We are delighted to announce that we won the ISA Award for Outstanding Sport (Small School) 2022 at the ISA Awards held on November 18th 2022. It is a huge achievement that we are tremendously proud of. The judges were extremely impressed with the depth of our commitment to sport and physical activity over the past 24 months and how we have developed and embedded a culture of participation and inclusivity for all our children to lead healthy and active lives whilst in school.
Our nomination detailed that during the Covid-19 pandemic our children designed and distributed Yoga cards to over 200 homes in Camden and Brent, helping local families safely practice Yoga whilst being at home. Coach Marc delivered online PE lessons and extra-curricular clubs and he created fun exercise videos for our younger children and their families to take part in whilst they were away from school. We have evolved and extended our PE curriculum to ensure that our youngest children in the first school embedded these core values of developing key fundamental movement skills such as running, jumping, skipping, hopping, lateral movements, throwing and catching in addition to also developing softer skills such as taking turns, sharing, communicating and most importantly having fun and enjoying being active.
Moving through the school we continue to work closely on movement-based skills, showing greater consistently and control whist also developing flexibility, strength, coordination and balance. Children are encouraged to work both independently and also with a partner/team collaboratively and competitively, when learning a new skill or technique. We have great emphasis on children playing by the rules, showing good sportsmanship and teamwork when playing games, combined with respecting each other during games. Children in our Badgers and Transition classes are introduced to working in teams early on and this continues through into our Prep classes. We also work hard to ensure that all children understand the importance that being physically active and how this impacts our emotional and physical wellbeing. From pupil surveys, 100% of children said that being physically active is good for them, 90% of our children have an extremely positive experience of PE, with 85% of our children saying it makes them feel happy all of the time. 91% of our children said that being active helps them with other aspects of school such as study, improves confidence, communication and team work.
Our Prep III children have a unit of work which allows them to create games using different pieces of equipment safely, making up their own rules and scoring points. During this unit we encourage our children to demonstrate their games to their class and the opportunity for questions and feedback on how they can improve on different skills and challenges. Our Prep III children are involved in facilitating younger classes sports mornings, undertaking roles such as mini ‘coaches and referees’ for the day, demonstrating a whole school approach to working together with others.
We run a multi sports club which is open to our Prep children as well as swimming, dance and yoga available across the school. Along with annual events such as Badgers and Transition sports mornings/afternoons and Preps sports day, football tournaments, visits from inspirational speakers such as Olympic Athletes, we organised external trips to Lords Cricket ground and last year to the Olympic Park in Stratford.
Across school we have many fund-raising events including Healthy Eating week, Wellbeing week, Happy Body Happy Me week and of course Coach Marc’s annual 24 hour PE and Dance Challenge raising money for Children in Need, with every child participating during the school day and parents and teachers doing an exercise workout during the evening. In June we hosted an Under 7 Multi Skills Festival where a total of 14 schools and over 200 children took part in fun and challenging activities focusing on team work, decision making and collaboration. Children won points for their team through playing the games well but also through sportsmanship, which is one of our key values at school.
We are honored to have been shortlisted for this prestigious award for all of our efforts in raising the profile and quality of Physical Activity and Physical Education in our school and demonstrating that, “Active Brains, need active games”. Our hard work and passion has ultimately been recognized and we continue to celebrate all of our achievements helping our amazing children learn to love being active, healthy and having fun.
