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Each child attending an Irish Primary School should receive 30
minutes
active physical education each day.
According to the 1999 Curriculum
one hour per week is the recommended time allocation.
A modern syllabus, which emphasises the importance of psychomotor
skills among primary school children, should be published in
consultation with teachers.
In 1999, the curriculum was launched and
teachers were involved in consultations, but it took until 2006 for the
Physical Education Curriculum (Government of Ireland, 1999b) to be
implemented.
Publish a handbook giving teachers of all ages and levels of experience
practical guidelines for teaching physical education in all classes.
Alongside the curriculum was published the Teacher Guidelines
(Government of Ireland, 1999c) to fulfil this role. In January 2006, the
resource materials for teaching physical education (Primary Schools'
Sports Initiative, 2006) were launched. The resource materials
contained on a CD-rom were distributed to all schools and consist of
lesson plans and resource materials for each strand for each class group
aligned with the curriculum.
Provide a National Certificate Course with a minimum of 120 hours,
which can be undertaken at pre-service and in-service levels.
No such
course exists as yet. Only St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra offer a
postgraduate certificate course consisting of four, twenty hour modules.
Provide local in-service courses staffed by competent and highly
motivated tutors.
The Irish Primary Physical Education Association was
formed in 2002 and co-ordinate a number of In-service Physical
Education Summer Course’s in conjunction with the Education Centres.
A number of Teacher Professional Communities (TPCs) in primary
physical education are in existence (6 in 2011) and these TPC’s facilitate
at least one workshop a term for teachers.
Appoint a group of specialist advisors who will motivate and provide
practical guidelines to teachers in their own schools on the teaching of
physical education.
A group of 26 teachers were trained as tutors to
‘mediate’ the Physical Education Curriculum (Government of Ireland,
1999b) as part of national in-service from 2004-2006. Following this
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two year role they were reduced to 13 tutors. These tutors continued to
support teachers until 2010, though the number of tutors continued to
decrease each year and job descriptions changed. Currently support
provision is being re-designed by the newly formed Professional
Development Service for Teachers (PDST).
Cutbacks continue to inhibit the consolidation of school physical education with
the Minister for Education cutting the annual physical education grant in 2002.
Although many positive statements were made during the eighties and nineties
concerning the value of the subject, no major change in the position of the subject
within the curriculum occurred (Duffy, 1997). Physical education, due to lack of
government investment at many levels (for example,
provision of equipment, facilities,
professional development opportunities and research) has only progressed marginally
from its position at the turn of the 20
th
century.
In the early 1990’s the publication of two reports by the Primary Review Body
and the Review Body on the Primary Curriculum saw the beginning of the next period
of change in the Irish Primary Curriculum. The Report of the Review Body on the
Primary Curriculum (Government of Ireland, 1990) on physical education stated that
while the vast majority of inspectors found the physical education curriculum suitable,
teachers found it unrealistic and felt that they required specialist knowledge. The
reporting committee found that in the case of
primary generalist teachers, they required
detailed specification of aims and objectives of physical education. Teachers needed to
know what skills, knowledge and attitudes were expected of the children in their
classes. Teachers felt that practical guidelines to achieve these were also necessary as
well as the appropriate resources and facilities to be made available in order to
implement the new curriculum. An appropriate programme of pre- and in-service
training was also highlighted as an area to be addressed with the implementation of a
new
curriculum, mainly due to the lack of confidence of teachers with the delivery of
the subject. The report also recommended that the physical education time allocation in
the Colleges of Education be increased so that newly qualified teachers felt more
confident teaching physical education. The Review Body recommended that some level
of specialisation among teachers should be encouraged and that each school should have
at least one teacher with a particular interest and expertise in this area to help support
the other teachers in the school. Another recommendation of the report was that
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employment of specially qualified teachers who could service a number of schools
would also be of benefit for safety reasons and because of the nature of
the skills that
are required in specialised forms of physical education. The similarities can be seen
between these recommendations and those made over half a century previously. These
recommendations led to the NCCA initiating revision of the curriculum in 1991. The
draft curriculum was published in 1997 which brings us to the current situation with the
launch of the Primary Curriculum in 1999 and the national rollout of the programmes
spread over the following four to six years. The implementation date for physical
education in primary schools was September 2006, seven years after its launch.
The curricular reforms, reviews and recommendations outlined above show both
how far we have come in Ireland and yet how far we have still to go to ensure teachers
are prepared to teach quality programmes of physical education. Educational reforms
which did not include
teachers in their design, or account for teacher professional
development in their implementation have been shown to be unsuccessful and
professional development opportunities which are not embedded in curricular reform
also struggle to be successful. Teachers can resent reform when it is imposed on them
and they feel neither part of or supported to implement the changes (Villegas-Reimers,
2003). Although many of the reforms and recommendations outlined above involved
teachers at certain stages, they were not fully sustained due to lack of financial
investment in on-going support, time investment in professional
development nor did
they have a local focus.
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