Poorest taught in Scottish schools? Physical education

As we are in the summer term, thoughts have started to turn towards the annual Sports Day in the school. This is one of my favourite and most stressful days of the school year as I am the one who is lumped with it every year.  The reason I do is because I love all things PEPASS in my school.

For those who aren’t teachers, PEPASS stands for Physical Education, Physical Activity & School Sport. It is one of many acronyms used in Scottish Education as the Scottish Education system loves an acronym. While I could write a whole column on acronyms, today I’ll focus on PE.

Physical Education is the part of the PEPASS acronym that most people are well aware of. Think back to your childhood experiences of PE and depending on your age you may remember such traditional PE tropes as a teacher who resembles more of a drill sergeant than teacher. Perhaps you remember trying to climb a rope or having a ball flung at your face as part of dodgeball. I remember my secondary PE teacher playing football with us, not unlike the scene in Kes, where despite being in his sixties I never saw him lose possession.

Things have moved on since then for the most part. Primary PE, especially in my school has a much less competitive feel to it. Usually, children are working themselves or in small groups practising skills at their own level and in a fun and supportive environment. There is usually very high engagement and games that are played are popular and age appropriate. Unfortunately, this isn’t the experience across the country. 

I feel PE is one of the poorest taught areas of the curriculum in the primary school. There is a huge lack of training available for teachers to deliver high quality PE. Primary PE specialists are like gold dust in schools. I know of people who completed a PGDE and did one afternoon of PE teaching in their entire PGDE. With such a lack of support, it’s very difficult for staff to deliver high quality PE. You don’t know what you don’t know. This means many teachers, who have to deliver primary PE, revert to what they may have done in primary school. 

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Most student teachers and staff I speak to about PE think positively about it. Sometimes it’s justified as being a chance for the kids to escape the classroom and burn some energy off. I agree with this – but I also think PE is so much more. We have a high number of children who arrive in our school with very limited English. For these children, PE is sometimes the first thing they can participate in with their classmates. This gives them huge confidence and helps the rest of the class see them as a classmate rather than the new person who hasn’t spoken to anyone yet. 

I can also think of a number of children through the years who perhaps had dyslexia or another additional support need, who loved their two hours in PE as it was the only time of the week when they felt they were as good or better at something than other children their age.

The solution to this seems simple – more training at Undergraduate or Post Graduate Level. More support for class teachers to develop their skills and knowledge of what quality PE is. The problem is, what I suggest would improve PE in the primary school is only a quick search and replace task on this document to work for modern languages. Or Science. Or Art, Music, Drama or any other number of curricular areas and government initiatives. 

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The problem with being a primary teacher is, no matter how much you want to, you can’t be a specialist in everything. I’m quite passionate about PE in schools. Other staff in my school are passionate about other things. It’s what makes primary schools unique all around the country. 

A simple way to help this would be training and hiring more Primary PE specialists. With the current funding and jobs situation though, the chances of this happening are slim at best.