A PE-specific blog by James Simms

Introducing Hot Topics for PE and sport exams 2025

Written by James Simms | Dec 4, 2024 3:59:32 PM

Dear PE and Sport colleagues,

I have something exciting to tell you!! From 2025, my team and I are going to be committing to publishing ten Hot Topics for every PE and sport exam. These Hot Topics will form the basis of our National Mock Exams and also live revision sessions and revision notes packs.

What are Hot Topics?

For every PE exam we analyse, we are going to publish 10 Hot Topics that we believe have a very high possibility of featuring on the real exams in 2025. Not only will we make these recommendations but we will also identify the likely skills that might be expected in exam questions. We will then provide comprehensive teaching of these topics and skills in our revision sessions. We are going to strongly encourage all students to overlearn these topics and skills in preparation for their exams, as well as complete revision of everything. 

We strongly believe that these Hot Topics will develop impacting behaviours by your students and, once again, I urge you to consider subscribing to TheEverLearner.com in order to be able to access them.

Back in 2015, I used to publish Hot Topics and they were super popular but, at the time, colleagues and students tended to view the Hot Topics as exam predictions. I became a little uncomfortable with this and decided not to use the Hot Topics wording anymore. Rather, I simply focussed on certain topics and skills and then, guess what, invariably those topics and skills appeared on the papers. As it turned out, my not-Hot Topics were seriously, seriously Hot! So, this year, I’ve decided, “Sod it! Let’s call them Hot Topics again.” 

There are a couple of details that you should know. Firstly, I absolutely do not endorse a student focusing on the Hot Topics alone. This would be a very, very bad idea and I want no part in students selecting what topics to revise and what not to. Rather, I am urging students to “overlearn” the Hot Topics.

 

What is overlearning?

Overlearning is a standard educational practice, commonly used in classrooms, universities, professional studies and sports coaching and any other learning environment where an educator encourages a learner to learn beyond the point of mastery key knowledge, skills and behaviours. It will not surprise PE teachers that a high-quality GS in netball would have overlearned the shooting skill. Of course! Imagine if they didn’t! I am simply arguing that your PE or sport students should overlearn the Hot Topics. That’s it. Nothing more.

Overlearning has many benefits but one of the biggest is automaticity. The Hot Topics and the associated revision sessions are designed to elicit this automaticity in your students in relation to the Hot Topics as well as their associated skills so that, no matter how the exam question is asked in their exam, your students will be utterly prepared to show what they have learnt. 

 

My “guarantee”

I strongly, strongly believe that every student who overlearns the Hot Topics as is being discussed will experience at least one grade improvement per unit that they work on. This is a very big claim and I acknowledge here that I cannot prove it to you (yet). However, from me (a PE teacher of 26 years experience) to you (the reader of this post) I am telling you this because I believe it deeply. Yes, your students need to follow the behaviours of overlearning. There’s no doubt about that. Simply attending a revision session or filling out the revision notes will not suffice and this is why you are so important. Help your students to overlearn the Hot Topics. Guide them, put time and effort into the revision and ensure that every student values it. If you do this, you will never regret it and you never know, you might just find yourself with a special feeling of success come results day in August 2025.

 

How to access the Hot Topics 2025

The Hot Topics will be available in January 2025 and will be published as part of an advanced infographic resource for subscribers of TheEverLearner.com. Non-subscribers will be able to access a standard infographic but this will not include the Hot Topics. Many of you will remember our standard infographics from previous years:

 

 

The advanced infographics of 2025 will be downloadable for our subscribers and will feature the Hot Topics on page 2. Here’s an example of an imaginary GCSE PE course which, for the purposes of this post, we will call the JS GCSE PE 9-1:

 

 

As you will notice, there are ten Hot Topics listed for the paper. This means that courses with two exams will feature 20 total Hot Topics and those with three exams 30, and so on. As mentioned previously, subscribers will be able to download these resources as early as January 2025 and the resources will be under strict embargo until June 2025. This means that subscribers will be asked to use the Hot Topics within their school or college only and not to publish them online or share them with non-subscribers. 

This also means that everyone who is not a current subscriber to TheEverLearner.com should seriously consider joining asap. Seriously, what are you waiting for!?! The value of a subscription is enormous. 

 

Summary

To summarise, I want to add a simple illustration that emphasises how our subscribers benefit from Hot Topics 2025:

 

Advanced infographic including the Hot topics

 

National Mock Exam featuring all Hot topics

 

Student revision notes packs featuring all Hot topics

 

Teacher revision notes packs featuring all answers

 

Live revision sessions featuring all Hot topics

 

Please join us and have your students benefit from these experiences. 

Thanks for reading.

James