Phillimore: Centre of Excellence

Yorkshire Sport Foundation has been allocated funding via Sport England to provide support to primary schools, where required based on the belief that school to school support is highly effective. YSF have pledged funding to establish a network of schools that can support to others by offering high quality training opportunities. These ‘Centres of Excellence’ will have a proven track record in specific areas of PE and sport and be able to offer capacity, resources or facilities to run training, observations or conferences to help other schools in South and West Yorkshire improve their PE and sport offer.

Phillimore Primary School has been awarded as a Centre of Excellence based on a track record of tackling physical and mental health and ensuring our pupils are fit for school. Links are made between wellbeing in its widest context with whole school improvement.

We recently ran an Open Afternoon with demonstrations, presentations and ‘have a go’ on the programmes we offer at Phillimore. These include:

• tests for physical fitness and challenges to all staff delivering PE and parents/carers to assist in improving their children’s fitness

• balance ability and biking programmes

• cookery and nutrition units of work

• healthy school dinners and packed lunches

• parent/carer workshops on tooth care

• pupil First Aid sessions

• after school sport, fitness and cookery clubs

• tackling mental health with proactive programmes such as ‘Feeling Fabulous’ ‘Philosophy for Children’, ‘Secrets of Success’

We talked about how we involve outside agencies (some free, some with a cost) regarding nutrition, active travel, sustainable living and an awareness of ways to improve the local and wider environment. We explained the ethos behind how we get our parents /carers and the wider community involved and how the initial concern about the fitness of our pupils a few years ago snowballed into a huge variety of successful initiatives.