Lord Addington
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proposals they have to ensure that the quality of teaching of school-age sport increases the levels of participation in sport in later life.
Lord Addington
My Lords, I thank everybody who has found time in their schedules to speak in this debate. I pass on the apologies of my noble friend Lord Storey, who is unable to join us due to an illness in his family. I hope that he will catch up next time round.
When I tabled this Question a long time ago, I used the words “school-age sport” because I am rather wary of talking exclusively about school sport as it has never encompassed everything that is required in the education of sportsmen, particularly at amateur level. Indeed, most of my speech concerns amateur sportsmen. We have never had a system within schools that has reached out to everybody and provided them with a basis for the rest of their sporting life. When you are considering embarking on the next stage of your sporting career, you usually have to join a club at some point, certainly if you are an enthusiastic amateur. One of the great fault-lines in our sports participation is the high drop-out rates at the ages of 16, 18 and 21. At those ages our education process changes and work can intervene. We should aim to achieve a balance whereby people continue their participation in sport throughout their lives, or at least make a lasting commitment to it. If one is a very fit and healthy 16 year-old but becomes an unhealthy, paunchy 30 year-old, what was the point of bothering to be fit and healthy at 16? Although the picture of a trophy that you won at an under-15s event which hangs on your wall may help to incentivise you, exercise should be treated as the wonder drug in terms of gaining health benefits from sport. The Health and Social Care Bill should be ringing in our ears in that respect. If you are fit and healthy, virtually everything else that you do will become easier. Your school reports will announce that you are studying better. You are also better able to interact and less liable to catch some of the more debilitating diseases. Obesity will rarely be a part of your life.
What I am trying to get at is how we encourage sports participation throughout life. Schools alone have never achieved this. In the past few years many initiatives have come forward, many from government, on what we should try to do to integrate the state and the private sectors in this regard. There was a great deal of consensus on how you should reach out to both sectors, certainly until fairly recently. I have complained at times that there were so many initiatives on the part of various sports that you felt that the same kids were turning up to the same events and swapping tennis rackets for rugby balls, cricket bats or footballs, with a couple of other smaller sports thrown in. The same people tended to turn up for the different sports, but that was possibly a personal impression. I have asked my next question before, but have we ever established which of those schemes was the best in retaining participation in sport through to adulthood? That is the real test. I do not think that we have found that out. Once we have established that, we can build on it. To go back to the amateur sports clubs, something like 22 per cent of our volunteers are involved in them and 2 million people take part in them. They are the big society writ large. In this country that sector is largely self-generating and self-funding. We have a tradition of owning our own sports clubs as regards some of our major sports. That is not the case for all sports but it is for many of them. The funding is provided by the individuals taking part in the various sports and by activities such as running a bar. They have taken on a huge amount of sporting activity which, in other nations, is provided by the state at local government level. These people should be supported, and the main way we can do this is to make sure they have a steady supply of recruits.
When I tried to plan what I was going to say, I used the phrase “elephant in the room” about the School Sports Partnership, something which has led to a degree of controversy in sport which those of us who looked at it a few months ago were not used to. Ofsted praises the project very highly. I have not heard too much against it, but since its demise I have heard some people say “The one I met was not that great”. Its objective was to make links between club and sport and to make use of the expertise and enthusiasm of the club, an environment you are in because you actually love the sport—or at least like it. I do not care what you call the scheme or how you do it, it is the enthusiasm that is the important bit. In times of austerity, it might look like something that was ripe for the picking—particularly to someone who was not tuned into this process.
What have we learnt from this process? What is the best way to achieve our aims? The particular individual scheme does not matter, in the end, nor does its name. What matters is how we take the benefit that was created in the good examples and go on with them. We can talk long and hard about what we actually think should be in this process of transferring from school-age sport to adult sport but we can be absolutely sure that, unless we have input from the top down that encourages this, we will miss out on a lot of youngsters who want to get involved. The social benefits—the value of the company of adults who are not your parents but who are interested in you and supportive—cannot be underestimated.
Some parents become a taxi service that runs the child everywhere to get on with their sporting life—the ones who say, “If it is summer it must be cricket”, or “If it is winter it must be football”, and “Oh, we have basketball in between”; I quote one of my neighbours as he helped me change a tyre the other day. We need to reach the group that do not have that support, or at least make it easier for them to access it. If we can do this then we are achieving and expanding our base in one of the most valuable community activities we have.
