Meet Lucy Baldock:
Studied Level 3 PE Teaching Assistant apprenticeship
Lucy Baldock joined Highover in 2024 as a PE Teaching Assistant Apprentice. Having successfully completed her Level 3 Teaching Assistant apprenticeship with a PE, Health and Wellbeing Focus, she is now undertaking a Level 4 Sports Coach apprenticeship.
Find out more about expanding your PE provision, to make classroom learning more active and bring in fresh role-models
Impact of a PE, Health and Wellbeing Apprentice
In addition to being the Lower KS2 Lead, Tom Bennett, is also Lucy's workplace mentor at Highover.
"Lucy joined us as a PE teaching assistant but quickly felt more like a sports teacher than an apprentice. She is now a confident and skilled professional who can lead aspects of the lesson which frees up a teacher to work with a focus group of children who might be finding it more challenging, or vice versa. This means every child gets the best possible support in our PE lessons.
Through structured mentorship, hands-on experience, and continuous professional development, Lucy has transformed from a shy school leaver into a confident, impactful sports coach. Her presence has helped to:
- Improve the quality of PE lessons and enable all children to participate
- Maintain high levels of engagement in sport, especially in girls
- Improve the school’s capacity to run enrichment clubs and take pupils to fixtures
Playing a vital role to expand enrichment club activities
She has also played a vital role helping to arrange fixtures and allowing us to expand the range of enrichment club activities - all of which we are able to offer for free. I had a really nice comment from a parent last year about their child who isn’t involved in sport outside of school. The child ran up to a teammate to discuss tactics and selection for the upcoming fixture. The parent felt a great deal of pride because she’d never seen him so excited and enthusiastic about belonging to a team. Without Lucy leading the event, that wouldn't have happened..
Building a sense of belonging
I know Lucy and I share the same values when it comes to instilling a love of sport in our pupils. We both think it’s one of the most important things for children to be part of in terms of both their physical, mental and social development, giving them that sense of achieving something as part of a team and setting them up for success as
adults.
Lucy is a fantastic role model for all the children, especially our girls. We’re
lucky that we don’t see many girls dropping out of sport here at Highover and I think a lot of that is down to Lucy.