Article excerpt

Teacher and Pupil Experiences of Student Designed Games. Within Scotland, Curriculum for Excellence has provided an opportunity for schools to develop their own individual curriculum to reflect their context. With this in mind, I wanted to design a practitioner enquiry to support the development of the primary P.E. curriculum, relevant to my current context.  Working in a small city primary school with a primary 5 class, the following questions guided my enquiry...

‘My best lesson’ is one that I feel demonstrates the reality of Physical Education and involves several situations that I am sure every teacher has experienced at some time or another. The lesson was for a third year elective basketball class, and, as a student, I spent quite a lot of time meticulously planning the ins and outs of the entire lesson.

For many years there has been a large emphasis on inclusion, engagement and participation of all pupils within the physical education (PE) environment, whether through primary or secondary school (Slee & Allan, 2001). Countless research articles and academic literatures such as Slee & Allan (2001); Green (2008); and Penney et al (2018) have been published with the intention of providing educators the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding on how to improve their personal practice to create a more inclusive learning environment.

Research carried out in both the UK and around the world emphasize that educational policy is failing to combat the growing problem that attributes poverty to lower attainment in schools (McCluskey, 2017; Ladd, 2012). This has lead to governments raising awareness of the so-called “attainment gap” between the richest and poorest children in education.

“Last night I lay a sleeping, there came a dream so fair”…. I stood in the most modern, well equipped, well -resourced PE department that had ever been seen in Scotland, and it was replicated throughout the country. I was astounded at the sheer magnificence of it all. At Last! – A place fit for purpose to deliver high quality Physical Education to pupils in the 21st century.

“As an association, and a profession we are stronger than we think”I had an extremely interesting day attending the North West Counties PE Association conference in Manchester in November 2017. There was a great opening key note by a Scot (Jamie Andrew OBE) in which he discussed his journey from an able bodied mountaineer to a quadruple amputee following a climbing incident – if you don’t know his story Google it!

There were lots of questions asked about the different approaches taken across Europe and hopefully these presentations will have given the Lithuanian teachers lots of different approaches to consider for their own context.

An evidence based reflection formed as part of a doctorate thesis which focussed on barriers to PEPAS in the Scottish curriculum. Recent initiatives aimed at making children physically active during class time such as the Daily Mile and more recently strength and conditioning based exercise programmes for primary children have received great media attention and are being touted as the answer to the obesity crisis (Collins,2018).

To support our goal of raising attainment & closing the poverty related attainment gap we know that successful learning stems from establishing and developing positive and respectful relationships with our learners, colleagues, parents and the communities we work with.