The world will not change if local team X manages to get a couple more trophies. It will change if we can encourage people to take part in that sport, right down to the third team. If we can encourage people who do not play at the highest level to take part—even if it is just a social activity—we are achieving most of our aims: the regular exercise, the social interaction, the bonding that goes on. If we can encourage people to come into that process early enough we can build on it and do what we can with it.
The political class has put a great deal of effort into encouraging this. We will be making a mistake if we allow doctrinaire activity to get in the way of school-age participation. I have heard quite a lot of worrying things from the Government about the importance of competitive sport. I do not know what uncompetitive sport is: exercise and training? I promised, a while ago, not to use the example of the football match in the film “Kes” again, but I am coming back to it. Those who are familiar with it will remember bored, cold people kicking each other and the ball, half of them not taking part at all. For too many, that is the experience of sport. If, in order to have a competitive match you go down to lower ability groups who are not interested and not tuned in, you can go back to that kind of situation. I hope the Minister can tell me that the importance of good education and connections with outside sporting bodies will be given priority; and that, although we want people to be involved in sport, we will not sacrifice the chance of an enjoyable experience for the sake of simply saying, “You are competing”.
Baroness Heyhoe Flint
My Lords, within the understanding and appreciation of the debate proposed by my noble friend Lord Addington, who I thank greatly, there has to be a key assumption that the quality and quantity of teaching of school-age sport is such that both factors are perfect: in other words, enough weekly hours of sports tuition and of a high enough standard to enthuse youngsters at school so that they wish to continue with such activities when they leave full-time education.
Let us look on the bright side and assume that both these key factors of school sport—quality and quantity—are answered in the positive. Both the current Government and the previous Administration have made efforts to increase the hours devoted to school sport and to improve the qualifications of the tutors and coaches in schools. Even in these difficult economic times, it is therefore very good news that the Department for Education announced £65 million of funding for school years 2011 to 2013 to release secondary school physical education teachers to organise competitive sports and train primary school teachers. Additionally, Sport England announced £35.5 million of lottery funding up to 2014-15 to support the new school games initiative inspired by the values and profile of the soon to be upon us 2012 Olympic and Paralympics.
Common sense decrees that if school sport is an enjoyable and uplifting experience, and if the encouragement is there from the PE staff, youngsters may wish to seek similar happy sporting experiences when they leave school. However, there are many negatives looming that can be erased only by a higher level of investment, and therein lies a drawback—a lack of facilities and organisers for casual sport and recreation and lack of ability to unlock the doors of sports venues in community schools to enable community sport and recreation activities to take place. Just drive around your own city, town or village and observe how many facilities are barred and shuttered after school hours. How many amateur sports clubs have expired through lack of funding to enable them regularly to hire costly indoor sports arenas or artificial turf pitches and the use of floodlights, which help when it is dark? The desire to take up sport after leaving school may be thwarted by lack of local organisations.
However, all is not doom and gloom. Data from the Taking Part survey—a national survey of culture and sport by the DCMS—show that a higher number of adults who currently play sport definitely played sport while at school. Perhaps I could indulge in an initiative promoted and actioned by the England and Wales Cricket Board, again, and show how a governing body of sport—and there are 320 such organisations recognised in the UK—can grasp the nettle and mirror the ECB, which has invested focused resources into increasing participation and growth in the adult game through its adult participation strategy as part of its Whole Sport Plan programme.
Cricket has established strong links between school sport and the club game through the Chance to Shine programme. Chance to Shine is a charity that aims to establish by 2015 regular coaching and competitive cricket opportunities to 5,200 primary schools and 1,500 secondary schools. Last year, more than 1 million boys and girls took part in the schools cricket programme —44 per cent were girls, I am pleased to say—but the most heartening factor, which is perfectly in tune with the theme of this debate, is that more than 29,000 children, 30 per cent of whom were girls, migrated from Chance to Shine schools to local clubs, thus demonstrating the success of the programme in getting more people to play sport once they leave school.
