high quality Physical Education provision.

We value the holistic development Physical Education offers our students – cognitively, physically, socially and emotionally. We recognise the fundamental need for Physical Education and how it’s qualities and core values; excellence, determination, resilience and perseverance, underpin the values of school life and that of a structured society. Additionally, we employ a full-time sports coach who teaches PE across each Key Stage 1 & Key Stage 2 class, weekly, to ensure the highest quality provision is maintained. We endeavor to utilize our community by bringing in specialist coaching where appropriate  – to maximize the quality of PE provision that our pupils are exposed to. The benefits of which were evident when our pupils had the opportunity to learn from professional, Commonwealth athletes provided by Team Super Schools and specialist coaches from Middlesex Cricket Club. As well as this, our close relationship with St Aloysius Secondary School has provided a multitude of benefits which have included further specialist coaching coupled with fantastic resources.

For PE lessons we follow the GetSet4PE scheme. The children receive one hour of PE from the class teacher and one hour of PE from our sports coach each week. We have found that the implementation of GetSet4PE has helped ensure continuity and progression across the whole school.

Our Year 3 children follow an intensive two-week swimming course at Archway Leisure Centre. The children will swim for 1 hour each day for 2 weeks. At the end of the 2 weeks, the children will be assessed to check that they have met the National Curriculum’s swimming standards:

• Swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres.
• Use a range of strokes effectively (for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke).
• Perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations.

Children in year 6 will also follow the intensive swimming course to ensure they have fully met the requirements before they begin secondary school.

For PE at St Joseph’s, we ask that the children wear the designated St Josephs kit. This includes the green logo t-shirt, navy shorts/bottoms, navy hoodie and trainers.  See the complete uniform list here: Uniform September

Swimming Kit

The children that partake in the intensive swimming course must abide by the Archway Leisure Centre swimming kit code. All children should wear a swimming cap. Boys should wear trunks – not ‘board shorts’. Girls should wear a one-piece swimming costume. If your child plans on wearing swimming goggles, we ask that you sign and return the parental permission slip which will then be distributed to Archway Leisure Centre by the class teacher. Moreover, if a child has a verruca, it is mandatory that that they wear a swimming sock.

Competitive Sports

This year, we will continue to make full use of the Islington School Sports partnership, a partnership which was sorely missed throughout the height of the pandemic.

At St Joseph’s, we recognise the importance of competition in sports for our pupils. Competitive sports offer our pupils the ability to problem-solve whilst under pressure, demonstrate determination and motivates them towards a common goal.

Our pupils have a wide variety of sports to compete in, for example, tag-rugby, cross-country, football and netball. This is important in ensuring that we offer the opportunity of competitive sport to as many of our pupils as possible.

Participation

At St Joseph’s we provide a wide variety of extra-curricular opportunities to ensure our pupils are able to further pursue their interests, develop their confidence and improve their wellbeing. Some of the clubs we offer include; karate, football, multi-sports, gymnastics and health & fitness.

Our clubs are offered to a variety of age groups across the school and are run by a combination of our specialist PE teacher, sports coach, class teachers and external providers.

Positive Role Models

We recognise the importance of offering our pupils at St Joseph’s positive role models in sport. We feel that these role models should be relateable to our children so they can aspire to someone who is like them. Henceforth, we have invested heavily with our fantastic library to cater to these wishes. Miss Rooney has acquired numerous books of different athletes across a variety of sports in order to inspire our children. This will be an initiative that we will incessantly build upon in order to continue to inspire our children in the world of sport.

Curriculum Overview

Attached below are the PE curriculum overviews followed by our class teachers and sports coach at St Joseph’s Primary School:

PE Curriculum-Overview