Recent curriculum change in Scotland has sought to bring increased coherence and greater teacher autonomy to curriculum development (Priestley and Humes, 2007).  The Curriculum for Excellence guidelines have shifted education from the ‘traditional’ subject based school curriculum towards an all-through 3-18 curriculum framed by a more constructivist approach to teaching and learning (Scottish Executive, 2007).  Teachers in Scotland are now being challenged to actively engage with curriculum innovation.

Alongside these developments physical education has emerged as an area of increased political interest.  Inspectorate evidence on primary school physical education (HMIE, 2001) and the report of the Review Group on Physical Education (2004) all argued for increased curriculum time, improved pupil experiences and professional development for primary teachers.  As a result of these recommendations and Curriculum for Excellence physical education has come to be housed within the core curriculum area of Health and Wellbeing and is the only subject that has been allocated a specific time schedule of two hours a week.  Additionally in 2007 the Scottish Government approached the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh to develop an innovative physical education professional development opportunity for primary teachers, the Postgraduate Certificate (Pg Cert) in Primary Physical Education. 

This paper stems from a PhD study investigating educational change in primary physical education. Concerns have been raised both nationally (Armour & Duncombe, 2004) and within a European context  (Makopoulou and Armour, 2010) about the quality of physical education professional learning opportunities offered to teachers and how knowledge and skills gained are put into practice.  The main question guiding this research asked how primary teachers with a further qualification in primary physical education construed and took forward curriculum change in primary physical education; focussing on how their additional subject knowledge influenced the curriculum, their teaching practice and the wider school.  The study explored the positive and negative constraints impacting on teachers as they attempted to cultivate an emergent pedagogy with a greater emphasis on creating pedagogical opportunities which were inclusive, developmentally appropriate, and which clearly articulated with national educational priorities.

Drawing on educational change theory, in particular the work of Fullan, the role of the participant teachers as ‘change agents’ and the complexity of the process of educational change was explored (Fullan, 1993).  The study expanded on Fullan’s (1993) description of change agentry to present empirical research illustrating how teachers as change agents think and act.  Supporting this line of analysis complexity theory was utilised as a lens to analyse and describe how curricular change is instigated and sustained when embedded within educational systems that are acknowledged as being complex, diverse and unpredictable. (Morrison, 2008).

Reflecting the conference theme this paper will discuss how participating in an innovative professional development opportunity empowered the participant teachers. They reported feeling more confident about teaching physical education and consequently this improved their competence. Drawing on their generalist class teacher experience along with the knowledge and skills gained from the Pg Cert the teachers adopted a more inclusive, collaborative and connected approach to teaching and learning in physical education.

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