It’s great that David Cameron has been prominent in
attending the London Olympics, and even better that he has been sufficiently enthused
by the tremendous success of British competitors to make a call for greater
sports emphasis in schools. But is
Mr. Cameron naïve in passing the blame for a ‘lack of competitive ethos’ on to
teachers? Or is he simply the
latest in a line of Prime Ministers from Margaret Thatcher on to pay lip
service to the idea of sports in state schools whilst simultaneously cutting
the funding that makes it possible.
The problem, as ever, lies with both government and school
leaders. Since the education revolution
of the 1980s, government has been immensely successful in focussing attention
on academic results. The annual
publication of exam league tables has forced schools into an ever more intense
cycle of relentless grade chasing.
Good, you might think, for the academic side of education. Not so good for all the other aspects
of school life. School leaders
have certainly got to grips with the idea that they need to show, year on year,
consistent exam success for their students. Sadly too many of them have taken a rather one-paced, narrow
perspective of this, making exams their focus at the expense of other, broader
aspects of a decent liberal education.
The most significant casualty of this has probably been school sports,
with trips and visits not far behind.
It isn’t directly the government’s fault that too many school
senior management teams increasingly hide behind a ‘cover my ass’ culture of
ever more detailed, time consuming and off-putting bureaucracy. Too few heads and deputies are willing
to support their staff in running after school sports, or arranging fixtures,
putting lengthy forms in the way of keen teachers and taking weeks to pass even
the simplest request to run an extra-curricular activity. One friend of mine, newly qualified and
teaching in a state school, commented in despair at the fact that she had to
fill in a lengthy risk assessment in order to take her PE class into the park
for a class session. The park was
opposite the school. Her
risk-averse head took two weeks before he decided he could agree with her
several page risk assessment, and demanded parental consents and health forms
from every parent before the lesson could be conducted. Lesser teachers would have given up
long before. Plenty of heads, too,
insist that their sports staff attend tedious after-school inset sessions over
running school sports fixtures. It
is little wonder that teachers who might once have been enthusiastic over the
idea of running extra-curricular sports give up in the face of the mountains of
cowardly, pass the blame bureaucracy put in their paths by senior staff. (I should incidentally declare an
interest. I am a rarity amongst
teachers, working as I do for a head who positively encourages extra-curricular
activities and ensures a can-do atmosphere in his school, happily taking the
ultimate responsibility on himself and giving his staff a high degree of leeway
to run things. Why? Quite simply he trusts their
professionalism, and he understands that responsible leadership involves
supporting rather than hindering them).
But behind this school problem is a government problem, and
whatever he says now, Mr. Cameron cannot honestly claim to have supported the
revitalised sports culture he now wants to see in state schools. His education secretary cut the funding
to the School Sports Partnership and devised a sixth form funding formula for
state schools that removed financing for extra-curricular sports in sixth
forms. Only academic A-levels are
deemed worthy of government funding in the state sector. As a way of hindering sport in schools,
that was pretty good going. And,
of course, if you are going to inculcate a blame culture for poor exam results,
you can hardly act surprised if your head teachers choose to ignore the poor
relation – sports.
The independent sector has a distinguished sporting record
because independent schools invest considerable sums in supporting their sports
provision. They pay for
professional coaches, offer considerable scholarships for students with strong
sporting ability and invest in state of the art sports facilities. None of that is available for state
schools and no, sports professionals who can command considerable salaries are
not likely to respond to a Big Society call to work free of charge in schools.
If Mr. Cameron’s commitment to long-term sports provision
for the majority of British students is more than simply the passing enthusiasm
of an Olympics fan, then he needs to encourage an ethos of support, accompanied
by appropriate funding, in the Department for Education first and
foremost. Otherwise, he might be
best advised to avoid the debate altogether.
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