The PM told delegates at a Sports Colleges conference in Telford that school sport was a "hidden success story".
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I want today, if you will let me, to herald a hidden success story.
Ten years ago there was hardly any direct investment in school sport. Since then, over £1.5 billion of government and Lottery funding has been invested in school sport. With more to come.
80 per cent of pupils are now doing at least 2 hours of PE and sport in a typical week. That’s up nearly 30% from 2003/04. We set ourselves a target of 75 per cent and exceeded it by five percentage points.
When I say “we” exceeded it, I of course mean that “you” did. I can state the essential purpose of this speech in two words: thank you. Thank you for the work you have done and the progress you have made.
You’ll be delighted, I think, to know that we are ambitious for even more. By 2008 we hope that 85% of children will do their 2 hours. By 2010 we want all children to be offered at least 4 hours of sport every week.
This is a tremendous turn-around. At times the decline in school sport must have felt terminal.
Over the latter half of the last century our lifestyles became more sedentary. The economy changed shape - from one dominated by heavy goods, intensely demanding of its labour force, to today’s economy, the majority of which is services. I don’t lament this shift, by any means. Anyone who has read the famous passage in Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier about the back-breaking physical demands of simply arriving at the pit-head will have no great nostalgia for the age of heavy industry.
The work we do today is more desk-bound, less physically demanding. Labour-saving devices in the home have reduced the calories we burn - not, incidentally, that I’m suggesting throwing away the washing machine either.
The point is that modern life has changed. Most of these changes are welcome. But the increased convenience of modern life brings with it some unintended consequences.
So, for example, the growing prosperity of post-war Britain and the falling prices in a competitive market meant that the car quickly went from being a luxury to a common item. The unforeseen consequence was that walking to school declined.
Unfortunately public policy exacerbated these trends, rather than counter-acted them. Open public spaces were neglected and left to decline. Cuts in local services meant that park-keepers, who had been an under-rated source of reassurance for parents, slowly disappeared.
And, I don’t forget, the gradual erosion of the salaries for teachers relative to the other professions accelerated. A great deal of the goodwill which meant that, for decades, extra-curricular activity was supervised without extra-curricular pay, was thrown away.
Then, for too long, a damaging argument was allowed to run. It said that competitive sport is bad for children. It was thought to be aggressive and set people apart from one another. Actually, like most areas of intense competition, sport of course teaches people to co-operate.
An unholy alliance between some well-meaning but misguided teachers and schools with a peculiar ideological view of sport and a failure to invest in the basic infrastructure of schools, let alone school sport, led to a slow decline.
Fortunately this is now changing. We still hear the claim that competitive sport has disappeared. In fact, 98% of schools offer football, 92% athletics, 89% cricket, 81% netball, 77% hockey, 77% rugby and 76% tennis. We are reforming competitions to ensure they offer high quality opportunities at the appropriate level.
We are also offering brand new sports. Soccer, cricket and athletics remain, of course, the principal sports offered. But the numbers of pupils doing archery, golf and cycling, for example, have all gone up rapidly.
Then there has been the huge investment in sport facilities. Capital funding for schools has increased six-fold in real terms since 1996-97. Almost £700 million has been put into upgrading school sport facilities specifically.
And outside of school, by the end of 2006 we had invested over £1billion to develop new or refurbished public sports facilities. Over 4,000 sports facilities projects have been approved.
More local authority swimming pools have opened than have closed. Lottery funding has made a big difference. Since 2004, 131 pools have opened and 27 have closed.
2003/4 was the second year running that more playing fields have been created than have been lost. Since July 2001 all applications to dispose have been scrutinised by an independent School Playing Fields Advisory Panel. Sport England is a statutory consultee on all such applications.
As a result, we have hit a tipping point with playing fields in which, each year, there will be a net gain. If you remember what we inherited, and many of you will, that is a big change.
And what this investment has allowed us to do is to draw on the power of sport as a catalyst. Sport is, of course, just enjoyable in its own right. But actually the spillover benefits are huge.
They are of four main types. First, specifically in respect of childhood obesity, I am struck by the extent to which the debate focuses, sometimes exclusively, on diet. You may remember we had a huge debate about school dinners, and quite right too. We have recently acted to ban fizzy drinks in school canteens and improve school dinners.
There is more on public health that we can do and we will.
But, on a longer-term view, the conspicuous change has not been so much the calorific intake of the country but the decline in physical activity. I am surprised that this doesn’t feature at least as strongly in the debate. It needs to. For the reasons I gave before, we do less physical exertion in our lives as a matter of course. We now need to take a conscious moment, to walk up the stairs when we could take the lift, to take short journeys on foot when it is tempting to get in the car. These might seem like small things but they all help.
Second, there is an obvious link between physical and mental well-being. Your Innovation Awards tonight actually demonstrate this. They are not primarily about sport as such. They are about health, Information Technology , communication. In many of your schools, as in the Academy I am going to be visiting later, PE and sport are used very widely: to increase generic motor skills, observation, analysis, evaluation, leadership and teamwork.
