MANOR Court Primary School in Chard is celebrating after being recognised for its commitment to competitive sport by achieving the prestigious Sainsbury’s School Games Mark award.

The Sainsbury’s School Games, supported by National Lottery funding from Sport England and delivered by the Youth Sport Trust, encourages young people to take part in competitive school sport.

The Games are made up of four levels of activity – competition in schools, between schools, at county/area level and a national event for the most talented school-age athletes.

To recognise good practice schools are encouraged to apply for the Games Mark and Manor Court has achieved the bronze award.

Over the last year Manor Court has taken part in a range of competitive sporting opportunities against other local primaries, including a tennis competition, a Quad Kids athletics competition, a netball competition, a swimming competition, tag rugby, dance, rounders and cricket.

Pupils have had professional PE teaching from Pro-Coaching and the school has invested part of its Pupil Premium Sports funding towards this.

The school is taking part in the Big Pedal initiative, the UK’s largest interschool cycling and scooting challenge that inspires pupils, teachers and parents to choose two wheels for their journey to school. Each day of the challenge schools compete to see who can record the most pupils, staff and parents cycling or scooting to school.

Manor Court PE co-ordinator Geri Terry said: “The school recently delivered Sports Play Leader training to some of the Year 5 pupils. These children have been trained to run PE games at lunchtimes and ran the last inter-house competition, which included recording and collating the results.

“We have raised competition since September between peers by running house competitions every half-term.

These included penalty shoot-outs, a cross country run and a ‘rob the nest’ based rugby competition. The drive for competitive sport has never been greater at Manor Court – and from the signs of what’s going on, there’s going to be no stopping in the near future.”

Mike Diaper, Sport England director of community sport, said: “The Sainsbury’ s School Games is a fantastic way for young people to get into sport and Manor Court deserves this recognition for its commitment and dedication to developing the competition at school and in the local community.”