A sporting chance

One of the most surreal moments of the Christmas holiday was reading that the Queen was going to major on sport in her Christmas Day message. This led to thoughts about her potential direct intervention in the school sports debate, perhaps making a plea to the government for the continuation of school sports partnerships. Of course that didn't happen, but the Queen did, at some length, deal with sport and its importance to the nation.  

That led me to think about the recent debates about competitive sport in school, our support for the Olympics, and the government's approach. The evidence is clear; physical activity, including, but importantly not limited to, competitive sport, brings long-term health, social and educational benefits. There are therefore strong grounds for incentivising and investing in physical activity at school level, both to reduce the long-term cost to the health service, and to increase social behaviour as against anti-social behaviour, and thus reduce long-term costs to the justice system. And since the benefits go well beyond the educational, we need, as a national priority, to find ways of investing in physical activity for all young people.

But I'm pretty convinced that a singular focus on competitive school sport for all is both misguided and simplistic. Of course there is a place for competition, and some, perhaps many, young people are motivated by competition, and of this number some will develop a particular talent to excellence, perhaps to professional or even Olympic standard. But not everyone can be excellent, and I, for one, have long ago given up any dream of opening for England at the SCG. And we can't use that ambition by itself to motivate young people, as it will become apparent very quickly that it's unrealistic. What is important is that everyone is encouraged to have fun and to enjoy some form of physical activity, be that competitive in teams or individually, or collaborative, such as cheerleading. (Of course cheerleading can be competitive, but the preparation is almost exclusively collaborative.) Young people will engage willingly with activities which are well taught and which they enjoy - but for longer-term involvement it's important that there is a variety of opportunity.

In what I might (at the risk of being ridiculed) call the ‘good old days' when I was at school (I mean the early 1970s) there was extensive school and inter-school sport and I hated every minute of it. It was only when I left school and indeed university that I took up middle distance running - never competitively except against myself, though I enjoyed the races — and that was initially simply because I felt better after a run. So it is horses for courses, and part of the job of a teacher should be to find out which course is right for which horse.

Inter-schools physical activity does not happen by itself; there is an organisational overhead - someone has to arrange the leagues, book the playing fields, arrange the transport, engage the referees, keep the scores, and arrange the tournaments. In (again) the old days this might have been a local education authority, and in these more enlightened times it has often been the local School Sports Partnership focused around specialist schools. The administration can be made more efficient, but it can't be done away with entirely, or the whole apparatus will wither, as it did when LMS gave schools their first taste of freedom. The annual Black Country Sports Tournament brings together hundreds of the best athletes from four local authorities, but the organisation is no small task.

So there needs to be an physical activity infrastructure, and it can't be managed by schools by themselves, as they just don't have the economies of scale. So, however he cuts the cake, the Secretary of State will have to find a way of supporting school sport beyond exhortation - ‘Play up, play up, and play the game!' as they did not say at my school. Or perhaps we should say ‘Pay up, pay up, and play the game'!

Anyway, thank you, your Majesty, for raising these thoughts!