debtForget Santa If you really, really want to do something this Christmas, whether it’s better social care or lower utility bills, writing to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss is the right step. Ubbenmoy has inspired the European Championship-winning England football team to post an open letter to two Conservative leadership candidates calling for football to be made available to all schoolgirls. After winning the women’s gold and men’s bronze medals at the Commonwealth Games, the England hockey team has created its own wish list.
Both letters required a guarantee of a minimum of two hours of PE per week. England Hockey is also calling for better facilities and more physical education teachers in primary and secondary schools, with team sports at the center of physical education classes. They weren’t the first. A joint letter from the Football Association, Lawn Tennis Association, England and Wales Cricket Commission and the chief executives of England’s rugby union and league also called on the incoming prime minister to make physical education a priority.
Lobbying for more sports in schools is nothing new, but it is timely. In July, Youth Sports Trust chief executive Ali Oliver noted that this year had witnessed the largest increase in childhood obesity recorded in the UK. school sports”.
Unusually, today’s problem is not a funding issue. Despite availability of up to £16,000 ‘sports premium’ subsidies for primary schools in England, PE offers are on the decline, with £320m pledged to the scheme next year . Sport England has provided him with £13.5m for the training of secondary school teachers, with around 75% of schools funded.
Last year, the House of Lords formed a special commission to try to understand what went wrong. Ten years after the London 2012 Games, Britain’s youth are not as healthy and active as previous governments promised. A number of experts were invited to provide evidence, including Lady Sue Campbell, FA’s director of women’s football. Campbell, who has repeatedly warned the government that the Olympic legacy is being squandered, did nothing during the hearings. Gym time was under pressure overall, she said. This means schools are hiring fewer PE teachers and after-school clubs have taken a hit.
“It wasn’t a lack of investment,” she said. “It was a lack of strategy and a lack of controlled implementation.” In other words, much of the money was not used in the right way or for its intended purpose.
This was exactly what Campbell predicted in 2010 when Michael Gove cut funding for the school’s sports partnership, which had been developed as the leader of the Youth Sports Trust. Are we listening to women with a winning record? Secondary schools operating within these schemes have increased the number of students playing sports for at least two hours each week, from 20% to 90%.
When the government ended the plan, it offered principals “the freedom to organize the sport themselves” in lieu of actual support. Alan Watkinson, Mo Farah’s former gym teacher, was another person who predicted the outcome in his Smith Institute essay in 2013. Prioritizing “individual effort and effort,” he writes, “adds to an already overloaded workload for school leaders.” The important task of “dealing with the obesity time bomb” was left entirely to chance.
And then the wheels turn. In February 2013 Ofsted called for a national school sports strategy based on school sports partnerships. Currently, the Rose Commission is proposing a national plan for sports and recreation. It contains similar recommendations for school strategies that people who know me have been suggesting for a decade.
UK Sport head Peter Keen, who oversaw Team GB’s gold rush in London 2012, sees the loss of the school’s partnership scheme as a decade of lost opportunity. “Its design features and philosophy put school sports at the center of our thinking about sports strategy and child development in general,” he says. We must return to the dialogue and reassert that physical literacy is essential to development.”
Nick Pink, CEO of England Hockey, agrees. “Over the last decade, this has been a big challenge for public schools,” he says. “The lack of strategy at the topline level has set us back. That is why we are seeing this challenge to the legacy system of the event as it must be backed up by a good strategy.
“British sport speaks well of winning over the integrity of sport, backed up by a physical education program in schools that provides children and young people with the basic developmental skills needed to stay involved in sport for life. I also need.”
Research on “physical literacy” shows that it is crucial for a child’s development and future health. It can be argued that it is as important as numeracy or reading ability. Teenage dropout rates remain high, and return-to-sport campaigns like This Girl Can are a remedy for a problem that doesn’t need to exist in the first place.
So one of the strongest proposals in the commission’s report is to make sport a core subject in the curriculum. “It’s strange that it hasn’t happened yet,” says Keen. “That’s not to deny that many people’s experiences with physical education in school weren’t good enough, and there’s a lot that needs to change about physical education.”
Whoever becomes the next Prime Minister, this is the next sporting battle to be faced and resolved.