This is just a small case study that shows how the responsibility and drive of just one national governing body has solved a funding problem by working with partners to introduce more opportunities to schools and colleges to reduce barriers, such as extra time commitments and travel, in order to support the retention of young people in sport at the traditional drop-off age of 16. The ECB has also put increased resources into volunteering in sport, which means that young people can be organised, coached and umpired by their peers—not by us noble Lords, I hasten to add—rather than by teachers, who may not have the time or facilities to hand to be of value. Through the adult participation strategy, the ECB is ensuring that cricket is delivered to the 16-plus age group as a continuation of its previous involvement. The ECB is also increasing its investment in colleges of further education and universities.
Maintaining participation in sport, once youngsters leave school, is the biggest challenge facing policy-makers, and we all know the inherent benefits of a fit and healthy nation. Looking to London 2012, the DCMS has developed programmes for school leavers to embrace sporting activities—in particular in Places People Play, which is a £135 million initiative that is being delivered by Sport England in partnership with the BOA and the British Paralympic Association.
Government must continue to take up the responsibility of helping to provide the sporting pathway for school leavers to journey into an adult sporting environment and at least help to provide the opportunity and facilities. After all, you can take a horse to water, but unless that trough is filled, the poor old horse will go very thirsty.
Baroness Howells of St Davids
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for raising this debate. His opening speech and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Heyhoe Flint, were enlightening. What I am about to say about the merits of sport in schools will take a different turn.
On Monday night, I attended an awards evening hosted by Tessa Sanderson’s foundation. Tessa is a gold medallist. The foundation, in collaboration with Newham College, seeks out talent, trains and gives much support to those who, because of poverty or ill health, may have missed the opportunity to get involved in sport. Many recipients of the awards paid tribute to the help that they received and talked of how their lives had been turned around. Most of the audience were so moved that there was hardly a dry eye in the room.
One awardee, sitting in his wheelchair, told his story. He left his school at 16 after the break-up of his parents’ marriage. He got into drugs, gangs, stealing and so on, and became a “no-good person”—those are his words—until one night, he decided to steal a motorbike, which he drove into a wall. He broke his back and lay in a hospital bed for some considerable time, contemplating suicide. He said he blamed no one, and said that it was his fault and that he needed no sympathy. That was until his mentor came into his life. His mentor introduced him to sport and he has been the recipient of many medals. He is hoping to go for gold in the 2012 Olympic Games. His mentor says that he has a good chance of raising the union jack with pride. His one regret is that he was not introduced to the buzz of sport during his school days. He is now financially secure, enjoying life and would like to influence others.
For most young British black males, sport of one sort or another has been the only means of upward mobility. The have used their talents across as many athletic fields as they have been exposed to. There are too many names to list them here, but noble Lords will have heard those names, Saturday after Saturday. I ask the Minister to consider new ways to improve the quality of teaching sport in schools.
I should also like to introduce the Minister to a programme that I have been involved with through my trusteeship of the Windward Islands Research and Education Foundation. With the enormous support of St George’s University, we launched in 2010 a programme called “Sport for Health” in the primary schools on the island of Grenada. In one year, this project has taken off so well that we are hoping for a gold medal in 2012. The prospective gold medallist is a champion for the project. Also, many footballers of Caribbean origin are working with us. Our patron is Garth Crooks, and he is very much a working patron.
There is considerable evidence of the adverse effects of non-communicable disorders on the quality of life. Those disorders should not be an inevitable burden on society, given that it would cost so little to attach sport to school programmes on healthy diets. Already, those pupils in Grenada are using sport to reduce obesity and other non-communicable diseases. Let us shift the paradigm through healthy eating—which we already encourage in schools—and add sport for health. There is no disgrace in dying healthily. Let us go for gold in our schools.
Baroness Grey-Thompson
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for raising this debate and asking some very important questions about what it is that works in sport so that we can improve on it.
It is incredibly important to think about school sport at this time while we all become obsessed with the Olympics and Paralympics. With 233 days until the start of the Olympics and 266 until the Paralympics, we have a unique chance to inspire people to be healthier. I admit to having mixed views on attaching participation rates to the Games. I do not believe that this is the right way to measure the success of the Games, but we have no better time to target people.
I declare interests as a board member of UK Athletics and the London Marathon, as a trustee of Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, and as chair of the Commission on the Future of Women's Sport. As a Paralympian, although I have a background in competitive sport, these days I am learning a lot more about participation, which just means that I get slower every year. However, I am passionate about what school sport can encourage, and not just because I was successful. Actually, I was not that great as a child. I spent a long time doing physical activity before I became good at sport, and I had the opportunity to be okay for a long time.
