Mr Blair reflected on today’s more "sedentary" lifestyles and the challenges this caused for public health in a speech to the Youth Sport Trust.
Read the transcript for the film below:
Prime Minister:
Thank you very much indeed, and it’s a real pleasure to be with you here this afternoon in Telford, and thank you, too, for that - well, actually, it’s a long time since anyone’s been that nice about me, so, thank you very much indeed. You must introduce me more often. In fact, I’ll take you around with me. And, if you don’t mind, I will repay the compliment by saying that I don’t think this conference would be of the size it is today and the strength of vigour in the school sports movement if it hadn’t been for your dedication and commitment, which I think has been sustained over a very long period of time.
[applause]
Prime Minister:
And in the video that you just saw, which was the video about the Olympics, it kind of highlights the importance of sport. And it was an extraordinary thing for us to win that Olympic bid, and you’ll have noticed many extraordinary things about the video, not least Tessa embracing David Beckham. I thought it went on a bit long, really. But, I remember the extraordinary thing that we had to do when we were going there and trying to persuade people, of the merits of the British bid. And one of the things I had to do was go and see a whole lot of - all the various members of the International Olympic Committee, including some of the leading sportsmen and women. And they used to just give me a little piece of paper, that said who it was you were about to see. And I got this bit of paper just before this guy came into the room, and it described him as a Czech javelin thrower. And he came in and the first thing I noticed about him was that he was very short, which I thought was odd. And then the next thing he said is, "look, the main thing for me is the quality of the ice."
[laughter]
Prime Minister:
He turned out to be a Norwegian ice skater, so, that was a slight problem. But we managed, in all the people that we saw, you know the really important thing for us, quite apart from the image we presented of London and the Olympics, we tried to set our Olympic bid within the context of what we wanted sport to do for young people. And, you know, one of the main parts of that was to talk about our specialist sports colleges and our decision and desire to make sure that sport took its rightful place again in our schools. And, you know, we’re all passionate enthusiasts for sport. Alan Johnson was telling me on the way out here, rather cruelly in the Australian media, they’ve got a new definition of optimism, which is an English batsman applying sun cream before they go to the crease.
[laughter]
Prime Minister:
You know, we sort of - you know, we live our own lives, in part, through the sporting events around us. But, there’s a lot more to it than that. And what I’d like to do today is try to describe to you, in a way, a story you’re, in some ways, quite familiar with, but it’s a story I’d like the rest of the country to know about. And it’s a story I call a kind of hidden success story. You know, ten years ago, there was hardly any direct investment in schools sport, and since then, there’s been something like one and a half billion pounds worth of government and lottery funding, that’s been invested in it, and there’s more to come. The great thing is that 80% of pupils are now doing at least two hours of PE and sport in the typical week, and that’s up nearly 30% just in the last few years, and up by far more than that over the last ten. We set ourselves, actually, a target of 75%, and we’ve exceeded it. And when I say, "we", I mean, you, because one of the other things I wanted to do this afternoon, and perhaps the essential purpose of the speech, is to say thank you. Thank you for your extraordinary work that you have done and the progress you’ve made. And I know that you will want to be, and we want to be, ambitious for even more. By 2008, we hope that 85% will do their two hours, and by 2010, we want children at least to be able to be offered four hours of sport every week. And that’s an extraordinary turnaround. At times, I think, the decline in school sport must have felt as if it was inevitable and possibly terminal. And, over the latter half of the last century, I think it’s worth just pointing out that our lifestyle became a lot more sedentary. The economy changed, from one dominated by heavy goods and therefore heavy labour, to today’s economy, where the majority of people work in the service industry. I don’t, incidentally, lament this shift by any means. Anyone who’s read the famous passage in the Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier about the backbreaking physical demands of simply arriving at the pithead, will have no great nostalgia for the age of heavy industry, but it’s meant a change in the way that we live our lives. The work we do today is more desk-bound, less physically demanding. There are labour-saving devices in the home that have reduced the calories that we burn. The point is, the modern life’s changed, many of these changes are welcome, but the increased conveniences of modern life has brought with it some unintended consequences. For example, the growing prosperity of post-war Britain and the falling prices in the competitive market, meant that the motorcar quickly went from being a luxury to a common item. And, again, that’s great, but an unforeseen consequence is that we walk, for example, less to school than we ever did before. Unfortunately, at the same time as this was happening, and perhaps because people didn’t really see its public health aspect, public policy exacerbated some of these trends. Open public spaces were neglected and left to decline. Cuts in local services meant, for example, that park keepers, who’d been an underestimated source of reassurance for parents, slowly disappeared. And I don’t forget, either, that the gradual erosion of salaries for teachers, relative to other professions, accelerated a great deal of the goodwill which meant