Children: Sport

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for introducing this debate.

The challenge of making an outstanding London Olympic Games truly great is the challenge of matching the exceptional performance of Team GB with an unprecedented stepchange in sport and recreational opportunities for inner-city children. We must translate that inspiration into their participation. It is not too late. Stronger ministerial co-ordination between a wide range of departments, driven by greater government commitment, can still deliver the necessary results.

No school should be an island. Only by working with local clubs, both community and private, can schools add full value to pupils. I hope the pilot teacher training programme which provides national governing body qualifications to promising teachers, so that they can become specialists, can be extended and funded nationwide. Ofsted should take a far more proactive role. Nothing short of a revolution in sports policy is needed to improve the content and time devoted to preparing primary school teachers for working with schoolchildren in PE.

In the run-up to the Games, the Get Set programme reached out to schoolchildren and was an essential part of the sports legacy for our schools. The tireless work of Jan Paterson of the British Olympic Association has ensured that Olympic and Paralympic values are now integrated into a wide range of curricula in a growing number of British schools. It continues to make sense for schools to draw on the expertise of the BOA and of governing bodies, as early and as deeply as possible.

When economic pressure is applied to local authority spending, discretionary spend will always be the first to be squeezed. In England, sport and recreation provision is discretionary spend. We should not forget that local authorities have historically been the largest source of funding for sport and recreation in this country. In educational terms; in aiding the fight against obesity; in providing the only language understood by some of our young people, who find the constraints of the classroom difficult to grasp and would find themselves on an escalator to crime without the medium of sport; in learning teamwork; in realising the opportunity of a growing, multi-billion pound industry with new media and global social networking access—in all these areas many of these benefits will wither on the vine, because of necessary local authority cost savings, unless discretionary spend becomes mandatory. With these cuts, and the loss of playing fields and facilities, the hope and inspiration which was felt by so many young people in 2012 will be dented.

The words of the President of the CCPR, the Duke of Edinburgh, after his half-hour broadcast on active leisure in 1956, which was watched by 10 million people, included the remarks:

“All I am concerned about is people should not be forced to do nothing because there is no opportunity for them to do something in their leisure time”.

We had a great Games. Children in the inner cities deserve a matching opportunity to participate in the sport of their choice, to improved facilities, greater access, targeted investment, qualified PE teachers and high-quality coaching.