Year 6 pupils at Noremarsh Junior School are celebrating after being elected as the new team of Sports Leaders for coming year.
The scheme was launched last year by Headteacher Hilary Macmeekin after she witnessed the success of the Power of 10 scheme at secondary schools in the area. Hilary explained, “As far as I know, we are the first Primary setting to try this idea, and our Sports Leaders last year had a successful year arranging events, helping younger pupils and generally being fantastic ambassadors for our school.”
She continued, “Last year they made the role their own and so this year we wanted to take it further and develop the role even more.”
Now in its second year, the new cohort of 11 pupils were chosen from 22 applicants after a process which involved them putting forward the skills that they had and why they would be good for the role.
Hilary continued, “They had to apply by writing a letter of application and then were chosen based on the skills that they put across in their letter and what we witnessed of those skills around the school.”
After the excitement of finding out they had been selected and being presented with their exclusive sports leader hoodies, the hard work began, with a day’s training session held by Phil Smith, the School Sports Co-ordinator for Ascend Learning Trust who supports PE and the delivery of PE across all the schools in the North Wilts sports cluster.
Phil explained the aim of the training day was to, “Have them thinking about what they want to teach through their activities each day and lead some training to think about how they will organise it, how they will manage the other children, how they will support children struggling with any of it. I ran through all the different training sessions during the day so they had a whole set of activities that they could start running at lunchtimes for children in other year groups.”
Sports Leader Frankie said, “It’s been really fun, I was really surprised and happy to get chosen and I can’t wait to get started.”
The first event that they organised was the annual ‘Fun Run’ at the end of September which included writing letters to parents about participation including why exercise is good for you and organising the sponsorship forms. On the day, wearing high vis jackets, the Sports Leaders led the different year group races to set the pace, guided the children around the track and encouraged those who were struggling. They ran warm up sessions before each race and marshalled the runners around the course.
Hilary added, “After all this they then went on to run their own Year 6 race of which all 3 winners of the boys’ race and 2 of the 3 winners in the girls’ race were sports leaders!”
The Sports ambassadors are currently enjoying running sports activities during lunchtimes for younger pupils and are looking forward to what their next challenge will be.
Power of 10 is a scheme led by Phil Smith (SSCo), which has been successfully run by secondary schools in the North Wilts sports cluster since 2012, giving Year 9 students the opportunity to be chosen as one of 10 Sports ambassadors, who receive training then travel around the area helping run sports festivals and events for primary schools. P10s have inspired over 3000 children since 2012.
For more information on Noremarsh Junior School go to noremarshjuniorschool.org.uk
The School is proud to be part of Ascend Learning Trust. For more information you can visit ascendlearningtrust.org.uk
