Five top tips to make the most of your school playground.

 Redesigning your playground with PE and sport in mind will help encourage pupils to stay fit and healthy. Photograph: Alamy

There has never been a more important time for physical education (PE), school sport and health-related activity in schools. Research shows that half of all seven year-olds do not get enough exercise and one in three young people leave primary school overweight.

From an early age, lifelong patterns of positive behaviour and involvement can be established through participation in physical activity and play.

Both informal and structured activity is essential for the mental, physical, emotional and social development of every young person. Through such activity, children develop movement and coordination skills, social skills linked to communication and language, and creativity and cooperation – all essential tools to aid successful learning in the curriculum and beyond.

It is essential to create the right environment within school for the development of the physical literacy of all pupils. That is why having the right playground is so important. Here are five key points to help maximise your playground space to inspire young people to undertake physical activity:

1. What does your playground need?

A needs analysis of your playground will help inform you of what improvements can be made. The analysis should focus on gathering and reviewing the information, consulting end users and key stakeholders, and establishing priority requirements. It is important that you are inclusive throughout the process and make a special effort to understand the requirements of children with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities to incorporate these into your plan. Consider the following key questions: How well is the space used? Are there any small areas that are not currently used? Are there any awkward-shaped spaces? Are there spaces between existing buildings that have always been under-utilised? What is it currently used for? Who is using it? Who is not using it? What would the pupils like it to be used for?

2. Review your activity

A review of your school’s current delivery of PE, school sport and healthy active lifestyles provision will help to identify areas of strength and those in need of development. It is crucial to consider three key areas of physical education, school sport and physical activity. Questions to ask include: What is the current use of the existing space? What is the current use of other space that could be included within the new area? What is the potential use of the new space?

3. Team effort

Engaging the right people at this early stage will ensure they are committed to the project. The key stakeholders that should be consulted from the very start are: governors, headteachers, teachers, teaching assistants, lunchtime supervisors, parents and pupils. They can be consulted in a variety of ways including: meetings and class discussions; school sports council(s); playground committee; questionnaires; observation studies and pupil drawings.

4. Design and build

It is always a good idea to appoint a contractor to work with you to check the feasibility of the components and configurations selected. They can also agree with you on the most suitable combination given any site constraints and the available budget. The options can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your school site. Key considerations within your design should include the space, the surface and the storage.

5. Plan the schedule

Once the installation is complete, your pupils will be excited and eager to use it immediately. Plan how the space will be used across each week, prior to completion, to ensure quick and easy access. To maximise use, consider programming use of the playground at all possible times (before school, during PE lessons, at break and lunchtimes, and after school) and consider its appropriate use by community groups too at weekends and during holidays.

This year, more than one million young people will be participating in National School Sport Week from 22–26 June. Thousands of schools across the country will make a pledge to get more involved in physical activity, school sport and celebrate school achievement. To receive free resources, toolkits and ideas to help run an exciting sporting week that will inspire all your pupils and the chance to win visits from Olympic and Paralympic athletes, click here.

The Youth Sport Trust has a range of resources and programmes aimed at helping member schools improve the quality of the PE and sport activities offered at their school. More information on membership can be found here.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/youth-sport-trust-partner-zone/2015/mar/06/five-top-tips-school-playground

Top tips: how can PE and school sport help students stay healthy?

Top tips: how can PE and school sport help students stay healthy? From pedometers to healthy Come Dine With Me clubs, physical education experts share their ideas for improving pupil wellbeing from our recent live chat

Get pupils to wake and shake in lessons

Brain function decreases after 17 minutes of sitting still. I know of lots of innovative primary schools that make sure children aren’t sitting for more than 15 minutes at a time. I have seen some wonderful literacy lessons delivered through physical activity, such as children acting out the story. With approaches like this, alongside a high quality PE and sport programme, schools can help young people achieve their 60 active minutes a day.

Alison Oliver, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust.

Take a cross-curricula approach

PE shouldn’t be just within the fabric of the sports hall. For example, in maths and food technology you can compare data on athletic times and calorie count over a six-week period to predict outcomes. Or, to motivate disaffected groups in languages, it’s not uncommon to run a sports days in a different language. History and sport also play a great part in Britain and abroad. Henry VIII was a massive advocate of sport and there are many opportunities for projects between the history and PE department.

Track how students are doing with a scorecardSteve Sallis, head of education and player welfare at Millwall Football Club.

Every Thursday our entire year 7 cohort arrive at school in their PE kit and take part in a physical activity instead of having their normal form time. They have a “personal best” scorecard, which lists performance measures linked to fitness levels, and work with a health mentor who designs activities around improving their performance over time. We deliver it on a day when the kids already have PE (to help with logistics) and have an all-inclusive “fun club” after school, which has fantastic levels of attendance.

Kevin Byrne, sport and health development leader at Bebington high sports college.

Rethink the layout of the playground

Zoning the playground to ensure ball games don’t dominate and there’s space for a range of activities can inspire and empower a wider variety of pupils to “play” at playtime. Equally, training lunchtime supervisors to organise and lead activity has proven effective. Some of the most innovative and exciting work I have seen is where children are trained to lead and organise peer-led activities. Youth sport leadership not only increases participation, but is a powerful way of developing skills that are important to learning and life, such as communication, organisation and self-reflection.

Alison Oliver.

Parental engagement

One of the difficulties is how to engage the “inactive” parent. Raising awareness of physical activity within school is a starting block, but leaders have to put PE and sport high on their agenda to begin with. For example, do you report on a child’s progress in PE at parents evenings? Do you invite parents to sporting events - not just sports days, but inter school competitions and festivals? And do you run health clubs where you look at changing eating habits and invite families in?

Helen Clark, secondary school teacher at the Elizabethan Academy in Retford and PE coordinator for feeder primaries.

Be creative in how you use space

Indoor space in particular can be a real challenge for primary schools, where the PE space doubles up as the dining room. However, I saw a fantastic programme running at a school in Cornwall last year where each Friday morning every class teacher offered some form of physical activity in every space in the school – classrooms, corridors, outdoor spaces, everywhere. The pupils were in teams and they rotated around the activities. It was wonderful and demonstrated that despite challenges an active school can be created if there is the will.

Alison Oliver.

You need a whole-school approach

You need to include the whole staff team, governors and pupils. Sharing the vision is time consuming, but worthwhile. You also need baseline data to prove that intervention is needed. This doesn’t necessarily mean spending hours surveying kids, although we did this. It’s from doing this that you start to notice the real issues and realise that health and wellbeing is so much more than any one person, department or steering group can have a long-term effect on.

Kevin Byrne.

Utilise the expertise of secondary PE teachers

A model that works well for us is having some of our PE staff go into local primaries to deliver lessons. It gives the teachers at the primary school some ideas and is good professional development for leading sessions on their own.

Thomas Brush, PE teacher at Wheelers Lane technology college in Birmingham.

Make learning about healthy eating fun

We run a healthy lifestyles programme in some of our primary schools, where we work with small numbers of pupils who are not physically active. We engage the parents using initiatives such as a healthy Come Dine With Me competition, where families produce healthy dishes that are tasted by other members of the group.

Andrew Dowling, partnership director for Gedling Sports Partnership at the Carlton Academy in Nottingham.

Source :http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/feb/25/top-tips-pe-school-sport-pupils-healthy