National Coach Training Development Officer Andy Heald, attended the Association for PE conference held at St Georges Park on your behalf last week.

The theme for the conference was Actions and Impact, with a big focus now being on ensuring the impact of the new sports funding is measured and there is a standard set for quality in schools through moderation. There was a big emphasis on the primary school curriculum changes and how the future of school sport will be shaped under a new PE national curriculum and the use of assessment without levels.

The new primary school PE curriculum will be in place for the new academic year. Every state funded school must offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based. In simple terms:

• Promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and in society.
• Prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.

It was exciting to learn that our Inspire Programme is well placed to support the new national curriculum for PE that comes in to play September 2014.  The old level descriptors to make judgements on children’s attainment and learning in PE have now been removed. As you are aware, our planning framework was strategically designed with this in mind as we make judgements on children’s learning and competence at emergent, expected, exceeding and not levelled.

The national curriculum is the absolute minimum entitlement - one small part only of pupils overall Physical Education experience.

It is for individual schools to determine their overall Physical Education curriculum which should extend way beyond the minimum entitlement as set out in the National Curriculum. Please see the fig1 below that explains this in further detail.

Our Activity Professionals are vital to the effective use of utilising the sport premium funding. That’s why it’s become increasingly paramount that providers like Premier Sport are moderated. This highlights a fantastic opportunity for you.

We have carried out 903 assessments on Activity Professionals this academic year with 514 of them being curricular, although this does highlight SOME fantastic practice it does tell us that there are a substantial amount of you that haven’t been observed and more importantly your managers are not realising the importance of moderation, missing a massive opportunity to assess the quality of your delivery and plan your CPD needs for the future.