Children: Competitive Sport

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, in 2006, Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, wrote an outstanding Olympic manifesto. In an article titled My Fight to Get Britain Fit for the Olympics, he outlined the following measures: to offer children four hours of school sport by 2010; to lead the world in 2012 as one of the fittest and most sporting of nations; to offer after-school sport and links to all local sports clubs; to have every school playing competitively in local leagues; to increase sports volunteering in schools and communities by 1 million; to provide every potential young sports star with extra support to help them train and develop; and that every school should have access to playing fields and better sports facilities.

It would be good to report that one of these laudable sports legacy initiatives had been achieved. Sadly, I cannot report that any of these measures have been delivered because the necessary building blocks for an Olympic sports legacy for young people were absent. The hard evidence, as evidenced in the recent Select Committee report, excellently chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, who I note is in his place today, highlighted that. The reality is that work for young children must start now, but how?

First, I applaud the approach taken by Scotland in its “Excellence” curriculum for physical education in primary schools that calls for all subjects to be delivered in a physically active way—not always through competitive sport. A step change is also needed at the Department of Health towards preventive health rather than having clinical targets, and recognition by the Department for Education that physical education has a distinctive and vital role to play in education. As has been rightly pointed out, primary school teacher training in sport is in need of far higher prioritisation.

The biggest neglect in national strategy during the past two decades has been the lack of focus on how local authorities can assist. In the main they provide most of the facilities that clubs and national governing bodies need to support young people and they often finance the most accessible first-stage coaching opportunities across a range of sports. The Government need to support local government, making spend on recreation and leisure mandatory, not discretionary. They need to invest in incentives for local authorities to use for clubs and their members; for example, a more systematic provision of rate relief.

The School Games initiative was the silver bullet in the mind of Jeremy Hunt in the run-up to the London Olympics. That was thought to address competition in sport. It was a good idea in principle but I regret that it has become in many respects a complex and unwieldy bureaucratic structure of activities ranging from level 1 up to level 4. I well recall going to a county level 3 in Kent where “Splat the Rat” and golf with giant plastic clubs and foam balls were in evidence on a hard tennis court. That was not competitive sport between teams representing their schools. Everybody enjoyed themselves but the reality is that funding, as recognised by the Government, should go first into schools to improve delivery. It needs to be directed towards the governing bodies of sport that for decades have built the expertise and experience in delivering competitive school sports. We have the Rosslyn Park National Schools Sevens, the National Schools’ Regatta, and the evidence of my noble friend Lady Heyhoe Flint, in her excellent speech, on ECB initiatives.

I shall close by quoting the interesting article by David Walsh that some of your Lordships will have read in the Sunday Times yesterday. He said:

“If one wish transcended all others in the aftermath of London 2012 it was that more young people, especially girls, would see sport as something they wanted to do and levels of participation would rise”.

Sadly, it has not happened.