For sale – primary physical education. £20 per hour or nearest offer

Abstract

With the pressures of time and finance schools find themselves under, such as the need to meet ever-increasing Public Service Agreement targets for pupil participation in physical education (PE) and school sport, the need to provide extended school hours and the need to cover planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time, sports coaches are being increasingly used in primary schools to fill the void. How exactly this current situation has emerged remains unclear. In order to shed light on this issue, sports coaches (n = 23) returned self-completion questionnaires before engaging in follow-up interviews, semi-structured in nature. The paper discusses key themes emerging from the data including a lack of teacher engagement in extra-curricular provision, the cost of covering PPA time, a willingness of teachers to ‘give up’ the teaching of PE and the apparent confidence exuded by sports coaches.

Keywords:

• primary
• education
• PE
• sports coaches