Skills, skills, skills

In this week's post, we will explore the importance of teaching specific skills in PE education. Learn how to prepare students for exams by focusing on skill development and accessing valuable exam analysis resources. Read on!

Take a look at this image:

In isolation, it’s not that impressive, right? But what if I told OCR A-level PE Paper 1 teachers that this image is a route to success for their students?

This post is not about OCR A-level PE. It could be about AQA GCSE or IB SEHS but the point I want to make is that the image above relates to the analysis below:

With the 2024 analysis pending, teachers of OCR A-level PE Paper 1 can clearly see that the exam assessment over-focuses (this is not “over” in the critical sense) on the skills of identifying, describing, explaining and evaluating with explaining being the statistically dominant skill. Eagle-eyed teachers will also notice the importance of the “Analyse” skill, which has been growing in importance in recent iterations:

So, why am I writing this down? It is my contention that far few teachers know the details represented above for the PE exam units they are teaching and, as such, are unlikely to provide skill-specific experiences to students that deliberately prepare cohorts of learners for their exams. Whilst I may find it hard to prove this in your centre or in any centre, I feel confident in the claim because I have spent 25 years working in the classroom PE teaching sector and conversations about the variables I am describing here are very, very infrequent.

So, let me pose some questions to you. I am assuming that you are a PE teacher and that you teach a classroom-based course such as GCSE, A-level, BTEC or equivalent. Here are my questions:

1. Do you plan and deliver your lessons with specific skill foci in mind?
2. Does your course design and redesign commence with a thorough analysis of the skills of your course?
3. Does your results analysis process focus on skills performance as equally as it focuses on unit performance or equivalent?
4. Is your core assessment model within your course accurate to the range of skills that students will be expected to perform in their external assessments?
5. Can your students tell you the explicit differences between skills such as describing and explaining or between analysing and evaluating?

I could be wrong but I am going to argue here that most of us focus on the content of our lessons more than on some of the questions above. I am going to go further and state that, across the PE teaching sector, it is…

…more common to teach content and bolt skills onto these experiences than it is to teach skills using content as the raw material to develop those skills.

To be clear: I am arguing here that it is every PE teacher’s responsibility to consider, at the very least, planning their lessons to achieve this goal:

The purpose of course content is to be the vehicle for developing the course-specific skills that students will need in their assessments, their future studies, their future work and their lives generally.

This probably seems really lofty to readers. But it shouldn’t be. What I have written above in that aim is a reasonable educational statement. Educators should –in fact must– aim for the highest of achievements and to influence the lives of our learners. This is what education is, in my opinion. Moreover, let’s take a skill such as evaluating and critically evaluating. Being able to evaluate is useful to our students both in terms of their OCR A-level PE Paper 1 preparation and as a civil skill that our society benefits from. The capacity to think critically is at the heart of the ability to act democratically. Educators have a responsibility to develop this skill in their learners. Whilst we may tend to focus on it in the context of lesson, homework or exam performance, the outcome remains the same: students learn important skills.

Conclusions and actions

So, you’ve read what I have to say. I’m confident that there will be some of you nodding and others who think “Yeah, but where do I start?” This is a fair point, as the types of analyses I am describing are not available to everyone. My work encompasses this analysis and I am able to share it with you.

For customers of The EverLearner: Customers of The EverLearner can access all of my exam skill analysis work via the PE Data Centre. This data is updated annually and we typically push a new version live between September and October, once the 2024 exam papers have been analysed.

For those schools not yet customers of The EverLearner: we also publish exam infographics every year and these are available to teachers utterly freely. The 2024 versions remain available to everyone and I encourage you to download them here:

I also encourage non-customers to consider joining our community to be able to access the premium Data Centre. 28-day free trials of our platform are available to everyone and we are happy to meet you online to show you how our service works. Customers also receive an account manager who is a core member of our team AND is an experienced Head of PE.

Thank you for reading.

James