The King Edward School Sport Partnership works in partnership with King Edward VI Aston school and with schools, families and young people across the Aston area. It aims to provide opportunities to take part in sport, physical education and physical activity for all young people in local primary, secondary and special schools.
During the pandemic, the organisation has been working hard to support young people and their families to stay healthy and active through various projects. Helen Tonks, Sports Partnership Manager at King Edward Aston School talks us through some of the many activities that have taken place over the last few months.
Steps to Success
The Steps to Success project is a family-based project which focuses on young people engaging with their family in physical, social and emotional wellbeing tasks over a 6-week period.
The project has been supported by Sport Birmingham as well as international athletes Layla Guscoth (England and Netball NHS Doctor) and Dan Mousley (England Under 19 Cricket Captain).
5,500 families across the King Edward Aston and Central partnerships accessed the resources. 26 schools took part and food hampers were sent to them as a reward. All the food had been donated by the local Co-op as part of their communities scheme.
The feedback from the young people taking part has been extremely positive. One parent wrote "I wanted to say a huge thank you to you for giving our children the chance to take part. Homeschooling has been very challenging and this gave my daughter something else to focus on and enjoy".
PE at Home Resources
PE at Home was created during the first lockdown to enable families to deliver high quality physical education lessons in a home environment. The resource cards mirror a physical education lesson and have cross curricular links to other national curriculum subjects, as well as pathways to local clubs. The cards were designed to be used at home with minimal or no equipment and cover early years learning, through to Key Stage 4.
22 weeks of resource packs have been produced across a range of activities with schools uploading them to their individual websites or downloaded them from the KESSP website. Alternatively, schools have also used them as part of their home-schooling packs where families do not have access to the internet within the home. To date, the resources have been downloaded over 87,000 times and across 114 countries. Helen comments "We have presented our resources to the Birmingham Education Partnership, Public Health Birmingham and the School Games Organiser regional summit".
County and King Edward School Sport Partnership Virtual Challenges
The partnership has been running virtual, physical challenges throughout the pandemic for primary, secondary and special school students. The county physical challenge events aim to keep young people active whilst they are not in school or whilst attending school as children of key workers.
To date, there had been over 16,000 participants across the partnership and many of those young people have won prizes as a result of their participation in the various challenges.
