PE and Sport Premium for primary schools
 

Use of the PE and Sport Premium to support online delivery and other uses

The existing guidelines regarding the use of the PE and sport premium continue to apply. These guidelines already permit a significant amount of flexibility in how the PE and sport premium can be used.

Any use of the PE and sport premium should continue to support at least one of the key indicators. The restrictions on using the PE and sports premium remain current.

About the PE and Sport Premium

All young people should have the opportunity to live healthy and active lives. A positive experience of sport and physical activity at a young age can build a lifetime habit of participation, and is central to meeting the government’s ambitions for a world-class education system.

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.

Ofsted’s Inspection Framework, which came into effect from September 2019, gives greater recognition to schools’ work to support the personal development of pupils, such as the opportunities they have to learn about eating healthily and maintaining an active lifestyle. Inspectors will expect to see schools delivering a broad, ambitious education, including opportunities to be active during the school day and through extra-curricular activities. Schools should consider how they use their PE and Sport Premium to support this.

How to use the PE and Sport Premium

Schools must use the funding to make additional and sustainable improvements to the quality of their physical education (PE), physical activity and sport.

This means that you should use the premium to:

• develop or add to the PE, physical activity and sport that your school provides
• build capacity and capability within the school to ensure that improvements made now will benefit pupils joining the school in future years.

Schools should use the premium to secure improvements in the following five key indicators:

Engagement of all pupils in regular physical activity, for example by:

• providing targeted activities or support to involve and encourage the least active children
• encouraging active play during break times and lunchtimes
• establishing, extending or funding attendance of school sport clubs and activities and holiday clubs, or broadening the variety offered
• adopting an active mile initiative
• raising attainment in primary school swimming to meet the requirements of the national curriculum before the end of Key Stage 2. Every child should leave primary school able to swim.

Profile of PE and sport is raised across the school as a tool for whole-school improvement, for example by:

• encouraging pupils to take on leadership or volunteer roles that support sport and physical activity within the school (such as ‘sport leader’ or peer-mentoring schemes)
• embedding physical activity into the school day through active travel to and from school, active break times and active lessons and teaching.

Increased confidence, knowledge and skills of all staff in teaching PE and sport, for example by:

• providing staff with professional development, mentoring, training and resources to help them teach PE and sport more effectively to all pupils, and embed physical activity across your school
• hiring qualified sports coaches to work alongside teachers to enhance or extend current opportunities.

Broader experience of a range of sports and activities offered to all pupils, for example by:

• introducing new sports and physical activities (such as dance, yoga or fitness sessions) to encourage more pupils to take up sport and physical activities
• partnering with other schools to run sport activities and clubs
• providing more (or broadening the variety of) extra-curricular activities after school in the 3pm to 6pm window, delivered by the school or other local sport organisations.

Increased participation in competitive sport, for example by:

• increasing pupils’ participation in the School Games
• organising, coordinating or entering more sport competitions or tournaments within the school or across the local area, including those run by sporting organisations.

London Sport (your local Active Partnership) can provide further advice on how best to use your PE and Sport Premium. Active Partnerships coordinate the local availability of PE, school sport and physical activity, and can help schools find the right sports opportunities and facilities. Where appropriate, you could also ask your local School Games Organiser for advice.

Active Mile

Where schools choose to take part in an active mile, you should use your existing playgrounds, fields, halls and sports facilities to incorporate an active mile into the school day and develop a lifelong habit of daily physical activity.

Raising attainment in primary school swimming

Swimming is a national curriculum requirement and by the end of key stage 2, pupils are expected to be able to swim confidently and know how to be safe in and around water. The three national curriculum requirements for swimming and water safety are to:

• swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
• perform a safe self-rescue in different water based situations
• use a range of strokes effectively.

The premium can be used to fund the professional development and training that is available to schools to train staff to support high quality swimming and water safety lessons for their pupils.

