Specialist PE Teachers

[BrightMauveLion]

Does your school have specialist PE teachers? For example, an overall Director of Sports/PE, with Teachers of Football/Rugby/Netball/Swimming etc with PE teachers only teaching their sport. Is this just independent schools that do this?

They're all SLT 🙄

I laughed because it’s true!
There’s only usually 1-2 of a PE department in any school who isn’t either SLT or a head of year. Usually these are the ECT teachers! I am guessing this is because they have less marking and planning and therefore more time. I encountered one in a previous school who was completely incompetent, everyone thought so except the head. She was one of those who was promoted above her station several times and was thoroughly obnoxious and unpleasant.

Our private school has 5 PE teachers. They are all capable of teaching all sports and non are on SLT! Obviously they have specialisms in terms of what teams they take but they can all turn their hand to any sport for teaching and officiating. Any decent qualified PE teacher will be able to lead any sport at school level. (And will often have a much better holistic view of the pupils than non teacher sports coaches)

@beckypv
That’s not my experience at all.
I would argue that it’s the opposite. I’m my experience they have a more biased view of students because they’re only seeing them in one situation. PE teaching heads of year and SLT members had a completely different experience than the rest of us having to teach them maths, English and science for example. It should be obvious that individual students can behave differently depending on the subject. For example, little Johnny who might excel at football and isn’t expected to write or sit still, listen or concentrate. He will not present as challenging to his PE teacher. On the other hand, he might hate maths and be extremely rude and disrespectful during lessons. The heads of year were of no support to teachers as they claimed ‘well he’s not like that for me’ and made the judgement that there were no behaviour issues. I remember one nightmare student who was extremely disruptive in my lessons, would often turn up late for lessons, refused to do any work. 90% of his teachers had the same experience. I arranged a meeting with his head of year who walked in to the meeting with a drink and bar of chocolate for little Johnny, I was gobsmacked. He made no progress and his behaviour points doubled during his last half half term in year 11, this student won an award for overall effort in the end of term assembly! You could see the faces of the staff drop as it was announced. This sort of shit leads to an increase in behaviour issues and has an impact on the morale of the staff. It also has a huge impact on the student, if the head of year had actually supported subject teachers and not undermined them then little Johnny might not have got U grades in all his core subjects. As expected he has not become a professional footballer as he often bragged he would, last thing I heard was that he was delivering drugs on an e bike. This may be different in private schools but was definitely my experience in state schools. This example is just one of many. Not just my experience either as it was often the main topic of conversation on the rare occasions we had time to sit in the staff room!

@Foostit I think you may have misunderstood me. I was comparing PE teachers to sports coach specialists. I often find good PE teachers care about the sporting progress and experience of all the children (regardless of ability). Whereas the coaches focus more on the elite, often to the detriment of others. There is a distinction between PE and sport and I think this can be blurred in some schools.