School Focus: Develop extracurricular opportunities through upskilling school staff, especially learning support assistants.
Expression of interest overview
Johnston Community Primary School, located in Johnstone, Pembrokeshire, has a high percentage of children with special educational needs (36% compared to national average of 6%). The school sought to become an active setting by striving to achieve all pupils attending a minimum of two extracurricular clubs per week. The provision provided was to be inclusive for all pupils (e.g. wheelchair users, children with autism). The intention was for the AEBSD funding to be spent on the following three overarching areas to support increasing the offer of the school to the community in an inclusive manner:
- Sports equipment
- Site manager time
- Coaching provisions
Programme Implementation
The school received funding from December 2021 to July 2022. Attendance numbers, recorded by the school, fluctuated across the months, with greatest attendance in March (681 participants) and May (577 participants). The lowest attendance was in April (147 participants). Monthly learning logs listed activities the school had been offering as basketball, netball, football, rugby, racquet sports, cricket, and rounders. Through the monthly completion of learning logs, the following key reflective points were highlighted, and the school’s implementation of the programme was documented in the timeline shown in Figure 4.
What worked well:
- High levels of participation and demand at the sessions
- Increase in the time pupils spent participating in activities
- Parental buy-in and active support from senior leadership team
- Some improvements in attendance and improvements in pupil behaviours observed
- Positive attendance from Learning Resource Centre pupils who attended supported by additional staffing
Learning points:
- Clubs for younger pupils were more difficult to provide as higher staff ratios were needed
- Sometimes difficult for vulnerable pupils to attend holiday provision due to lack of transport
- Community clubs did not need the school facility and their volunteers do not have capacity to offer additional input at school clubs
- Parent and child running club was less popular than other offers
Next Steps
- Remaining grant money used for food and fitness camp, which was running for a week in the 2022 summer holiday