The premium may also be used to provide additional top-up swimming lessons to pupils who have not been able to meet the three national curriculum requirements for swimming and water safety – after the delivery of core swimming and water safety lessons.

Schools are required to publish information on the percentage of their pupils in year 6 who met each of the three swimming and water safety national curriculum requirements. Further details are in the online reporting section of this guidance.

Further information on training and resources, including advice on the use of the PE and Sport Premium, is available from Swim England.

What your funding should not be used for

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 – with the exception of top-up swimming lessons after pupils’ completion of core lessons (or, in the case of academies and free schools, to teach your existing PE curriculum)
• fund capital expenditure – the Department for Education does not set the capitalisation policy for each school. School business managers, school accountants and their auditors are best placed to advise on a school’s agreed capitalisation policy.

Accountability

School compliance

Schools are accountable for their use of the PE and Sport Premium funding allocated to them. Schools are expected to spend the grant for the purpose it was provided only – to make additional and sustainable improvements to the PE, sport and physical activity offered. Schools and local authorities must follow the terms and conditions in the conditions of grant documents.

Online reporting

You must publish details of how you spend your PE and sport premium funding by the end of the summer term. Online reporting must include:

• the amount of premium received
• a full breakdown of how it has been spent
• the impact the school has seen on pupils’ PE, physical activity, and sport participation and attainment
• how the improvements will be sustainable in the future.

You are also required to publish the percentage of pupils within your year 6 cohort in each academic year who met the national curriculum requirement to:

• swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
• use a range of strokes effectively
• perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations.

Attainment data for year 6 pupils should be provided from their most recent swimming lessons. This may be data from years 3, 4, 5 or 6, depending on the swimming programme at your school. It is therefore essential to retain attainment data from swimming lessons in years 3 to 5 to be able to report this accurately in year 6.

To help you plan, monitor and report on the impact of your spending, partners in the physical education and school sport sector have developed a template. The template can be accessed through the Association for PE and Youth Sport Trust websites. It is recommended that the template is used to record your activity throughout the year, as well as for publication at the end of the school year.

Review of online reports

Schools’ online reporting is monitored through an annual sample of schools in each local authority. Active Partnerships review the published information on selected schools’ websites to ensure it meets the requirements on premium funding and swimming attainment. The results are reported to the Department for Education, and also help to ensure that Active Partnerships can offer schools in their local area the most relevant support.

Eligibility

Most schools with primary-age pupils receive the PE and sport premium in the academic year 2019 to 2020, including:

• schools maintained by the local authority
• academies and free schools
• special schools (for children with special educational needs or disabilities)
• non-maintained special schools (schools for children with special educational needs that the Secretary of State for Education has approved under section 342 of the Education Act 1996)
• city technology colleges (CTCs)
• pupil referral units (PRUs) provide education for children who can’t go to a mainstream school)
• general hospitals

The following types of school do not receive this funding:

• nursery schools
• studio schools
• university technical colleges (UTCs)
• independent schools (except for non-maintained special schools, which do receive the funding)

How the funding is calculated

Schools receive PE and sport premium funding based on the number of pupils in years 1 to 6.

In cases where schools don’t follow year groups (for example, in some special schools), pupils aged 5 to 10 attract the funding.

In most cases, we determine how many pupils in your school attract the funding using data from the previous January's school census.

Funding is generally paid as follows:

• 7/12 of funding allocation in the October
• 5/12 of funding allocation in the following April

Further advice

You can get further advice at:

• Swim England’s website for advice and resources on primary school swimming and water safety
• UK coaching’s primary schools toolkit for advice on employing sports coaches for your school
• Short films on the Sport England website for more advice on using the PE and sport premium effectively. Sport England produced these films in collaboration with the Association for Physical Education, the Youth Sport Trust, the County Sports Partnership Network, Sports Coach UK and Compass.

You can also contact your local Active Partnership, the Association for PE and Youth Sport Trust for support with spending your PE and sport premium.