What a Successful 2020-21: Despite COVID-19

What a Successful 2020-21: Despite COVID-19

  

School Sports Successes 2020 - 2021

         

Whitehall Junior School has maintained its School Games Gold Award for 2020-2021.

School Sports Funding 2020 - 2021  

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 year 2020-2021 has been an extremely difficult year due to two school closures as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. Despite these difficulties, our school spent the funding on: promoting healthy, active lifestyles; increasing numbers of children who participate in out of hours sports clubs when in school; using external providers to deliver adventure activities; use of coaches to team teach PE lessons with school staff and providing children with leadership opportunities within sport. Please see the 2020-2021 school sports funding report for a full breakdown of our expenditures for this academic year. We feel the money has been used 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.  

PE Lessons

At Whitehall Junior School, we view Physical Education as an extremely important part of the National Curriculum. This year all children were timetabled with two hours of outdoor PE every week. These outdoor PE lessons were conducted in a COVID safe environment following the government’s guidelines and provided our children with the opportunity to take part in a range of team games and individual sports such as athletics. Our PE lessons taught the children the skills needed be successful in a range of sports. Every PE unit provided the children with the opportunity to practise the skills learnt in competitive scenarios. Our inclusive PE curriculum allowed all children to develop communication, teamwork and leadership skills in a healthy competitive environment.         

Daily Mile

This year Whitehall Junior School continued with Daily Mile into its timetable. Every day all children take part in the Daily Mile to further promote leading a healthy lifestyle. 

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. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, sports coaches were used predominantly as play leaders at lunchtime this year to ensure we maximised physical activity yet still following COVID-19 safety measures.

Squad Training

Unfortunately, due to two school closures as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, squad training did not take place this academic year. We hope to resume these sessions in September 2021.

Extra-Curricular Clubs

Unfortunately, due to two school closures as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, extra-curricular clubs were not able to take place this academic year. However, summer term 2021 we re-established these clubs and we look forward to continuing them in September 2021.

Swimming 

Unfortunately, due to two school closures as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, swimming lessons ceased in March 2020 and did not resume again until summer term 2021. However, we have already booked our swimming lessons for Year 5 pupils for September 2021.

2020-2021 End of KS2 swimming statistics:

  

Meeting national curriculum requirements for   swimming and water safety

What percentage of   your current Year 6 cohort swim competently, confidently and proficiently   over a distance of at least 25 metres?

N.B. Even though your   children may swim in another year please report on their attainment on   leaving primary school.

67%

 

What percentage of   your current Year 6 cohort use a range of strokes effectively [for example,   front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke]?

86%

 

What percentage of   your current Year 6 cohort perform safe self-rescue in different water-based   situations?

93%

Inter-school (level 2) competitions 

Unfortunately, due to two school closures as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, our usual inter-school competitions, outlined below, did not take place this academic year:

- Cross Country Competition

- Netball League

- Football League

- Football Cup

- Packham Football tournament

- Key Steps Gymnastics Competition

- Sportshall Athletics

- Mixed netball rally

- Girls’ netball rally

- Boys’ netball rally

- Swimming gala

- Years 4 and 5 Rugby Tournament

- Quad Kids Athletics

- Rounders Competition

- Large Schools District Sports

However, we did exploit the virtual activities offered as much as possible and Whitehall were the winners of the LYG Virtual Challenge- Week 8 Netball.

Intra-school (level 1) competitions 

Despite the difficulties posed by COVID-19 this academic year, we have exploited intra-school competitions through:

- PE lessons

- Play leaders at lunchtime

- Sports ambassadors leading play leader tasks

- Whole school intra-sports competitions

- Sports day

Here are two Loom assemblies as an example of one of our many intra-school competitions held this academic year:

https://www.loom.com/share/162c1950f188443cbc7991576ee439f3

https://www.loom.com/share/88d557fa176e4f298bc42d0e6d2ae609

Health and Fitness Week and Sports Days

Please see below an outline of the activities we carried out for Health and Fitness Week this year.

Monday 21st June

We have two GB athletes in school all day: Team GB Gymnast and World Champion Dominic Mensah and Team GB Para athlete, & 100m champion James Arnott. They will be completing workshops with each class bubble throughout the day and your child will get to work with one of these athletes.

Tuesday 22nd June 

Year 4 Sports Day in the morning.

Year 3 Sports Day in the afternoon.

Wednesday 23rd and Thursday 24th June

Years 5 and 6 on the Wednesday and Years 3 and 4 on the Thursday have ‘Road to Tokyo’ workshops organised with our ClubSport coaches. The children will have a class bubble session with these coaches where they will complete a circuit of six Olympic activities: rowing, boxing, handball, volleyball or fencing and archery or shooting. 

Friday 25th June

Year 5 Sports Day in the morning.

Year 6 Sports Day in the afternoon.

Hannah Cockcroft Virtual Session

Whitehall Junior School were winners of a competition we entered earlier on this year with the British Athletes Commission. Our prize was an opportunity to have a virtual meeting with a member of British Athletes Commission. This took place on Monday 14th June with multiple Paralympic and world champion, Hannah Cockroft MBE.

Annual sports Celebration

Unfortunately our annual sports celebration assembly was not able to take place this year due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We hope that next year this will be able to take place again.