Doing PE at Stoke Lodge – the view from the inside

The year is 2014. The TVG1 application is in process, but what was happening behind the scenes at Cotham School? As 2014 opened, Cotham had already stopped using Stoke Lodge for sport and was investigating hiring pitches at Golden Hill instead of continuing with shared use of Stoke Lodge.

In May 2014 the PE department presented proposals to the school governors, seeking a new all-weather pitch on the school site because ‘Without time spent on travel, students would benefit from more playing time, there would be greater flexibility in the timetable and also ecological advantages…’

The Head of PE said that offsite provision of different types would still be needed to provide the full curriculum, and also during the exam period when the sports hall is out of use, and for matches etc.

To get a sense of how Cotham uses Stoke Lodge in the summer term (when it is most keen to take pupils off site due to exams taking place at the school), we looked at usage in the summer term of 2022. There are 10 possible 2-hour PE sessions per week, and over 10 weeks of that term, Cotham typically used Stoke Lodge for 6 to 8 sessions per week. Its lowest usage was 4 sessions in a week – obviously this is to some extent weather dependent, but the weather tends to be worse in other terms. How long are those sessions? On 2 occasions the actual teaching time provided was 1 hour (i.e. just 50% of the timetabled lesson). But that’s very much the exception: the average lesson was around 45-50 minutes and the shortest was just 35 minutes of the 2-hour period. The school has stated that travel time is about 35 minutes each way, so pupils inevitably spend longer in transit than actually doing PE. The PE staff are right to be concerned about this, of course – and Ofsted expressed a similar concern as long ago as 1999 (when Cotham was choosing to use Coombe Dingle Sports Complex, having abandoned its playing fields at Kellaway Avenue):

So the preference of the PE staff was clear, and was underlined again at a governors’ meeting in July 2014:

But the governors’ minutes suggest there was something of a power struggle going on – the Learning and Wellbeing Committee wanted to improve PE provision for Cotham students principally by doing PE on the main school site, while Sandra Fryer, then Chair of the Finance, Premises and General Purposes Committee, had drawn up an options paper showing alternative plans for the school’s use of Stoke Lodge. In tomorrow’s post we’ll look at that options paper and what it tells us about what Cotham really wants from Stoke Lodge – because clearly the school recognises that travelling from Cotham Lawn Road to Stoke Lodge for PE is not a good solution for pupils from an educational perspective.