that, for decades, extracurricular activity was supervised without extracurricular pay, was thrown away. Then, also, for far too long, I think, a somewhat damaging argument was allowed to gain currency, and this said that competitive sport was bad for children. It was thought to be aggressive, set people apart from one another. Actually, like most areas of intense competition, sport, of course, teaches people to cooperate. So, a somewhat unholy alliance, if you like, between some well-meaning but misguided teachers, and schools with a particular ideological view of sport, combined then with a failure to invest in the basic infrastructure of schools, let to a slow decline in schools sport. I think the really important news, thanks to your efforts, thanks to what you represent, in schools up and down this country, this is now changing. We still hear the claim that competitive sport has disappeared, but, in fact, almost all schools offer football, 92% athletics, 88% cricket, 81% netball, 77% hockey, the same rugby, and roughly the same tennis. We’re reforming competitions to ensure that they offer high quality opportunities at the appropriate level, and we’re also, or you are also, offering brand new sports. Soccer and cricket and athletics, remain, of course, the principal sports offered, but the numbers of pupils doing archery and golf and cycling, for example, have all gone up rapidly. And then there has been huge investment, as Sue was saying, in sports facilities. Capital funding for schools has increased six-fold in real terms, over the past ten years, and almost £700 million alone has been put into upgrading school sports facilities, specifically. And then, outside of school, by the end of 2006, we’d invested over a billion pounds to develop new or refurbished public sports facilities, and over 4,000 sports facilities projects have been approved. More local authority swimming pools have opened and have closed. Lottery funding has made a big difference. And, since 2004, over 130 pools have opened and just 27 have closed. Indeed, 2003/4 was the second year running that more playing fields have been created than have been lost. And since July, 2001, all applications to dispose have been scrutinised by an independent playing fields advisory panel, and Sports England is a statutory consultee on all such negotiations. As a result, we have now hit a tipping point that, in each year, with playing fields, there will be a net gain. And, if you remember what the situation was some years back, and many of you will, that’s a very big change. And what this investment has allowed us to do is then to draw on the power of sport, as a catalyst. Of course, sport is enjoyable in its own right, and many of us, virtually all of us here, will have sports that we particularly enjoy. But I think all of us also recognise that the benefits of sport are not confined simply to the enjoyment of it alone. First, specifically, in respect of what is a very hot topic, childhood obesity, I’m struck by the extent to which the debate focuses, sometimes exclusively, on diet. You remember, we had a huge debate about school dinners, and quite right, too. And we’ve recently acted to ban fizzy drinks in school canteens and improve school dinners, and there is much, much more on public health that we can do and we will. But, you know, the interesting thing is, that, on a longer term view, the really conspicuous change has not been so much the calorific intake but the decline in physical activity. And I’m surprised that sometimes this doesn’t feature as strongly in the debate, and 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, if you like, almost a conscious decision to take the stairs rather than a lift, to take short journeys on foot when it’s tempting to get in the car. And these may seem small things but, actually, cumulatively, they all help. But, second, there is an obvious link between physical and mental well-being. Your innovation awards, tonight, actually demonstrate this. They’re not primarily about sport, as such, they’re about health, information technology, communication. In many of your schools, as in the school I’m visiting later, PE and sport are used very widely to increase generic motor skills, observation, analysis, evaluation, leadership, team work. These are all things that when people engage in the activity of sport, are things stimulated, so that they improve things like how they work together with other people, how they do exercise leadership. Schools now have some very imaginative ways of using sport to interest students in other topics. This was part of the rational of specialisation, of course. So, for example, forces and movement, in physics, materials and drug testing in chemistry, anatomy, physiology, biology, are all being taught by examples that are sometimes driven from sport. English departments are using the extensive literature that some sports have attracted, notably cricket and boxing but increasingly football and rugby, too, and the traditional skills of mathematics, geometry, measurement, calculating proportions, can all be exemplified through sport. And, thirdly, the place that sport has and occupies in our national life, the kind of theatre and the glamour of it, makes it a great catalyst for other things, too. The Double Club Scheme, for example, that is pioneered by Arsenal Football Club, is a programme which combines literacy and numeracy with football coaching. It began out of school hours for underachieving pupils and has now been brought into the school timetable. Following its success in eight London Challenge schools, the approach is now being piloted in seven other places with the support of other clubs. And the early results, incidentally, are very promising. The Playing for Success programme is establishing study support centres at sports grounds. 18 sports are involved, including all the major national bodies. 18 of the 20 Premierships are signatories, as are Silverstone Motor Circuit and the Brit Oval. And a centre will also be situated within the new Wembley, hopefully some time this century.