In sport we need role models, whether they are the gold medal-winning athlete or an amazing PE teacher. Like others in your Lordships' House, I do not believe that what we have is right. Perhaps instead of asking questions, I shall make some suggestions for change. Girls leave school half as likely as boys to meet recommended activity levels. Competitive sport is great for some people. I loved it. It works for sporty girls, but it is important not to forget the rest. Girls are missing out on the health and personal development benefits that participating in sport can bring.
Head teachers and governors should be doing all that they can, and in my opinion a lot more, to ensure that PE and sport is provided in such a way that girls find engaging and establish healthy activities and habits for the rest of their lives. If I could wave a magic wand and be just a little radical, I would extend the school day and have PE every single day of the week, to encourage that habit. It would not be something that girls did twice a week; they would do it five days a week. The schools that give more choice on the type of activities in which girls become involved, and where PE teachers pay attention not just to the talented girls, will achieve far higher participation rates.
So, for once, I am asking the Government not for more money for this area but to encourage schools to do more and be more creative, because 80 per cent of women do not currently do enough exercise to be healthy. I do not forget that parents have a role to play in their children's lives and I do not want to negate their responsibility, but it is a challenge for some parents. If you are a mum around my age, you probably had a fairly miserable time in PE in schools. You will have been sent out on cross-country runs and to play hockey wearing gym knickers and not allowed to wear gloves. I speak to so many women whose expression, when I mention sport to them, just turns cold. Because their experience is negative, they do not understand some of the benefits that they can pass on to their children by encouraging them to do sport.
I also understand that sports development is really hard. I did it as a job for two years—my first job on graduation. I understand that that cultural change will not happen on its own. British sport will be better for more girls taking part at school. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, I do not really mind what it is called, but we have to do something to encourage change. If more girls do sport in school, more will carry on afterwards, more will get involved in coaching, volunteering and administration. If the Government want to change representation of women at all levels of society, what better place to start than school sport?
Journalist Liz Jones wrote recently what I would describe as an “interesting article” about women in sport. She was right in some aspects, saying that some girls do not like competitive sport, but we should not throw the baby out with the bath-water. I disagree with her comments about women with sinewy arms not looking attractive and that they should not be involved in competitive sport. I prefer to think about a woman looking strong. We have to encourage girls and women to think differently about what is attractive and what being a strong woman really means for them. In January next year, the Women's Sports and Fitness Foundation is releasing a report on girls’ attitudes to sport and physical activity, and I think that this will provide valuable insight into how we can make improvements. I will take the liberty of personally delivering it into every noble Lord’s pigeon hole.
Having travelled around the world with the Sport for Good Foundation, I have seen some amazing examples of good practice—projects that have recognised how hard it is to engage girls, and so have worked with their mums. I would love more of this. What better way to encourage daughters and mums than to do sport together?
Just this afternoon, I visited a wonderful school: Highbury Grove in Islington. Yes, it is on a new site, which has the most amazing sports facilities. It has a 200 metre track; it has a swimming pool; it is absolutely stunning. Through sport and music the school has turned around attendance and improved academic grades. Credit should be given to the head and the staff, who see the importance of physical activity. They also work with the local community. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Heyhoe Flint, my plea is for more of that. School sites that are open to a wider community can help change the patterns of participation.
My second favourite topic around school sport is young disabled people being active. There is so much more to do in this area, and I know of many positive changes through Sport England and the other home country sports councils. I do not see enough disabled people being active enough, whether at school or beyond. I am pleased that there have been some positive moves in the direction of more clearly being able to measure participation of disabled people—it is a real challenge. So many reasons are given for the barriers to participation, but I have never believed that something being a challenge is a reason to not try.
This is where schools can make a massive difference to young disabled people, because, if we want a more inclusive society, what better way to do it than through sport? It is even more important that disabled children, very young children, are encouraged to play and be active, because those benefits carry on for the rest of their lives. I also believe that, if we have more disabled people active, that contributes to wider government targets of helping to get more disabled people into work. What I would love to see in this area is better teacher training so that there is far greater understanding of adaptive PE. Where I probably am very radical is that I think we need specialist PE teaching at primary level. I know that there is a cost to that, but I would love general teachers at primary level to have much greater understanding of working with everybody in their class. Finally, teachers need to understand what talent is in disabled pupils so that they encourage and give realistic goals, not tell them they are brilliant just because they are disabled and are having a go. There is a big difference between participation and elite sport.
