Alternative Provision Blog

In this latest of a series of alternative provision School Games blogs, Adam Fuller shares how Yorkshire Sport Foundation is enhancing PE and sports for Alternative Provision, PRU, and SEMH schools across South and West Yorkshire by fostering collaboration, sharing best practices, and providing specialised support. Learn about their initiatives and success stories in creating a robust community of practice:

Yorkshire Sport Foundation are the Active Partnership covering South and West Yorkshire including 28 School Games Areas across nine Local Authorities. Insight and feedback highlighted an increase in the number and range of Alternative Provision, Pupil Referral Units and SEMH specific schools and settings across the districts locally.

With increased exclusions from school and an increase in CAMHS and specialist CAMHS referrals in all areas. From working with a small number of these settings it was clear that they were often trying to deliver PE and school sport as part of their curriculum and also to  support wider outcomes, but with limited space, capacity and resources.

They were also often not engaged in local networks and support structures around PE, school sport and physical activity. Some settings had PE specific staff and have been working with local partners such as community club foundations to deliver activities, however the offer for PESSPA was extremely varied due to a number of reasons and the needs of the students.

Research from Leeds Beckett University highlighted a need to bring these settings and schools together to share good practice as they often felt alone in their area and unable to access CPD, resources and support due to their very specific needs.

Yorkshire Sport Foundation created a community of practice initially online to bring staff together with a responsibility for sport/ PE and to share good practice and opportunities. Over 40 settings signed up across the nine districts which immediately highlighted the need for further support. This allowed us to link settings into their local School Games Organisers and PE Networks and also shared good practice but also challenges that they were facing when delivering PE and Sport. A follow up online meeting was put in place in the Autumn Term allowing staff to further network.

This led to the delivery of a face to face subject network day for Alternative Provision, PRU and SEMH Schools to attend where we were able to provide specific and related CPD, in addition to networking opportunities.  

Sessions included a keynote from the Wings School in Notts around their fantastic offer and achieving Gold School Games Mark, delivering physically active learning in the classroom- linked with neurodiversity, trauma aware PE, curriculum design and outcomes for students, capturing youth voice, sport sanctuaries and using physical activity to support emotional regulation.

We had 24 schools/ settings attend on the day with 97% of schools rating the event a 10/10 on their feedback. Staff immediately asked when the next opportunity to network would be, and not just for the day away from school and a free lunch!

We will continue to develop the online community of practice and from this event the settings have already started to liaise outside of the meetings, putting on school fixtures and visiting each other’s sites to learn.

The next steps are to ensure we continually support these settings and understand their development needs. We were asked to think about how we can ensure that we put similar schools/ settings together across districts (medical, behavioural, schools, alternative provisions) and some key themes around CPD including:

• Assessing PE- Some only have pupils for short time periods, unable to deliver certain sports/ activities.
• Delivering PE to Small Classes
• Alternative Activities
• Delivery of events/ competitions for their students

We are now considering how we can further engage these schools/ settings in local offers working with School Games Organisers as well as supporting them to apply for Opening School Facilities funding to access equipment and a wider range of activities.

The challenges to continue and develop this work  have been in identifying these settings and finding the right member of staff, as well as high staff turnover meaning that is has been difficult to engage some that we would love to have on board.

There are also challenges around the differences in sites with some having little/ no facilities to deliver PE and therefore continually thinking how we can support them to deliver physical activity in the space they do have for young people.

From this work Yorkshire Sport will look to develop a community of practice for other Active Partnerships across the country, to share practice and try to develop a focus in this area for AP’s to support AP’s. Or advice to any organisation working with these settings is that they are the experts when it comes to their young people, but may need further support when it comes to PE, Sport and physical activity!