Primary Sports Grant

About the Primary Sport Premium Grant

Sports Premium is allocated to schools to fund additional and sustainable improvements in the provision of PE and sports to encourage the development of healthy, active lifestyles. This can include:

• The hiring of qualified sports coaches to work with teachers
• Providing existing staff with training and resources to help them teach PE and sport more effectively
• Introducing new sports and activities and encouraging more pupils to take up sport
• Support and involve the least active children by running school sports clubs

Physical activity has numerous benefits for children and young people’s physical health, as well as their mental wellbeing (increasing self-esteem and emotional wellbeing and lowering anxiety and depression), and children who are physically active are happier, more resilient and more trusting of their peers. Ensuring that pupils have access to sufficient daily activity can also have wider benefits for pupils and schools, improving behaviour as well as enhancing academic achievement.

The school sport and activity action plan sets out the government’s commitment to ensuring that children and young people have access to at least 60 minutes of sport and physical activity per day. It recommends 30 minutes of this is delivered during the school day (in line with the Chief Medical Officers guidelines which recommend an average of at least 60 minutes per day across the week).

The PE and sport premium can help primary schools to achieve this commitment, providing primary schools with £320 million of government funding to make additional and sustainable improvements to the quality of the PE, physical activity and sport offered through their core budgets. It is allocated directly to schools, so they have the flexibility to use it in the way that works best for their pupils.