I do not believe that it is all doom and gloom, but neither do I think that we have it right. If this were a school report, it would read “Could do better”, and our young people deserve much better than the provision they currently receive.
Lord Smith of Finsbury
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and a pleasure to be taking part in this very short but important debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for tabling the subject. I want to make three brief points about why school-age sport—that means sport in schools, sports associated with schools but outside school hours and sport completely separate from school—is so important. It is important because it can and should be preparation for sporting endeavour and even sporting excellence in later life. The quality of the teaching, of the facilities and of the enthusiasm that is communicated to youngsters at school are crucial in helping the transfer from school age to later life. It can be life-changing. I know that because I first found informal sport—through hillwalking and mountaineering—at school. It became a very important part of my life subsequently. As an aside, I say that I hope very strongly that we can rediscover a spirit of adventure for young people, the ability to take risks in engaging in informal recreation in the outdoors, because we have lost a lot of that in recent years and we need to find it again.
In both informal and formal sport, sport at a young age can lead to riches later in life. Secondly, sport can enhance the educational original experience and overall quality of a school. Sports, both competitive and non-competitive, can make a huge contribution to the atmosphere and culture of a school and the ability of pupils to engage with academic subjects, as well as with their sport. That is why, when I was Secretary of State at DCMS, I encouraged Sport England to come forward with a substantial programme of funding for school sports co-ordinators. That is why we endeavoured, with a modest degree of success, to prevent the selling off of school playing fields. It is why the school partnership programme was a valuable attempt to link the enthusiasm of sporting clubs and societies with the engagement of pupils in schools. These things are not just important for sport; they are so important for the quality of the education as a whole that pupils receive.
My third point links a little to what the noble Baroness, Lady Howells, said. We do not need to read the recent report, Reading the Riots, about what happened back in the summer to understand why some young people get into trouble, hang about on street corners, join gangs and smash windows. It is not just because of poverty of circumstance—housing, environment and upbringing. It is because of all those things and more, but often it is because of poverty of aspiration. The starting point for any process of regeneration, either physical or social, has to be giving young people a chance to find self-esteem, to find something that they can be proud of themselves for having done, something to give them a sense of real achievement. Sports can give them that.
I would say the same about music, drama, dance and the arts in general as well, but the chance to play sport and to become part of a team, part of a league, to endeavour to excel—the chance to do all those things that sports can be to young people in an exciting and enthusiastic way—can be life-changing. Let us make sure that more of our young people get that opportunity.
Lord Lexden
My Lords, we are all indebted to my noble friend Lord Addington for bringing to our attention once more the twin and linked issues of sport in our schools and in adult life. This topic of course grows steadily in importance and preoccupies public attention to an ever greater extent as we get closer to next year’s Olympic Games. However, the Olympic Games concern the world’s sporting elite. It is the rank and file amateur sporting associations and schools across the country with which this debate has rightly been mainly concerned.
If the state of school sport in the United Kingdom were all that we would like it to be today, with the majority of children being classified as having demonstrated “exceptional performance” under the national curriculum level descriptors on leaving school, we would all be confident that they would be likely to flock with enthusiasm of their own accord to the plethora of amateur associations and clubs that operate in every corner of our kingdom. Sadly, however, in many of our state schools sporting performance leaves much to be desired. Departmental figures for 2010 reveal the depressing statistic that only one in five state schools regularly played in competitions with other schools and that only two children in five regularly played competitive sport, even within their own school, and all this despite more than £2 billion having been spent in attempts to rectify the position.
The independent sector, on the other hand, continues to provide many centres of excellence, as shown by Millfield School, for example, with its outstanding sporting record. At school level, partnerships between the state and independent sectors—a point that as a former general-secretary of the Independent Schools Council I always stress wherever appropriate—offer an immensely important way forward, as I think more and more people have come to appreciate over recent years.
