PE and Sport Premium

PE & Sport Premium 2026/27: What’s Happening Now?

The PE and Sport Premium continues for the 2026/27 academic year, with updated government guidance now available for primary schools in England. The funding is designed to help schools make additional and sustainable improvements to PE, sport and physical activity for all primary-aged pupils. [

What’s the focus for 2026/27?

Schools should use their funding to:

  • Support all children to live healthy, active lives
  • Make participation in PE and school sport easier and more accessible
  • Ensure children can achieve and thrive through physical activity, whatever their background or ability
  • Improve health, wellbeing, personal development and academic attainment
  • Build capacity and capability within the school, so improvements are sustainable and benefit pupils in future years.

The latest guidance also says schools should aim to provide at least two hours of high-quality PE and sport each week, alongside a wide range of extracurricular sport and competitive opportunities.

💷 Funding for 2026/27

For this academic year, schools with 17 or more eligible pupils receive £6,240 plus £10 per pupil. Schools with 16 or fewer eligible pupils receive £390 per pupil.

🤝 How can we support you?

Through the Chippenham Sports Partnership, we want to help schools use their funding effectively and sustainably. From sporting festivals, SEND inclusion to leadership, targeted participation, staff development and links into community sport, our programme can help schools create meaningful opportunities for their pupils.

The key message for 2026/27 is not simply about spending your PE and Sport Premium. It is about using it to create sustainable change and ensuring more children develop positive, enjoyable and lasting relationships with physical activity.

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PE and sport premium for primary schools – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

How to use the PE and sport premium

Schools must use the funding to make additional and sustainable improvements to the quality of the PE, sport and physical activity they provide.

This means that you must use the PE and sport premium to:

  • build capacity and capability within the school to ensure that improvements made now are sustainable and will benefit pupils joining the school in future years
  • develop or add to the PE, sport and physical activity that your school provides

Sustainable improvement

Making sustainable improvements should be considered as a priority. This is often achieved through developing and investing in the knowledge and skills of the teaching staff and other school staff who may have involvement in supporting a lasting change to the school’s approach to physical activity, curriculum PE or provision of school sport.

Key indicators

You should use the PE and sport premium to secure improvements in the following 5 key indicators:

  1. Increased confidence, knowledge and skills of all staff in teaching PE and sport
  2. Engagement of all pupils in regular physical activity
  3. The profile of PE and sport is raised across the school as a tool for whole school improvement
  4. Broader experience of a range of sports and physical activities offered to all pupils
  5. Increased participation in competitive sport

Examples of how these may be achieved include:

  • providing staff with professional development, mentoring, appropriate training and resources to help them teach PE and sport more effectively to all pupils and embed physical activity across your school
  • embedding physical activity into the school day through encouraging active travel to and from school, active break times and holding active lessons and teaching
  • providing targeted activities or support to involve and encourage the least active children
  • raising attainment in primary school swimming to meet requirements of the national curriculum before the end of key stage 2 – every child should leave primary school able to swim

Active mile

Active miles can be an effective way to make regular physical activity part of the school day. If schools choose to take part in an active mile, you should use existing playgrounds, fields, halls and sports facilities.

It is not appropriate to use PE and sport premium funding to fund the cost of a specially constructed course.

Raising attainment in primary school swimming

Swimming and water safety are national curriculum requirements and essential life skills. The national curriculum requirement is that by the end of key stage 2, pupils should be taught to:

  • swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
  • use a range of strokes effectively, for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke
  • perform a safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

You can use the PE and sport premium to fund the professional development and training that is available to schools to train staff to support high-quality swimming and water safety lessons for their pupils.

You can also use the PE and sport premium to provide additional top-up swimming lessons to pupils who have not been able to meet the national curriculum requirements for swimming and water safety – after the delivery of core swimming and water safety lessons.

What your funding should not be used for

You should not use your funding to:

  • fund capital expenditure
  • employ coaches or specialist teachers to cover planning preparation and assessment (PPA) arrangements – this should be funded from your core staffing budgets
  • teach the minimum requirements of the national curriculum (or, in the case of academies and free schools, to teach your existing PE curriculum) – apart from top-up swimming lessons after pupils’ completion of core lessons

Capital expenditure

Where schools have an existing capitalisation policy, you should use this policy to determine whether proposed spending would be considered to be capital expenditure.

If a school does not have a capitalisation policy it remains for them to determine what qualifies as capital, but you might wish to use the following resources:

Small purchases should not be capitalised. Your school or trust should determine an appropriate (de minimis) value, below which transactions should be charged to revenue.

Accountability

You are accountable for how you use the PE and sport premium funding allocated to you. The funding must be spent for the purpose it was provided – to make additional and sustainable improvements to the PE, sport and physical activity offered.

As part of their role, governors and academy trustees should monitor:

  • how the funding is being spent
  • how it fits into school improvement plans
  • the impact it is having on pupils

Schools and local authorities must follow the terms set out in the conditions of grant. If a local authority or a school fails to comply with these terms, the Secretary of State may require the repayment of the whole or any part of the premium paid to the local authority or school.

Online reporting

You must publish details of how you spend your PE and sport premium funding by 31 July at the latest.

Online reporting must clearly show:

  • the amount of PE and sport premium received
  • a full breakdown of how it has been spent or will be spent before of the end of the academic year
  • the impact the school has seen on pupils’ PE, physical activity, and sport participation and attainment
  • how the improvements will be sustainable in the future

You must also publish the percentage of pupils within your year 6 cohort in the 2022 to 2023 academic year who met the national curriculum requirement to:

  • swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
  • use a range of strokes effectively, for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke
  • perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

Attainment data for year 6 pupils should be provided from their most recent swimming lessons. This may be data from years 3, 4, 5 or 6, depending on the swimming programme at your school. It is essential to retain attainment data from swimming lessons in years 3 to 5 to be able to report this accurately in year 6.

To help you plan, monitor and report on the impact of your spending, partners in the physical education and school sport sector have developed a template. The template can be accessed through the Association for PE and Youth Sport Trust websites. It is recommended that the template is used to record your activity throughout the year, in readiness of publication at the end of the school year.

Review of online reports

School online reporting will be monitored by DfE. We will look at a selection of schools’ online reports to confirm that use of the PE and sport premium described in the report meets the requirements outlined within this guidance and the conditions of grant document.

Where concerns or discrepancies are identified the department will make contact with the school to address and investigate these fully. In the event that any concerns are confirmed, appropriate and proportionate action will be taken against the school, which may include action to recover funding from the school.

Further guidance

You can get further guidance at: