The Really Useful Physical Education Book

Learning and teaching across the 11-16 age range

Gary Stidder, Sid Hayes, Gary Stidder, Sid Hayes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317285694
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Really Useful Physical Education Book offers support, guidance and practical ideas for effective, innovative and imaginative physical education lessons. Underpinned by easy-to-understand theory, this second edition is fully updated in line with the National Curriculum for Physical Education at Key Stages 3 and 4 and provides a wide range of high-quality lessons alongside engaging teaching examples and methodologies.

With an emphasis on inclusive physical education, it highlights the ways in which schools can re-design the curriculum to ensure maximum enjoyment for all pupils. Key topics covered include: • Planning, progression and assessment
• Health and safety issues
• Inclusive track and field athletics
• Adapting activities to support SEND
• Swimming and water-based activities
• Alternative activities including street-surfing and combat sports
• Introducing dance into the curriculum
• Enjoyable gymnastics for physical literacy
• On-site adventurous activities
• Values-based teaching
• Teaching accredited awards
• Using new and emerging technologies The Really Useful Physical Education Book offers essential advice and inspiration for both trainee and practising teachers responsible for the 11–16 age range. It is a must-read for all those who want to make their lesson inclusive and fun whilst promoting a healthy lifestyle and enthusiasm for lifelong activity.

Part 1

1
Introduction

Gary Stidder and Sid Hayes

A great deal has happened in the physical education teaching profession since we published the first edition of The Really Useful Physical Education Book. Indeed, there has been more change than we ever expected or anticipated. Just months after we published the first edition of this book, the United Kingdom coalition government’s White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’ was announced in the House of Commons on 24 November 2010 signalling the beginning of a radical overhaul of the education system in England. Ironically, The Schools White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere¹ was announced as we prepared to submit the manuscript of this book proposing a greater focus on school-led initial teacher training and the replacement of qualified teacher status (QTS) with a new system of teacher accreditation awarded and ratified by schools rather than by universities and higher education providers. In terms of physical education, the previous white paper made it clear that a vision for physical education was firmly embedded in competitive team sport as a means of providing moral fibre and personal toughness to pupils in schools. It stated:

4.28 Children need access to high-quality physical education, so we will ensure the requirement to provide PE in all maintained schools is retained and we will provide new support to encourage a much wider take up of competitive team sports. With only one child in five regularly taking part in competitive activities against another school, we need a new approach to help entrench the character building qualities of team sport.

DFE (2010: 45)

This publication provided some of the impetus for us to publish a second edition of The Really Useful Physical Education Book as we sensed a potential return to an obsolete and dysfunctional model trialled in the 1950s which caused many young people to suffer injury and pain. It was extraordinary that two years before the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and, ironically, on the same day as announcing the government reforms to teaching, Prime Minister David Cameron attempted to justify the government’s decision to axe the school sport partnership scheme along with 162 million pounds of previously ring-fenced funding, on the basis that it was a poor use of public money. Instead, the Olympic-style school games was to form the centrepiece of the Coalition government ‘s physical education strategy, with pupils competing at district and national level against children from other schools. In 2013 the Department for Culture Media and Sport² revealed that almost three-quarters of children under 10 and half of children aged 11–15 had said that the Games had not inspired them to take up a sport. While the Olympic and Paralympic games may have inspired half a generation to engage in more competitive sport, the same could not be said of physical education in schools. Much of this could be attributed to the lack and quality of facilities, suitably qualified teachers of physical education, time devoted to physical education, and the way that the physical education curriculum was presented to pupils in schools.

Prior to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, physical education in schools was said to be, at best, minimal and at worst non-existent, reflecting the diminishing status of the subject (Green 2008: 45). Mo Farah’s former physical education teacher branded the government’s lack of investment in physical education as an ‘insult’, while Lord Moynihan, British Olympic Association chairman at the time, attributed the lack of an Olympic legacy as being responsible for poor-quality teaching and a lack of space and time for physical education in schools. On 18 November 2013 the House of Lords Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic legacy put this into the public domain:

The UK faces an epidemic of obesity and the promise of inspiring a new sporting generation was a crucial and tantalizing part of the legacy aspiration. A post-Games step change in participation across the UK and across different sports did not materialize.

House of Lords Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic legacy (2013: 5)

The legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games was supposed to ‘inspire the next generation’ to take up more physical activity, and yet there has been little or no evidence that this has been the case despite Ofsted (2013: 8) recommendations that schools have a vital role to play in ensuring that all pupils remain at the heart of a successful sporting legacy left behind by the Olympic Games. Instead, it has left a number of uncomfortable questions to which there have been no forthcoming answers. David Walsh, the Sunday Times chief sports writer, implied that the government’s decision to cut school sport funding was contradictory and full of double standards, citing the fact that it was young people that had actually helped London (and Sebastian Coe) to achieve the rights to host the 2012 Olympic games during the bidding and lobbying process in Singapore in 2005. In return, funding for school sports partnerships would be slashed:

Five years on and one feels nothing but disgust at the way young people were used and are now being abused . . . Sport and young people are being exploited for political purposes, used by any amount of careerists for their own ends and it asks a serious question about Coe’s sincerity when he said that the London games would be about inspiring young people.

