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What are PE Skills courses?
How well do your PE students know the course structure and requirements that they are studying in your classroom? What proportion of your PE students can tell you the key skills they are going to be assessed by? Who in your PE group can authoritatively tell you what is required of them between now and their practical assessments?
It is my experience that PE students only vaguely know their qualifications on average. Whilst I mean no criticism of PE students or teachers, I am confident to write that most students can’t tell me critical information about the qualifications that they are studying. For example, what proportion of PE students across a range of GCSE and A-level PE courses in the UK do you think can confidently tell you the following?
- The three most important writing skills for the Paper 1 exam
- Exactly what these three writing skills require of the student 👆
- The marks-per-minute ratio of their PE exams
- The recommended order of answering their exam questions
- The AO distribution of their extended writing pieces
- Whether their extended writing tends to be a discuss or evaluate or analyse or justify command
- The structure of their practical assessment
- How their teacher and moderator mark their written/oral coursework
I could keep writing this list and it would become very lengthy but suffice to say that this is why I have made a new series of skills courses for the major PE qualifications. Here’s an example of a few shots from one of my courses for AQA GCSE PE:
How to use the courses
Teachers will use the skills courses in many different ways. If you consider that an entire skills course experience would take a student about 90 minutes to complete, teachers may choose to allocate the skills course at the start of a qualification as a whole. Alternatively, a teacher may choose to drip-feed the content, only utilising the introduction lesson at the start of the course and then drip-feeding lessons into the students’ experiences as each lesson demands.
Beyond whether to study the skills courses as a whole or whether to drip-feed them, teachers can also be confident that students can reassess skills courses whenever they need to. For example, after “mock week” in Year 11 or at the end of Year 12, a teacher may ask students who have struggled on a particular paper to revisit the lesson for that particular exam.
A example of assigning a lesson to students in a drip-fed format.
Finally, I honestly believe teachers will use these courses for their own knowledge and progression. Teachers can benefit from the skills courses too!
An example assignment that could be set for students who have had a poor AQA GCSE PE Paper 2 mock exam.
Beyond all of these possibilities is the reality that this is a tool in the teacher tool belt that can be used as you, the teacher, see fit for the best. The flexibility is outright and the capacity to restudy is endless.
What we currently cover
As we launch the first batch of PE skills course, you can access:
Assuming that these courses are popular, we will be launching further courses for other exam boards and course types. High on the list are BTEC courses and Cambridge Nationals and Technicals, but we will also be releasing courses for other GCSEs and A-levels as well as the IB SEHS course.
Who has access already?
Current customers of TheEverLearner.com with access to ExamSimulator have access to the skills course at zero expense. Non-ExamSimulator customers can upgrade for very low costs and non-customers are encouraged to take a free trial as soon as possible. A free trial comes with the entire skills course as well as the whole range of PE courses available.
REMEMBER THE GOLDEN RULE OF THE PLATFORM
Teachers and students receive skills course access when they are enrolled in a group with the course assigned.
What happens next?
We are eager to learn how teachers use these exciting new courses and we will be surveying our client base in the coming months for their opinions. Furthermore, we are currently writing equivalent curriculum courses designed specifically for teachers allowing colleagues to learn the underpinning tendencies of the courses they are teaching at a pace that suits them.
Thank you for reading. If you are not a customer yet, please reach out and consider a free trial.
Have a lovely day.
James.
