Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate she has made of the average number of hours of sport and physical activity undertaken by pupils in primary schools in England in each year since 2010.

We have developed the Active Lives: Children and Young People survey (ALC), to provide a world-leading approach to gathering data on how children engage with sport and physical activity. Each term, a number of schools will be selected randomly to take part in the survey, with the aim of getting 100,000 children and young people in Years 1 to 11 to complete it each academic year. The survey will include measures of children’s activity levels, physical literacy, wellbeing, self-efficacy and levels of social trust.

The first set of baseline results will be available from early 2019, and will give us a better, and more joined-up, understanding of children’s engagement in sport and physical activity through their early lives and into adulthood.

The Department of Education has not collected data on time spent participating in sport or physical activity by pupils in primary schools prior to the establishment of the Active Lives Children Survey.