Schools now have some very imaginative ways of using sport to interest students in other topics. This was part of the rationale of specialisation, of course. So, for example, forces and movement in physics, materials and drug testing in chemistry, anatomy and physiology in biology are all being taught by examples drawn from sport. English departments are using the extensive literature that some sports have attracted, notably cricket and boxing but increasingly football and rugby too. The traditional skills of mathematics - geometry, measurement, calculating proportions - can all be exemplified through sport.
And, third, the place that sport occupies in our national life, the theatre and glamour, makes it a great catalyst for other benefits.
The Double Club scheme, for example, pioneered by Arsenal football club, is a programme which combines literacy and numeracy with football-coaching. It began out of school hours for under-achieving pupils and has now been brought into the school timetable. Following its success in 8 London Challenge schools, the approach is now being piloted in 7 other places, with the support of other clubs. The early results are very promising.
The Playing for Success programme is establishing study support centres at sports grounds. 15 sports are involved, including all the major national bodies. 19 of the 20 Premiership Clubs are signatories, as are Silverstone Motor Circuit and the Brit Oval. A Centre will also be situated within the “new Wembley”.
The point is that these schemes are aimed at children who have not succeeded in school. 180,000 students have benefited so far. And it works. Four successive evaluation studies, undertaken by the National Foundation for Educational Research, found significant improvements in literacy, numeracy, ICT skills and motivation to learn.
Fourth, sport is the lifeblood of our voluntary sector. Nearly 2 million people give at least an hour a week to sport. They contribute time equivalent to more than 54,000 full-time workers. They sustain over 106,000 affiliated clubs in England, serving over 8 million members. The sporting sector makes the single biggest contribution to total volunteering in England, with 26% of all volunteers citing “sport” as their main area of interest.
Again, government has tried to help. We have invested o ver £60 million in coaching up until 2008. 3,000 new Community Sports Coaches will be in place by the end of 2006.
I still think there is more we could do. We have a great opportunity coming at us soon in the form of the Olympics.
The really exciting thing about the Olympics is that it gives us an opportunity to focus our minds on the power of sport, to inspire young people to take part. This has started already: the first UK School Games were held in Glasgow in September of last year. They will take place in a different city each year until 2012.
One of the reasons we won the bid was our emphasis on the legacy. Plans for the physical legacy are proceeding well. We need to ensure that we have a sporting legacy too, contained in increased participation rates in sport, up to 2012 and beyond.
Let me come back to where I started, with you.
The first 11 Specialist Sports Colleges were born in September 1997. They will soon be celebrating their 10th birthday. The movement has grown. We now have 402. Neither is the growth over. I am very pleased to be able to announce ten more schools with sports specialisms - eight new sports colleges and two other schools taking sports as a second specialism.
The idea of the specialist college has been one of the ways in which we have sought to transform the landscape over the past decade. We inherited a schools system that was essentially monochrome. With a rapid extension of the specialist schools movement, the introduction of Academies and, in the near future, the new Trust schools, we’ve brought institutional diversity to the system.
And the idea was that, within the system, the schools themselves would be quite different. We had a thesis about what makes a good school. Good teachers, proper investment, partnerships with outside bodies. Schools would have more control over their own assets, recruitment and resources. They would specialize in a discipline, foster great expertise and harness the enthusiasm of pupils for that discipline, to bring out the best in them in others.
In particular we saw these new types of school as a way of raising aspirations and standards in some of the poorest areas of the country. This is especially true of the Specialist Sports Colleges. The percentage of pupils at Sports Colleges who got 5 or more good GCSE passes has gone up from 49.0% to 54.2% in the last two years. This means that Sports Colleges are now the fastest improving schools, academically, of all specialist schools.
OfSTED also found that the community programme of Sports Colleges continues to be a great strength: sharing resources, good practice and expertise with partner primary schools are some of the most successful aspects of community work.
The partnership aspect of how a school works is crucial. Again, I think you are pioneers of what we have tried to do. School Sport Partnerships now include all maintained schools in England. The School Sport Co-ordinator ensures that there is someone in every school arguing for the needs of sport. Links beyond the school, to other secondaries and primaries, are hugely improved.
School sport is not a story that is often told. I am glad to have had the opportunity today to tell it. In a sense it is a familiar story: we inherited a sense of pervading gloom with lots of people saying it can’t be done. This was lifted by a combination of investment, much needed and indispensable, and reform, to create new types of institution that released the drive and creativity of staff.
I often say that modern government is always a partnership. The era in which problems were simply fixed by government alone has gone. This conference is testament to a partnership working well. I am delighted to salute the work already put in, the progress already made. I know that some of you at least will see next year’s Youth Sport Trust Conference. Keep up the good work. I know you will.
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