Summer Sports Varsity at Foxes Piece School Led by GMS Sports Leaders

Great Marlow School’s PE Department has now been working with our primary feeder schools for eight years. Foxes Piece and Lane End have always maximised the use of this link and received staff CPD, the use of our facilities, and PE lessons at GMS for their KS2 classes to help with the primary to secondary transition.

To strengthen this link further, I decided that we could use our Year 10 Sports Leaders to deliver a varsity style sports event between Lane End and Foxes Piece. The plan would be to give the responsibility of the entire event to our Year 10 Sports Leaders, this in turn would link perfectly with the current Youth Sport Trust initiative GMS are running for My Personal Best, where students are engaged in activities to develop key life skills. The Sports Leaders were required to plan a coaching session, which would be followed by a competition between the two schools in each of the respective sports. 18 leaders were used across four different sports. All of the leaders delivered part of the coaching session; they all had specific roles in the competition too,  as team coach/manager, referee/umpire and scorer.

The Sports Leaders were outstanding. The quality of their sessions (which had been practiced and refined back at GMS after school during the week leading up to the event) were superb, the students delivered well informed, appropriate, yet fun activities that engaged all of the Year 6 primary children for the full two hours. On reflection I genuinely think that some of our students were better than some of the university PE trainees we have had work with us at GMS.

The feedback from the two primaries was excellent. The afternoon was an absolute success and thoroughly enjoyed by all. Our Sports Leaders said that despite the whole project being a lot of work and very challenging, it was hugely rewarding and they relished the opportunity of having such significant responsibility. The whole project was sweetened further when the Sports Leaders were summoned to see Mr Ford who asked them all about the project and before rewarding them with an ice-cream for their hard work.

Mr Goodright

“It was really good fun, and it helped us realise how rewarding, yet challenging, teaching can be” said Ella Goff.

“After experiencing teaching children, I now have the utmost respect for all of my teachers at GMS who do such a fantastic job. I really enjoyed my day, and the ice-cream Mr Ford gave us.” Jasmin Bains