Although the report is some years old, the Institute of Youth Sport at Loughborough University has analysed sporting partnerships between the independent and state sectors. The report mentions numerous benefits to the pupils involved, including increased self-esteem, motivation expectations, new chances to try sports that had not previously been available, the establishment of new links between schools and local clubs, and the dispelling of misplaced preconceptions that the pupils in the two sectors had about each other. As many speakers in this debate have stressed, schools must be opened as fully as possible to the wider community. Such great gains—to individuals and to society as a whole—should be extended as widely as possible. School partnerships between the two sectors must be conducted on an equal basis, bringing enjoyment and satisfaction on both sides. For my part, I continue to regret that as soon as possible I fled from the rugby field and the cricket pitch for the tranquillity of the school library.
What should be our overall aim? If we could work towards ensuring continuity for pupils, we could end the distinction between school sport and sport in later life, and the two would become merely different points along the same spectrum, as my noble friend Lord Addington stressed at the outset. My noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint also lent strong support for that view. I believe that this is what we should be trying to do, especially if we are to avoid squandering that increased enthusiasm and participation created by the Olympic Games for which everyone hopes. In too many previous Games in other countries, participation has soared in the immediate aftermath, only to tail off sharply over a longer period. If Britain’s Games serve as a catalyst for the mixing of schools and local sports clubs, its legacy will last longer than the stadium’s own steel.
Success in this venture will spring from partnerships between sports organisations and the nation’s schools, underpinned by a high degree of volunteering. Apart from areas where government agencies such as Sport England could help to facilitate such partnerships, progress should proceed as far as possible without heavy-handed bureaucratic intervention. Perhaps more responsibility for the initiatives that are undertaken could rest primarily with school heads, although of course the local clubs themselves would be equally important partners.
Finally, and most importantly, such a strategy would go a long way towards improving the health of scores of children and encourage the virtues of sportsmanship that are just as important off the field as they are on it. It was Cicero who taught us that:
“It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigour”.
Baroness Billingham
My Lords, we do indeed thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for this interesting Question. I shall just repeat it to remind the House what it says:
“To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proposals they have to ensure that the quality of teaching of school-age sport increases the levels of participation in sport in later life”.
Well, my straightforward and brief answer to that is, “None whatever”. I have to say that I am outraged, as are thousands of others, that the actions taken by the coalition so far have destroyed the hard-won foundation for sport laid by the previous Government. I can tell noble Lords that it was not easy. Successive Labour Sports Ministers, supported by the health and educational lobbies, battled to increase the reality of PE in schools and to open up the reality of sporting extracurricular activities, which other noble Lords have mentioned. They succeeded, and when the coalition took over, it had the potential to improve not only the health of the nation but to bring about a fair and broad introduction to sport at grass-roots level. Within that framework, school partnerships had offered expert, well trained staff and the network of school sport partnerships that held the prospect of high-level professional input into schools, which had been lacking in the past and which we had all bemoaned.
So let us fast-forward to the arrival of Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education for the coalition Government. He promptly announced a cut of more than £160 million of funding for sport in schools. He did this by removing the ring-fencing of that money, allowing heads to decide where the extra money should be spent. When league tables of academic achievement dominate the priorities of heads, the likelihood of that money being spent on academic subjects becomes, for them, irresistible. That decision, taken by the Secretary of State without any public consultation or discussion within the schools themselves and, I understand, without even any discussion in Cabinet, will have the most profound and devastating effect on the sporting lives of future generations.
To take away basic school sport is to wreck grass-roots sport—the vehicle by which individuals may later choose a specialist sport to provide a lifelong interest and involvement in that sport. The Secretary of State ignored at a stroke all arguments about the benefits of sport across the nation, as others have mentioned—health, well-being and educational advantage. It is clear that Michael Gove is sport-phobic, even philistine, and it is even more astounding when viewed against the promises of sporting legacy to be achieved against the background of the 2012 Olympics.
All promises are broken. As the Times wrote just last week:
“2012 legacy plan for a fitter Britain is quietly scrapped”.
So much for the promises which helped London to win the Games, and so much for the vision of the noble Lord, Lord Coe, of a healthier sporting nation. Even the Prime Minister is a very keen sportsman. However, they all find themselves well and truly rumbled. The coalition fails to understand the crucial role of schools, both secondary and primary, where well taught sport can be embedded as the foundation for children’s future sporting lives. Instead, the DCMS, the Secretary of State and the Sports Minister show their total lack of understanding of the nature of a sporting heritage. Grass-roots sport is the key to success. Their belief that competitive sport is the answer—that Olympic-style competition might be the spur—completely misses the point. As has been said, for a small minority of very talented individuals that may be the case. For the vast majority, however, it will prove disastrous.
