Whitehall Junior School
Happiness at the heart of learning
School Sport and Funding
Sports' Grant Annual Report 2022-2023
Historic School Sports' Grant Funding Reports
Annual School Sport Successes
School Sports' Grant Funding 2023-2024
At Whitehall Junior School, we view leading healthy and active lifestyles as a priority for our children and their families. The sports funding we receive each year enables us to successfully provide a diverse range of opportunities for our children to be healthy and active. Each year, we review our spending and evaluate the effectiveness of our sports provision. This analysis is then used to widen and enhance the opportunities we provide to ensure our children continue to live healthily and actively as well as learning new strategies to be healthy. The school will spend the funding on: promoting healthy, active lifestyles; increasing numbers of children who participate in out of hours sports clubs; using external providers to deliver adventure activities; use of coaches/PE coordinator to team teach PE lessons with school staff; and providing children with leadership opportunities within sport. The money will be allocated accordingly in order to support the school to make sustainable improvements to the provision of PE and sport for the benefit of all our children.
Whitehall has been informed that we will receive approximately £19,759.00 in sports funding for the academic year 2023-24. We have also carried over from last year £11,496.00, meaning this year we have approximately £31,255.00 to spend. See the document below for how we plan to spend this sports grant:
School Games Award
Whitehall Junior School achieved the Gold School Games Award for 2022-2023.
The School Games Mark is a Government-led award scheme launched in 2012, facilitated by the Youth Sport Trust to reward and recognise school’s engagement (provision and uptake) in the School Games against a national benchmark and to celebrate keeping young people active, and we are delighted to have been recognised for our success.
We are extremely proud of our pupils for their dedication to all aspects of physical activity and school sport, including those young volunteers, leaders and officials who made our events possible. We are committed to using the School Games to try and engage those young people who haven’t previously been active or represented our school and to try and ensure that all our students have a positive experience and want to try out new activities beyond school too in our community. We believe in the power of physical activity and school sport as a school and give opportunities to those young people that need it most either as a participant, leader, official or volunteer.
As part of our application, we were asked to fulfil criteria in the areas linked to the five School Games outcomes and we are pleased that the hard work of everyone at our school has been rewarded.
Commonwealth Games 2022
At Whitehall Junior School, we will continue to use the power and inspiration of the 2022 Commonwealth Games to inspire our pupils in the importance of leading a healthy lifestyle and developing a life-long love of sport. We will achieve this through assemblies, PE lessons, intra-school competitions and through extra-curricular activities, through referencing the following ethos these games provided:
- Motto: Games for everyone.
- Humanity, equality and destiny in everything we do.
- Kind hearts and never quitters.
- Friendly games.
PE Lessons
At Whitehall Junior School, we view Physical Education as an extremely important part of the National Curriculum. All children are timetabled with two hours of PE every week. These sessions include both indoor and outdoor PE lessons. Throughout the academic year, children complete three dance and three gymnastics units through indoor sessions. Outdoor PE lessons provide children with the opportunity to take part in a range of invasive team games and individual sports as well as athletics. Our PE lessons teach the children the skills needed be successful in a range of sports. Every PE unit provides the children with the opportunity to practise the skills learnt in competitive scenarios. Our inclusive PE curriculum allows all children to develop communication, teamwork and leadership skills in a healthy competitive environment.
Sports Coaches
Sports coaches are a vital part of Physical Education and sport at Whitehall Junior School. They are deployed in a range of capacities to ensure children receive high quality teaching in both PE lessons and extra-curricular sports clubs. The sports clubs at Whitehall Junior School are delivered by fully qualified coaches. On a weekly basis, the coaches provide regular training sessions for a wide range of sports and physical activities. We have had great feedback from the children who are currently attending these clubs and it has been great to see them benefit from these wider opportunities. Our sports coaches are also utilised during lunchtimes. Every child has the opportunity to be physically active by taking part in games led by our coaches at lunchtime (as well as our trained sports ambassadors). This year we are are continuing to work with Super Star Sports coaches. Our dedicated PE coordinator, who has worked alongside trained sports coaches for a number of years, will work alongside our teachers throughout the year to develop their PE teaching skills; this will involve team-teaching and observation sessions to ensure our teachers continue to deliver high quality PE lessons.
Squad Training
As well as the clubs ran by external sports coaches, a number of Whitehall staff also give up their free time to deliver squad training sessions. From these squad training sessions, children have the opportunity to represent Whitehall in a range of inter-school competitions. These competitions consist of leagues where matches take place on a weekly basis and knock-out tournaments.
Swimming
At Whitehall, we see swimming not only as a great way to stay healthy and active, but as a fundamental life skill. To help prepare children for life outside the classroom, we have continued to provide Year 5 with regular swimming lessons throughout the year. By introducing swimming lessons at an earlier age we hope to see an increase in the amount of children who can swim 25m by the time they leave in Year 6.
Intra-school (level 1) competitions 2023-24
At Whitehall, we exploit intra-school competitions through:
- PE lessons
- Play leaders at lunchtime
- Trained pupil sport leaders leading play leader tasks at lunchtime
- Skip2bfit Challenges
- Whole school intra-sports competitions
- Sports day
- Health and Fitness Week
Inter-school (level 2) competitions 2023-24
Skip2bfit Workshops
Every class across the school had a Skip2bfit workshop today, led by an instructor from this company. Skip2bfit uses counting skipping ropes and music to motivate everybody to exercise by challenging them to take the two minute skipping challenge. This challenge is not only fun, it incorporates numeracy as well as teaching the importance of fitness and healthy living. The school has purchased a counting skipping rope for every pupil across the school so that we can continue with the skipping challenges in school and record progress over time. These workshops were thoroughly enjoyed by all and we are looking forward to tracking the progress we make in the coming weeks. Here is their website for further information: Skip2bfit - Skipping Workshops in Schools