Walsh (2010: 20)

If schools are to secure the nation’s sporting future beyond 2012 and ensure that the provision of high-quality physical education is to make a significant contribution to maintaining a legacy of sporting success up to and beyond 2016, then why is it the case that (Ofsted 2012: 5–6):

• One in five 11-year-olds can’t swim 25 metres by the time they leave junior school.
• Few primary schools taught selected physical activities in sufficient depth or played competitive sport to a very high standard.
• Most (PE) subject leaders in primary schools are non-specialists – few have sufficient time outside of their own teaching commitments to form an accurate view of the quality of teaching in PE.
• The quality of PE teaching in primary schools was outstanding in only 4 per cent of all schools inspected (66 per cent was good).
• In the best secondary schools fewer traditional, outdoor games were taught to enable all pupils to compete on an equal basis.
• Limited opportunities for secondary-aged gifted and talented pupils to excel in competitive sport?

The Chance to shine survey³ (2012) considered the impact of London 2012 on school sport and found the following startling facts.

• The London 2012 Games failed to build a secure future for school sport.
• Eight out of 10 parents said the amount of PE and games in schools had either stayed the same or reduced as a result of budget cuts.
• More than half the parents surveyed said their child’s school had failed to provide at least two hours a week of PE or games in school.
• Girls were more likely to receive less sport than boys, 56 per cent failing to receive the minimum target compared to a national average of 54 per cent. The dearth of schools offering two hours per week of sporting activities contrasts with the finding that two-thirds of parents said their children spent more than 10 hours a week watching TV.

The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation (2012)⁴ asked 1,500 secondary school pupils about their attitudes to fitness and sport and found that two key issues emerged: Girls do not see the relevance of sport to their lives; PE and School Sport meet the needs of ‘sporty’ girls but are often unappealing to less active girls. Specifically, the study (Youth Sport Trust 2012⁵) found that:

• Half of all girls (51 per cent) are put off physical activity by their experiences of school sport and PE.
• 45 per cent of girls say ‘sport is too competitive; and more than half think boys enjoy competitive sport more than girls.
• Over half of all boys and girls agree that ‘there are more opportunities for boys to succeed in sport than girls’.
• Half of the girls surveyed (48 per cent) say that getting sweaty is ‘not feminine’.
• Nearly one third of boys think that girls who are sporty are not very feminine.
• Of the least active girls, 46 per cent say that they don’t like the activities they get to do in PE compared to 26 per cent of the most active.
• 43 per cent of girls agree that ‘there aren’t many sporting role models for girls’.

On 21 May 2014, The Independent newspaper reported the findings of Virgin Active research which showed that more than one third of 8–16-year-old girls avoided playing competitive sport because they felt self-conscious and embarrassed while taking part. Even more disconcerting was that 39 per cent of 16-year-old girls said that they never undertook any strenuous activity while at secondary school. The Youth Sports Trust (2014) found that in cases where girls were allowed to design the content of their physical education, class participation rates in physical education lessons doubled.

It was disappointing that there is very little evidence of a 2012 Olympic legacy and even less evidence of its impact on the teaching of high-quality school physical education. Instead, the use of public money had been directed to fund ‘elite sports’ ahead of the Rio De Janeiro Olympic Games in 2016, and one might argue that this was simply an act of ‘wilful neglect’. Nonetheless, on 11 September 2013 the government published the fifth national curriculum for physical education. Two hundred and twenty-four pages were devoted to writing the entire National Curriculum for England. Physical education appeared on the last four pages of the document and was written onto exactly 90 lines in 856 words. It was as if physical education had been pencilled into the National Curriculum rather than engraved. As with previous versions of the national curriculum for physical education, long-established discourses were retained with little to prompt teachers away from a physical education curriculum dominated by traditional team games. In this respect, the proverbial new broom was not sweeping clean the traditions of the past and seemed to strengthen the importance of elite sporting performance. Just as before, new and alternative approaches that would consciously challenge stereotypical views and practices remained largely a matter of potential (Penney 2002: 123). Attainment targets, key concepts and processes were a thing of the past. Face-to-face competition rather than ‘outwitting opponents’ through ‘proper’ team and individual games alongside competitive sport were now the popular educational catch-phrases being shared among politicians. The continued focus on competition in the National Curriculum for Physical Education (2013) and the requirement to ‘master’, ‘perform’, ‘play’, develop’, compare’ rather than ‘create’ led some educationalists to predict that a reliance on sports coaches rather than teachers in primary schools would potentially become the norm, as performance rather than creativity ignores the pedagogical aspects of teaching provided by the teacher (Lavin 2008). Moreover, even though there was no legal requirement to include the named games that appeared within the square brackets in the national curriculum for Key Stages three and four, th...