All the evidence shows that Labour’s investment in sport was having a rich return. Our ambition of 2 million more people becoming physically active by 2012 and for 60 per cent of young people to be doing at least five hours of sport per week became a reality. This is now on the scrapheap of coalition dogma. That is why I am so angry. For the first time, students in state schools—93 per cent of the school population—were provided with a well funded framework for a sporting legacy. The statistics of the outcome of the Labour investment of £1.5 billion from 2003-08—specialist school colleges, as have been mentioned, school sport co-ordinators, school and club links, and a host of other initiatives—showed a 10 per cent increase in active participation across the community. By his draconian action, Michael Gove has put paid to this, with only government support for competitive sport to hide his nakedness.
But noble Lords can relax. Public schools, which educate just 7 per cent of our children, know better. Their comprehensive programme of expensively funded school sports continues unabated. They provide a full range of sport, competitive and non-competitive, and they will be richly rewarded. In future, even more privately educated athletes will hold aloft the winning trophies and wear the gold medals around their necks. The rest—the 93 per cent—will look on to a world that has been ruthlessly denied them.
Finally, to put the tin lid on it, the Government have announced an additional £41 million for the Olympic opening ceremony, presumably for hundreds of synchronised maypole dancers. What a total lack of judgment. That money should have gone back into schools and grass-roots sport. It is most dispiriting. The coalition has lost its way.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for calling this debate, the importance of which is exemplified by the calibre and the expertise of those who have spoken this evening and the quality of their contributions. It is not often that we get the chance to debate the quality of teaching of PE and sport and the positive impact it can have on lifelong participation, and I am very pleased that we have been able to do so today.
Ofsted’s report, Physical Education in Schools 2005/2008, published in April 2009, found that the overall quality of teaching in physical education was good or better in two-thirds of the schools it visited, although it was more variable in primary schools. The previous Government’s PE and Sport Survey 2009/10 found that 84 per cent of pupils aged five to 16 participated in at least two hours of physical education per week in curriculum time. However, the survey also found disappointingly low take-up of regular competitive sport by young people, with only around two in five pupils taking part in regular competitive sport within school, and only around one in five in regular competitive sport against other schools. That is hardly a good platform on which to base lifelong participation in sport. I rather share with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, some memories of those miserable days on cross-country runs and foggy sports pitches. For those like me who were not in any way built for sport, this did nothing to enhance self-esteem.
However, noble Lords throughout this debate have spoken of the very wide-ranging benefits of sport which of course start with a good teaching experience. The noble Baroness, Lady Howells, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, the noble Lord, Lord Smith, and others indicated the importance of enthusiastic and motivated teachers at school to ensure that young people regard sport as fun. This is really important if we are to encourage young people to continue sport after school and into their adult life. We know that there are ages and stages when participation drops. As my noble friend Lord Addington indicated, 16, 18 and 21 are the key ages at which participation drops. There are particular concerns about cohorts, including girls and young women, and indeed young people with disabilities who are not encouraged to continue in sport, as might serve them well. We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Howells, about the life-changing effects of sport, the inspiring programme in Grenada, and the event she attended recently at Newham College.
I will pick up one or two of the references to particular sports. My noble friend Lord Addington asked for examples of the best schemes targeting community participation. We have an example from England Netball, which developed the Back to Netball programme aimed at tempting women who have dropped out of the sport to return through a fun and flexible offer. This approach is driven by a network of netball development officers around the country, appointed by England Netball. The success of the programme is evaluated and monitored in the partnerships which are created locally to deliver and provide the necessary support and exit routes to sustain women’s participation beyond their initial engagement. England Athletics also developed a programme, and my noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint talked about the Chance to Shine cricket programme, which has been so successful in increasing participation, and in appealing to women to take part in cricket. If only we could read more in the media about the success of women’s sport and teams, that would help to enhance sport across the board for girls and women.
As part of delivering a legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has stated that he wants to create a culture of people playing sport for life and has already written to all the national governing bodies of sport saying that they will be required to focus more on youth from 2013—specifically the 14 to 25 year-old age group. He will be making an announcement in January about a new strategy for participation which will include better links between schools and sports clubs in the community. Contrary to what the noble Baroness, Lady Billingham, was saying, we are not walking away from increasing participation. Every sports governing body will have individual targets in their 2013-17 sports plans that they will have to reach.
