Coaching Edge 33 2013 | Page 33

|PRIMARY SCHOOL SPORT FUNDING| COACHING EDGE

T

he Olympic and Paralympic
legacy is a prickly, nebulous
issue and anything related to
it tends to provoke criticism
and debate. The recent £150m boost
for primary school physical education is
no exception.
Under pressure to provide tangible evidence to
justify the expense of The London 2012 Olympic
and Paralympic Games, and in response to
Ofsted comments that primary teachers lack
‘knowledge and confidence’ in delivering PE,
the government has pledged £8000 a year plus
£5 per pupil to each primary school for PE
provision for the next two years.

The funding is only guaranteed until 2015 and
yet, head teachers are expected to provide
improvements in PE teaching, competitive sport
and pupils’ health and lifestyles that are
sustainable. Ofsted inspectors will visit next
year to assess whether they have succeeded.
A recent House of Commons Education
Committee report didn’t provide much
encouragement. It stated: ‘We are concerned
that the government’s primary sport premium –
while correctly focused – is only being given to
schools for two years. This is simply not long
enough for schools to build a sustained provision.’
But amid this political maelstrom is an
unmissable opportunity to give young children
a flying start to their sporting lives. Coaches’
ears should be pricking up attentively because
they have a key role to play.
In the last issue of Coaching Edge, we outlined
examples of governing bodies of sport that
deliver excellent ‘off-the-shelf’ coaching
packages in primary schools. These won’t suit
every school as each head teacher has their
own priorities, needs, resources and limitations as
they look to invest their money most effectively.

© Dent

Dent Primary School, for example, has just 39
pupils and is situated high up in a very isolated,
small village in the Yorkshire Dales. Among other
things, head teacher Nicky Edwards previously
paid for a rugby coach to visit for half a term,
but continuous progression was difficult and
efforts to join inter-school competitions were
stymied by cost and long distances.
Now, armed with her £8195 of PE funding,
Edwards’ response is twofold – to upskill current
staff by having them work alongside specialist
coaches, and to forge previously untenable links
with local clubs and other schools.

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‘We don’t have any male members of staff here
and I think it’s important to have some positive
male role models,’ says Edwards. ‘We’ll have
Multi-skills clubs run by coaches with continuing
personal development (CPD) input, so teachers
will baseline children while working alongside
and learning from those coaches.
‘At the moment, apart from myself, we haven’t
got everybody here up to date with PE and
sport. I want to have them fully trained for a time
when the funding isn’t there,’ says Edwards.
It’s an approach that matches sports coach
UK’s vision for primary sport. As sports coach
UK CEO Dr Tony Byrne says: ‘We believe it’s
most beneficial to children when coaches and
teachers work together to enhance each other’s
skills. That is why we believe in both specialist
PE teachers and specialist children’s coaches.’
Dent School has its own PE ‘specialist’ – a
recently appointed senior teaching assistant
who happens to have a range of sports
coaching qualifications. The funding will enable
her to take over and expand upon the school’s
existing extracurricular sport clubs, which the
head used to run but found difficult to commit to
fully due to time constraints.
‘I’ll now have someone even better qualified
than me to make sure those standards are high,’
says Edwards. ‘It’s improving the quality of what
we can offer in a sustainable way. It will make
a huge difference.’
Dent itself is surrounded by tumbling hills, lakes
and rivers, so swimming is the school’s PE
priorit y for health and safety reasons. With their
slice of the funding pie, Dent has already
doubled swimming tuition for next year and set
up an inaugural gala for all abilities with a
school seven miles away. They will then enter a
bigger gala against 25 schools for the first time
next year.
It’s a stark change of scenery from Dent’s idyllic
countryside to four primary schools in Tower
Hamlets in London’s East End. A charity called
Greenhouse works in these four schools (and
many others across London), using sport, in this
case table tennis, as a vehicle to change the
lives of disadvantaged and disengaged
children. The award-winning programme,
delivered by world-class coaches, runs through
these four primary schools into nearby Morpeth
Secondary School, providing a continuous
progression. It has strong emphasis on
discipline and pumps out nationally ranked
junior players by the dozen.