Today is the 13th annual National Fitness Day (NFD) in the UK. Fitness and Health continue to be high on the public agenda in the UK and around the world. The new Labour government prioritised preventative measures as one of the three pillars to reform the NHS. Whilst only yesterday the IPPR published the final section of its report on the nation's health, aptly named Our Greatest Asset. The title rings true for an individual as much as a nation.
As we prepare for the start of the new school year, we have been working with some of the schools using miMove to analyse their data from last year. Yes, they are easily able to see key metrics like average activity time per student, the most popular activities, activity rates in and out of school, percentage of students attending clubs etc. And all these data sets are able to be broken down by gender, year/grade, ethnicity etc to ensure PE teams work towards equity of provision with no students left behind.
This brief article outlines some of the challenges that come with teaching Athletics and offers an alternative approach that could be used and adapted for students in KS2 through to KS4. This is detailed more fully in these FREE resources comprising of a sequence of Running lessons with some detailed activity suggestions. The same will be offered for Throwing and Jumping in the next blog.
I am that person who had a negative experience of PE. School PE was for the few who could make the teams. It wasn’t for me. PE philosopher, Scott Kretchmar, says all kids should be encouraged to ‘find their playground’. I believed there was no playground for people like me. I could not relate to any of the posters of high-profile athletes plastered on the walls of my school. I did not enjoy PE lessons, had no way into school games and events, and that spilled into my informal physical play. I believed I just did not possess the skills - never for a minute did I assume I hadn’t been taught them or that someone could be taught them - it was obviously just something to do with ME.
This short blog will discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by the new SHAPE America Standard 4 for Physical Education.
A few weeks ago, I observed an enthusiastic and committed pre-service teacher deliver a basketball lesson. The learning objective was ‘how to defend’ and the justification given as to why the class was learning this, was that ‘it will help you win more basketball games’. Pause and reflect - what assumptions was the student teacher making about the year 8 group that he was teaching? What was he communicating about the purpose and place of sport in young people’s lives? I’ll return to this below.
The content of this blog might be read by some as being controversial. That is not my intention. Rather I want to explore some ideas that suggest educators might be making things worse when it comes to young people and mental wellbeing, and then apply these ideas in a productive way to physical education.
miMove versions 1 & 2 were game changers - the first bespoke app to capture young people’s physical activity experiences. Our goal for 2023 is to develop the app, to not only capture this insight data but to support, incentivise and motivate young people to be active and stay active. By so doing, we aim to leverage the best that tech has to offer to create meaningful behaviour change so that far more young people reap the benefits of physical activity.
Written a few days after England won the UEFA Women’s Euros, this blog follows closely on the publication of our recent post, marking the 10 year anniversary of the London Olympics and Paralympics. It expands on some of the same themes, in particular, the difficult relationship between elite sport, PE and youth participation.
This article, published on the 10th anniversary of London 2012, asks questions about the way we treat mega sport events and elite athletes. At the end is a link to access a free resource that will prompt thinking and conversation about how we can do better at inspiring far more young people.