Our PE Curriculum
Article 6: Every child has the right to life. Governments must do all they can to make sure children survive.
Article 23: A child with a disability has the right to live a full decent life and play an active part in the community. Governments must do all they can to provide support for disabled children.
Article 24: Every child has the right to good health.
Our goal is for our children to become physically active. Physically active pupils must have:
- The ability to acquire new knowledge and skills exceptionally well and develop an in-depth understanding of PE.
- The willingness to practice skills in a wide range of different activities and situations, alone, in small groups and in teams and to apply these skills in the chosen activities to achieve exceptionally high levels of performance.
- High levels of physical fitness.
- The ability to remain physically active for sustained periods of time and an understanding of the importance of this in promoting long-term health and well-being.
- The ability to take the initiative and become excellent young leaders, organising and officiating, and evaluating what needs to be done to improve, and motivating and instilling excellent sporting attitudes in others.
- Exceptional levels of originality, imagination and creativity in their techniques, tactics and choreography, knowledge of how to improve their own and others’ performance and the ability to work independently for extended periods of time without the need of guidance or support.
- A keen interest in PE. A willingness to participate eagerly in every lesson, highly positive attitudes and the ability to make informed choices about engaging fully in extra-curricular sport.
- The ability to swim at least 25 metres before the end of KS2 and knowledge of how to remain safe in and around water.
Fundamental Foundations
We believe that for children to secure greater depth, it is important that they first have solid fundamental foundations. Fundamental foundations should not be rushed and so the notion of ‘rapid progress’ must be dismissed. Instead the goal of repetition should be seen as both useful and necessary. This is why you will see us returning regularly to art knowledge and concepts.
Cognitive Domains - Degrees of Understanding
We refer to three degrees of understanding and thinking ‘Basic’, ‘Advancing’ and ‘Deep’. BASIC – Low level cognitive demand. Involves acquisition of fundamental foundations. ADVANCING – Higher level cognitive demands beyond recall. Requires application involving some degree of decision making in how to apply fundamental foundations. DEEP – Cognitive demand involves non-standard, non-routine, inter-connected, multi-step thinking in problems with more than one possible solution. Requires reasoning and justification for the inventive application of fundamental foundations.
Time Scales for Progression Through the Cognitive Domains
Milestone 1 – Y1 & Y2
Milestone 2 – Y3 & Y4
Milestone 3 – Y5 & Y6
Each milestone should be seen as containing two phases. In the first phase, pupils should repeat the content a sufficient number of times to secure fundamental foundations; in the second phase, they should apply the foundations in order to reach the ‘expected’ standard. If they reach this before the end of the second phase, they should move on to tasks that will secure greater depth. Thus, progress through the cognitive domains take two years.
It is expected that by the end of Year 1, pupils should be able to complete the BASIC tasks to secure fundamental foundations and by the end of Year 2, the ADVANCING tasks. It is also reasonable that a number of children may move on to the DEEP activities if they secure an early understanding of advancing.
As part of our progression model we use a different pedagogical style in each of the cognitive domains of basic, advancing and deep. This is based on the research of Sweller, KIrschner and Rosenshine who argue to direct instruction in the early stage of learning and discovery based appropriate later.
Milestone 1 Y1 & Y2 |
Milestone 2 Y3 & Y4 |
Milestone 3 Y5 & Y6 |
||||||
Beginning Y1 |
Advancing Y2 |
Deep Y2 |
Beginning Y3 |
Advancing Y4 |
Deep Y4 |
Beginning Y5 |
Advancing Y6 |
Deep Y6 |
Page 144 of the Primary National Curriculum 2014 states:
‘While it is important that pupils make progress, it is also vitally important that they develop secure understanding of each key block of knowledge and concepts in order to progress to the next stage. Insecure, superficial understanding will not allow genuine progress: pupils may struggle at key points of transition (such as between primary and secondary school), build up serious misconceptions, and/or have significant difficulties in understanding higher-order content.’
We believe that it is therefore extremely important to secure the fundamental foundations before trying to secure greater depth.
Curriculum Breadth, Depth & Progression Principles
We have carefully planned our curriculum to ensure progression as well as breadth and depth. These are the principles we have adhered to:
- We revisit the same micro-topics in both years of a milestone so that pupils have a chance to connect topics together (intra-curriculum links)
- Threshold concepts are returned to regularly within and through all the milestones
- Planning ensures that we move from basic to advancing, with some children achieving deeper learning over the two years within a milestone
Building a Physical Education Schema at Bangabandhu
Our pupils will form a Physical Education schema* by:
- using concepts as the basis for schema. We call these threshold concepts; these are the big ideas which form the basis for the subject schema. In PE the threshold concept is: Develop practical skills in order to participate, compete and lead a healthy lifestyle
- strengthening the schema with knowledge. The knowledge comes from our topics. Within each topic are knowledge categories, the facets of each threshold concept that helps to strengthen the schema. The PE knowledge categories are: movement, healthy lifestyle, tactics and strategy, leadership and personal and social.
- Further deepening connections through tasks. This is what is developed though our planning.
*Schema – Schema theory states that all knowledge is organised into units. A schema is, therefore is a conceptual system for understanding knowledge. A subject schema is a way of organising knowledge in a meaningful way; it is an appreciation of how facts are connected and they ways in which they are connected. A schema is distinct from information, which is just isolated facts that have no organisational basis or links.
Threshold Concepts – The Big Ideas
The one Big Idea, the one threshold concept in PE is to :
Develop practical skills in order to participate, compete and lead a healthy lifestyle
Each threshold concept has its own facets of knowledge which help to strengthen the schema. This knowledge can be put into categories. Here are the knowledge categories:
- Movement
- Tactics and strategy
- Personal and social
- Leadership
- Healthy lifestyle
Curriculum Breadth Maps (topics) - IntentMilestone 1 Curriculum Map
How we Implement our PE Curriculum
Our PE Policy