The ambition is for every secondary school club to be linked to a multi-sport club in their area and for sport governing bodies to have much stronger relationships with schools. As we have heard today, young people who join a sports club are far more likely to continue playing sport when they leave school. By providing the right coaching or activity at the right time and in the right place, we can bridge the gap between school and community sport through satellite clubs and sports hubs. Sport England is working with 34 national governing bodies of sport to increase the number of five to 19 year-olds taking part in club sport or taking on leadership and volunteering roles within sport. Those roles are also extremely significant in involving and enthusing people.
Places People Play, Sport England’s £136 million lottery-funded mass participation legacy programme—which was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint—includes Sportivate, a £32 million programme that gives 14 to 25 year-olds access to six-week courses in a range of sports including judo, golf, tennis, wakeboarding, athletics, and parkour—or free running. That programme is aimed at those who do not currently choose to take part in sport in their own time, or who do so for a very limited amount of time, and will support them to continue playing sport in their community after the six weeks is up. There is also the Sports Makers programme, which is recruiting tens of thousands of new sports volunteers, aged 16 and over, to organise and lead community sporting activities across the country.
My noble friend Lord Addington and the noble Baroness, Lady Billingham, have berated us once again on the School Sports Partnerships front. The noble Baroness is quite right that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education announced in October last year that ring-fenced funding would not continue beyond the summer term 2011. On average, each of these partnerships costs £250,000 to run, and while many were successful in generating interest and increasing participation, this was not true of all of them.
We will build on the good work already being done by schools to encourage more pupils to play competitive sport both in their school and against other schools. I stress that we are not trying to dismantle school sport partnerships. We are happy for schools to continue to work in partnership with other schools if they wish to do so. We are simply not requiring them to and instead entrusting partnerships to schools for them to continue to fund them from within their school budgets if they want to.
There are all sorts of partnerships. My noble friend Lord Lexden spoke of the very successful schools partnerships between state and independent schools, which enhance the prospects of a range of children and young people who would not otherwise have access to particular facilities. We are encouraged by the fact that more than 10,000 schools have signed up to be part of an exciting new competition, mentioned by my noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint, which will harness the power of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games to inspire a generation of young people to take part in competitive sport, and will culminate in a national finals competition. The first of these will take place in May next year at the Olympic Park. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, I say that more than 30 sports are involved in this, so there should be something for everyone to participate in. We hope that all young people—boys, girls, young men and young women, the disabled and the fully able—will find something that will be interesting and fun to participate in.
The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, mentioned the difficulty of engaging girls and women in sport. It was great to hear that England's netball team recently became 2011 world series champions. Following the World Championships this year, we have 12 world champions in Olympic sport, of whom six are women; and 18 world champions in Paralympic sport, of whom eight are women. The participation figures for women’s sport do not make great reading. The Government will be much tougher at holding sports to account and encouraging them to ensure that girls enjoy sport as much as boys.
My noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint also mentioned the community use of school sports facilities. The Government are encouraging more community use of school sports facilities through extended schools programmes. We hope that they will remain open for more people to enjoy.
The noble Lord, Lord Smith, talked about sport giving young people self-esteem, and about how life-enhancing that is in all sorts of ways that range far wider than sport. Significant evidence shows that sport can have a positive impact on behaviour. When it is used as part of a wider development programme of education and support, it can certainly lead to reduced offending and better social and educational outcomes. A great scheme called StreetGames works with six NGBs to build a sporting infrastructure in deprived areas and has had great success in recruiting and training coaches, community sports leaders and volunteers.
The contributions to this short debate have focused very much on the wider impact of sport on life-enhancing skills. We have heard about a sense of achievement. My noble friend Lord Lexden spoke of the virtues of sportsmanship and my noble friend Lord Addington of the social benefits and of a wide range of other activities that add to them.
I am conscious of the time. I end by thanking all noble Lords who took part in this stimulating debate, and give special thanks to my noble friend Lord Addington for raising this important issue. We are all shaped by our experiences. No doubt the shape of many of us here reflects the amount and quality of PE and sport we experienced and enjoyed at school, and the extent to which we took that participation with us into adulthood. As we count down to the Olympic and Paralympic Games we can be excited and proud of all that is going on in school and community sport. The Government will continue to work hard to ensure that sport remains a key part of our national life.