Introduction The PE and Sports Premium funding was introduced by the Coalition Government in 2013, following the ‘legacy’ of the successful 2012 London Olympic Games, with the aim of enabling schools to promote high-quality physical education and sports provision for all ages. Initially, schools received at least £8,000 per year to develop provision for PE and sport. In 2017, this funding was doubled to at least £16,000 per year, in response to the growing concern regarding high levels of obesity and low levels of activity of school-aged children and the general population. With the exception of a small grant for music, the PE and Sports Premium funding is the only funding allocated to schools which is earmarked for a specific subject or activity and, in many small schools such as Northenden Community School, the funding for this will outweigh the total budget of all other curriculum areas. The school can use its PE and Sports Premium funding to:
Specifically, school must use the premium to secure improvements in the following indicators:
General National Aims The PE and Sports Premium funding for schools is one of the ways in which the government aim to achieve much wider and long-term goals for the country’s health and well-being which include:
Until 2015, Government’s approach towards sport focused to a large extent on the number of people playing grassroots sport and the number of medals that were won at elite competition. “Sporting Future: a new strategy for an active nation”, the new government sport strategy published in December 2015, represented a significant shift in policy. It looks at how sport and physical activity can improve and contribute to five key outcomes:
The strategy represented a significant step in the Government’s work on physical activity, first set out in 2014’s “Moving More, Living More” paper. This paper described government’s intention to deliver a physical activity legacy from London 2012 and to work collaboratively across sectors to tackle inactivity. Public Health England followed this work with “Everybody Active, Every Day” later in 2014, a national physical activity framework. Following the publication of “Sporting Future”, Sport England published their 2016 strategy “Towards an Active Nation”, setting out how it would support grassroots sport to deliver against the new Government aims. This placed inactivity at the heart of their work, with £250m of funding dedicated to tackling physical inactivity over the next four years. |