Teaching School-Age Sport

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[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”.