The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy - Now just days away!

Dear PE colleagues,

I am really excited to inform you that The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy will be live and available on TheEverLearner.com from early August 2025. In this post, I want to share some ideas and plans with you so that you have a comprehensive view of what is included and how The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy works. 

• Mission
• How will it work?
• Key principles

Mission

You may well be sick of me writing this if you are a regular blog reader, but this is the mission of The EverLearner Ltd as well as my individual, professional mission. This is what I do day in and day out. This is why I get up every morning, and I am utterly dedicated to it:

To radically improve the PE achievements of all students and transform the PE-teaching sector into the best-trained and highest-performing classroom teaching network in the world.

Please, once again, take note of the second part of this mission: 

transform the PE-teaching sector into the best-trained and highest-performing classroom teaching network in the world.

I honestly believe that the PE teaching sector is capable of this. Whilst I am definitely biased as a proud PE teacher, I actually believe that the PE teaching sector is ideally suited to be the driver of educational improvements in schools and colleges in the UK and around the world, and I aim to play my part in helping to achieve this.

However, there are a couple of issues. Firstly, PE teachers in the UK either receive no or very little training on classroom practice. I want to be clear here: PE teachers, in general terms, receive very close to no training on how to be a classroom teacher but are measured and held accountable for their and their students’ performance on courses like GCSE PE, A-level  PE and BTEC Sport. Whilst I have no issue with accountability, it can only be just when the individual and sector in question receive the right level of support. Secondly, the ongoing CPD that PE teachers receive via their employer often lacks the subject-specificness to be highly relevant to classroom PE teaching.   

This is where and why I have decided to intervene. In August 2025, PE teachers in the UK and way beyond will be able to learn about classroom PE teaching specifically via TheEverLearner.com.

How will it work?

My team and I will initially release a series of between 20 and 30 courses via The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy in five paradigms:

The first two letters of each paradigm are the important ones each time. These courses will be PE-specific. Whether a colleague is learning about the spacing effect within PE Cognitive Science or about Assessment Models in PE Course Design and Assessment, the learning will be tailored to PE teaching and PE learning. NOTHING ELSE! These courses are for us and are not generic to teaching and teachers.

Furthermore, each course will take approximately 60 minutes to complete. In other words, a PE teacher will be able to study during a free lesson, before registration or even during a lunch hour (I am aware that a lunch hour is a thing of mythology to most PE teachers. Rarely is it either an hour nor free for a PE teacher).

PE teachers will be invited to activate up to three courses at a time.

At any point, PE teachers can deactivate, reactivate or take courses again to suit their specific situation. PE teachers can also study those courses at any rate and repetition they wish:

PE teachers will complete courses by watching over 90% of the video content of a course and scoring above 80% success on each of the two checkpoint quizzes.

Key principles that we believe will lead to impact

From what is written and shown above, you may well notice some key principles. Firstly, the courses feature an assessed element in the course checkpoints. No teacher has to take the checkpoints, but they certainly may choose to in order to complete the course.

This also means that, in the near future, my team and I will be releasing the possibility of certification after course completion and also a record of achievement (this name may change) that every PE teacher can hold, which details all of their learning to date. 

The courses are also completely self-driven. No senior leader or Head of PE can assign courses to their PE department. However, we aim to release the option to recommend a course to a colleague or share one’s record of achievement. In other words, we want to get the balance right between PE teachers being encouraged to learn and being compelled to learn at a specific rate defined by an external influence. The latter will never be our way of doing things. 

Finally, you may have noticed from the way I am describing things that The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy will be released in what we call an MVP model. Now, MVP to PE teachers probably means something to do with the best player in a competition, but here it is a little different. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, and the idea is to build The Academy, get it in the hands of PE teachers and then ensure there are clear feedback routes so that as PE teachers use the service, they can guide and lead how it develops over time. Therefore, I strongly intend to have The Academy as an iterative product that improves and refines over time. The core required features will be there from day one, and the option to build the service for our specific PE teacher users will then be enabled. Who knows where this might lead in the years to come?

And finally...

So, there you have it. The PE teaching sector is a few days away from having its own academy for learning the skills of a classroom PE teacher. I am deeply proud that we have got to this point, and I hope that you (presumably a PE teacher) will join us in The Academy very soon to learn, reflect and grow our classroom skills together. I can’t wait!

Thanks for reading and have a lovely day. 

James Simms
PE teacher
Founder of The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy