Physical Education develops children’s physical skills, confidence, capabilities and potential. It gives opportunities for children to be creative and competitive while learning to work with and respect others. At Davyhulme Primary School, children learn how to plan, perform and evaluate actions, often in pairs and small groups, helping them to develop the quality and effectiveness of their work. We promote a positive attitude towards active lifestyles and aim to introduce children to lifelong physical activity. Our pupils are encouraged to complete the ‘daily mile’ every day. The Daily Mile is all about improving the health and wellbeing of children. The benefits they gain are physical, emotional, social and mental – all from running or jogging, at their own pace, for 15 minutes every day.

In addition to being taught by their class teacher, children across the school are also taught by PE teachers and coaches who are specialists in their field. Our aspiration is for all children to do a minimum of 2 hours PE a week.

The school runs a range of after school clubs which involve children in competitive and friendly sporting fixtures. These include gymnastics, cross country, multisport, football, dance, skittle ball, netball, judo, boxing and athletics. The school plays competitive sport in the local schools’ leagues.

Swimming:

At Davyhulme Primary School we take swimming very seriously and have done for a number of years. We are constantly reminding our children that the UK is a land surrounded by water , with rivers , canals , ponds and lakes never too far away. We must be comfortable in and around water , confident in the knowledge that if we ever fall in that we can propel ourselves to safety.

This is why we share this very important message with our parents as early as possible and then follow it up with a very practical strategic plan in KS2. Recently school has paid for extra swimming lessons so that up to 70 children can go swimming each week with the ultimate aim being to swim 50 meters by the end of Y6. Any pupil not able to manage this target at the end of Y4 has to carry on in Y5 and Y6 until they can succeed - this strong message makes it clear to pupils and parents that this challenge will never go away at Davyhulme  Primary school because they have a cold or forgotten their swimming kit - they will always have to go swimming until the magic 50m has been reached.

In the past two years every Y6 child has been able to swim 50m and this year we celebrate the fact that after one term most of Y5 and all of Y6 have achieved our target !!