Sports Premium

What is the Sport Premium?

About the PE and sport premium

Physical activity has numerous benefits for children and young people’s physical health, as well as their mental wellbeing (increasing self-esteem and emotional wellbeing and lowering anxiety and depression), and children who are physically active are happier, more resilient and more trusting of their peers. Ensuring that pupils have access to sufficient daily activity can also have wider benefits for pupils and schools, improving behaviour as well as enhancing academic achievement.

The school sport and activity action plan sets out the government’s commitment to ensuring that children and young people have access to at least 60 minutes of sport and physical activity per day. It recommends 30 minutes of this is delivered during the school day (in line with the Chief Medical Officers guidelines which recommend an average of at least 60 minutes per day across the week).

The PE and sport premium can help primary schools to achieve this commitment, providing primary schools with £320 million of government funding to make additional and sustainable improvements to the quality of the PE, physical activity and sport offered through their core budgets. It is allocated directly to schools, so they have the flexibility to use it in the way that works best for their pupils.

How we use the PE and Sport Premium

Schools must use the funding to make additional and sustainable improvements to the quality of PE and sport you offer.

This means that you should use the premium to:

• develop or add to the PE and sport activities that your school already offers
• build capacity and capability within the school to ensure that improvements made now will benefit pupils joining the school in future years

There are 5 key indicators that schools should expect to see improvement across:

• the engagement of all pupils in regular physical activity – the Chief Medical Officer guidelines recommend that all children and young people aged 5 to 18 engage in at least 60 minutes of physical activity a day, of which 30 minutes should be in school
• the profile of PE and sport is raised across the school as a tool for whole-school improvement
• increased confidence, knowledge and skills of all staff in teaching PE and sport
• broader experience of a range of sports and activities offered to all pupils
• increased participation in competitive sport

For example, you can use your funding to:

• provide staff with professional development, mentoring, training and resources to help them teach PE and sport more effectively
• hire qualified sports coaches to work with teachers to enhance or extend current opportunities
• introduce new sports, dance or other activities to encourage more pupils to take up sport and physical activities
• support and involve the least active children by providing targeted activities, and running or extending school sports and holiday clubs
• enter or run more sport competitions
• partner with other schools to run sports activities and clubs
• increase pupils’ participation in the School Games
• encourage pupils to take on leadership or volunteer roles that support sport and physical activity within the school
• provide additional swimming provision targeted to pupils not able to meet the swimming requirements of the national curriculum
• embed physical activity into the school day through active travel to and from school, active playgrounds and active teaching

You should not use your funding to:

• employ coaches or specialist teachers to cover planning preparation and assessment (PPA) arrangements – these should come out of your core staffing budgets
• teach the minimum requirements of the national curriculum – including those specified for swimming (or, in the case of academies and free schools, to teach your existing PE curriculum)

How we spent our Sports Premium

Take a look at the attachments at the bottom of this page for our evaluated Sports Premium Strategies.