Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency

Objective

The school’s objective was to improve standards of performance in PE and school sport. Specifically, staff wanted to improve year 2 pupils’ thinking and decision making skills (high quality outcome 7) and encourage them to become more independent learners.

The starting point

Thinking skills are a particular focus of St Mark’s school improvement plan, particularly for the able, gifted and talented.

Before the investigation, pupils were simply doing as they were told in PE lessons. Staff instructed, prompted and intervened, and pupils responded accordingly. With lessons tightly directed, there was little opportunity for pupils to show their initiative, think independently or make plans to solve problems. They did not evaluate their own or others’ performances in order to identify ways of making progress. Overall, staff felt that pupils should enjoy lessons more and remain more consistently active and on task. They wanted to hear pupils talking positively about PE.

A traffic light survey of four of the ten PESS high quality outcomes – understanding (outcome 2), skills (outcome 5), thinking and decision making (outcome 7) and desire to improve (outcome 8) – revealed a fairly negative picture, with only 4 of the 16 characteristics at green (met by most year 2 pupils).

Core task record sheets – which make judgements against national curriculum levels – showed that eight of the thirty pupils in the year 2 class were performing beyond expectations, and two were on the school’s gifted and talented register.

Action

The year 2 class teacher went out of her way to ensure that pupils had the resources and time they needed to develop as independent thinkers in PE lessons. They used cards and photographs to help them plan gymnastics sequences. They created a dance from a stimulus in literacy. They used a strategy board for athletics and games. They developed their language with vocabulary cards.

Video was introduced across the PE curriculum to promote peer and self evaluation. Pupils were constantly expected to evaluate and improve their own and others’ performance and applied their newly-acquired language when acting as evaluators during lessons, playground activities and clubs. The teacher ensured that higher order thinking skills were embedded in teaching and learning at all times, particularly through the use of open-ended key questions.

All PE tasks were challenging, open-ended and relied on the ability to select and apply skills, strategies and techniques. To support their efforts, pupils were given signs of success for each task.

As well as affecting PE lessons, the project’s trialling of active learning philosophies, improvement time, signs of success and the use of ICT for evaluation was monitored to see how it might be implemented across the curriculum.

Impact

At the end of the summer term, comparisons with the previous year group’s attainment in PE core tasks showed an improvement of 50%. Twelve of the class were working beyond national expectations and two extra children were added to the school’s gifted and talented register.

A second traffic light survey of the four targeted high quality outcomes showed 14 of the 16 characteristics at green (being consistently met by most of the year 2 pupils).

The targeted pupils became much more enthusiastic about PE and talked positively about what they were doing. They were active throughout lessons, remained on task, began to make their own plans and were sad when sessions finished. They were keen to discuss their performances and share ideas on how to improve. They remembered what they had learnt and made good progress. Their enthusiasm and success helped to foster a much more positive attitude towards PE across the whole school.

Thanks to the success of this investigation, the new approaches to teaching and learning have become fundamental practice across the whole curriculum and will feature in the school policy and handbook for teaching and learning.