On the wrong track to get kids into sport

Perhaps it will. Perhaps the thrill of seeing teenagers as young as 16, 17 and 18, such as Tom Daley and Zoe Smith, compete with the best of the rest of the world will actually make them tear their eyes away from a screen and get into a sporting arena of some sort.

Usually, nothing short of an Olympic-sized boot up the backside will lift these potatoes off their couches.

Screens are just one of the impossible hurdles society has placed in the way of youngsters and sports. Downgraded in British schools over the past couple of decades, PE lessons are reduced to two hours a week, and even just one hour in some secondary schools, replaced by a growing emphasis on numeracy, literacy and science lessons.

Hundreds of school playing fields around the country, including Sussex, have also been sold off and even though this government is attempting to protect remaining playing fields, it's too late now to retrieve those already under concrete. This government is taking measures to protect them now... but this is the same government that axed school sport partnerships, which extended the quality and range of sports offered at schools and increased inter-school competitions.

Individual schools have been forced to fund their own partnerships if they can afford it. And this is the same government whose Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, responsible for the Olympics, said: “I can sum up our sports policy in three words: more competitive sport.”

A succession of conflicting government policies has relegated sport from the premier league to the amateur league, sports initiatives begun by one government axed by the next and ridiculed by the opposition: Labour’s school sport partnerships were jeered at for replacing “traditional” sports such as rugby, hockey and netball with “cheerleading, yoga and circus skills”.

Health and safety is forcing schools to abandon high-risk activities such as gymnastics, and primary school teachers, who teach a range of subjects that includes PE, have less time to concentrate on PE when they study for their PGCE teaching qualification.

“If primary school teachers have spent more than two weeks of their time training on PE, they have done well,” Louise Everard, sports strategy manager for a partnership of 54 Sussex schools, reportedly said earlier this year.

Competition – vital, you’d think, in sports – has become strangely distorted in schools. At primary schools, running and egg-and-spoon races may have a winner but every participant receives a “Well Done!” sticker regardless of how they’ve performed.

At junior school, children take part in non-competitive “activities” such as circuits, where groups perform activities endlessly until a timer goes off and no one wins. Losers can no longer be made to feel like losers, and this results in potential winners feeling like losers, because children who excel at sports rather than academic subjects are denied their one chance to shine.

At secondary schools, straightforward competition between children of the same sex is disappearing. Boys and girls are so different in strength, ability and body shape they simply cannot compete on a level playing field, yet mixed PE classes are now the norm. This summer, pupils at one secondary school in Brighton and Hove competed together at the shot put but boys and girls were given different targets – further ones for the boys, of course. The result is that however good the best girl is, she is unlikely ever to win outright. No wonder the confidence girls have in their sporting skills ebbs away so quickly that by the age of 14 only 31% of them regularly exercise compared with 50% of boys of the same age.

And that’s not taking into account the embarrassment girls feel about having to do PE in front of boys. It’s putting them off sport in a big way, according to a recent study for the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation, and it’s not surprising. Just when teenagers reach their hormonal heights, they are forced to put their developing or newly developed bodies into skimpy sports gear in order to jump about in close proximity to each other. Eeuugh!

Girls also lack female role models in sport, the same study found. Women's or girls’ sports accounts for about 5% of total media coverage because, sorry, girls, it would only get in the way of the football coverage – and I’m not talking about women’s football. The only way you’ll get a female in the football media is if she’s successfully completed the cheerleading lessons that 37% of schools now offer as part of their PE curriculum. Or if she’s a female reporting on male sports – sports programmes on the BBC, for example, tick all the right boxes when it comes to the number of female sports presenters, but it fails miserably when it comes to showing female sports.

The results of this country’s failure to teach sports effectively and inspire young people are evident: the fattest children in Europe with bodies, says a study in Acta Paediatrica, “now made up of more fat and less muscle”, the arm strength of 10-year-olds reduced by 26% and their ability to do sit-ups down 27% in the past decade. Even slim children are less fit, with a 10-year-old from 10 years ago easily outrunning a 10-year-old today. Physical activity improves children’s academic ability, and it’s hard to believe that the alarming rise in attention problems among school pupils has nothing at all to do with the extra hours they spend sitting at desks rather than in the school gym or on the playing field.

Perhaps the Olympics experience will once again make sports a winner, but sadly I think it’s still a distant dream. Will this generation of children be inspired by the pumped-up bodies of the athletes competing in the Olympics? Or will it be the pumped-up ads of the sponsors that will inspire them to eat fast food, drink pints of cola and sit in front of the telly watching other people doing sports?

Do you think your children or grandchildren do enough physical activity in school? Tell us what you think.