The secondary curriculum review
The revision of the key stage 3 programme of study provides an opportunity to review and refresh your sequences of work.
Planning in PE needs to ensure that pupils:
A coherent curriculum in PE enables learners to make the connections between different activities and aspects within the curriculum. It allows them to make progress by moving from simple contexts that make limited technical, strategic, tactical, compositional and physical demands to increasingly complex and demanding contexts. To achieve this, the curriculum needs to be designed to ensure that:
To achieve this there are two major considerations for the design of the curriculum:
To gain physical skills and develop their physical capacity, pupils need frequent and regular bursts of sufficiently intense practice. By contrast, exploring and experimenting with strategies, tactics and compositional ideas requires less frequent but longer periods of time. An effective curriculum will ensure these principles are taken into account when planning how to use the time available (both in and out of lessons), the range of activities and experienced offered and the way they are sequenced over a term, year and key stage.
You should ensure that pupils' learning in PE is supported by a range of out-of-hours school sport. You may find it helpful to design your PE curriculum alongside your school sport programme, so that the two are coherent and complementary. Similarly, it is important to consider how to link the curriculum with pupils' lives outside school. For example, if pupils are being taught balance activities in PE, they could be shown how these relate to their skateboarding or dance skills. Seeing the relevance of what they are learning is likely to result in greater commitment to PE.
By looking at the broader picture in this way, a curriculum can be developed that will enable pupils to achieve the high-quality outcomes as set out in the national PE and Sport strategy, as well as the expectations set out in the PE programme of study.
When reviewing planning across the key stage, developing new sequences of work or revising existing ones, you should consider the following.
Planning needs to show how the key concepts are integrated into learning across the key stage. When reviewing your planning you should consider the range of contexts through which pupils learn to become physically competent and confident young people. Pupils should experience activities in sufficient depth to enable them to produce complete pieces of work that have engaged them in the key processes. They should learn to make the connections between the key processes and use them in increasingly demanding and challenging contexts.
As pupils revisit the key processes throughout the key stage, you need to demand more of them to ensure they continue to progress and be challenged. You may ask them to perform similar activities, different activities or activities that place more complex demands on them. You may increase the complexity of apparatus layouts or the number of pupils playing a game, for example. Or you might add more complex moves to sequences and routines or ask pupils to undertake problem-solving activities in unfamiliar environments. Pupils should become more independent in the way they apply these processes when performing individually, in teams or in groups.
All pupils should have the opportunity to perform as an individual, in a group or as part of a team in formal competitions or performances to audiences beyond their class. They should also have the chance to join clubs and organisations both in and out of school.
