Primary school sports funding premium

The Oxfordshire Hospital School is in receipt of the 3 year Primary Sports Premium Funding. This is a government funding allocation put in place to help primary schools, and schools with primary age students, improve the quality of the PE and sport activities they offer their pupils. They have allocated over £450 million on this funding over the 3 academic years 2013 to 2014, 2014 to 2015 and 2015 to 2016. This funding is being jointly provided by the Departments for Education, Health and Culture, Media and Sport, and will see money going directly to primary school Head teachers to spend on improving the quality of sport and PE for all their children.

At the Hospital School year 1 funding was used to improve sports provision as a tool for supporting mental health. As such the main site benefiting from this was the Highfield Unit teaching site. Funding was used to buy equipment that would allow young people to access physical activity more easily; for example the provision of garden sports equipment and indoor fitness equipment. The impact of this was that more young people were able to access sport due to the ability to participate on the main site. There was already a high level of sports and fitness expertise available at the Highfield and the improved quality and availability of equipment enabled these staff to develop a better delivery model for curriculum sport, as well as promote recreational participation in physical activity as a tool for physical, social and psychological wellbeing.

This academic year (2014/15) has been the second year of this funding stream. The focus of this allocation has been to improve the sport and physical activity offer across the whole school and create a sustainable delivery package. Funding has been targeted at providing quality equipment across the school, accessing facilities where there are none on site, and providing training for staff. This focused allocation has allowed all main sites to offer a minimum of 1 hour physical activity as part of the weekly timetable, the delivery of a wider variety of sports and health education aspects, and will look at staff development to enable them to support the delivery of sport specific sessions as well as add a physical dimension to their other curriculum subjects.