[laughter]
Prime Minister:
Actually - sorry - for the media, that was a joke, incidentally. It’s all going fine. The point is that these schemes are aimed at children who have not succeeded in school. And around 180,000 students have benefited so far. And it works. Four successive evaluation studies, undertaken by the National Foundation for Education Research, found significant improvements in literacy and numeracy and ICT skills and, actually, motivation to learn. And, fourth, sport is the life blood of our voluntary sector. You know, nearly two million people give at least an hour a week to sport, to helping others participate in sport. They contribute, indeed, I’m told, the time equivalent of more than 54,000 full-time workers. They sustain over 100,000 affiliated clubs in England, serving over three million members. This sporting sector makes the single biggest contribution to total volunteering in England, with some 28% of all volunteers citing sport as their main area of interest. And, again, we have been investing money in this, some £60 million in coaching up to 2008, and there’s now 3,000 new community sports coaches that will be in place by the end of 2008. But I still think there is much more we can do. And 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, and they will take place in a different city each year, until 2012. And one of the reasons, again, that we were successful in our bid, was the concept of physical legacy, and we want that physical legacy to be a legacy of superb sporting facilities. Sue mentioned, right at the outset, that, in 1997, we had eleven - I think it was eleven - specialist sports colleges, and they will soon, obviously, be celebrating their tenth birthday. We now have over 400. Neither is the growth over. I’m very pleased to be able to announce ten more schools for sports specialisms, eight new sports colleges, and two other schools taking sports as a second specialism. And the idea of the specialist college has been one of the ways in which we sought to transform the landscape over the last decade. We inherited, in a sense, a school system that was essentially monochrome. And with the rapid extension of the specialist schools movement, the introduction of academies in the near future, new trust schools, we’ve brought institutional diversity to the system, and we want that to go further. And the idea was that, within the system, the schools themselves would have their own sense of individual ethos and purpose. We have a thesis about what made 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 specialise in one discipline, foster greater expertise and harness the enthusiasm of pupils for that discipline, to bring out the best in others, too. But, 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. And this is especially true of the specialist sports colleges. The percentage of pupils at sports colleges who got five or more good GCSEs has gone up dramatically just in the past couple of years. And this means that sports colleges are now the fastest improving schools, academically, of all the specialist schools. Ofsted also found that the community programme of sports colleges continued to be a great strength, sharing resources, good practise and expertise, with partner primary schools, and some of the most successful aspects of community work and community sport, are to be found in the tie-up between the sports college and the local community. The partnership aspect of how a school works is critical. And, again, I think you are pioneers of what we’ve tried to do. School sports partnerships now include all maintained schools in England. The Schools Sport Coordinator 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. So, school sport is not a story that is often told, but it’s right that we have the opportunity to tell it. Sue spoke earlier of my own commitment to this over the years. And the reason I have been so committed to it is very simple, and it comes from my own personal experience. I was very lucky to have a privileged education, and one of the aspects of that privileged education was access to fantastic sports facilities. And I used to play sport virtually every day, and I used to play it just as a matter of course. And the fascinating thing about it is that you learn so much about yourself and others as a consequence of doing it. And sometimes people have asked the question, and, indeed, I’ve asked it occasionally myself, when a school has a great set of sports facilities and takes sport seriously, so many other things seem to come with it. And the answer to that, I think, is very, very simple, indeed. We know enough about the world in which we live today to realise that academic skills are very important. But we also know that there can be a danger, particularly with all the things that can distract young people nowadays, that young people, not merely don’t get used to team working and a team approach and games that involve teams, but they can always lock themselves away in front of the computer or with the Gameboy or whatever it is, and they can play by themselves, but sometimes that immensely enriching experience of actually interacting with others on the sports field, is lost. And I think the whole purpose of what we have to do today, in a world that is completely different, is to take some of those very old and traditional values that we were brought up with and believe in, values to do with community, looking after other people, a sense of obligation to others, helping those less fortunate than yourself, getting on with people. You know, sometimes, when you talk to employers nowadays, they say, "okay, you can send me the kids with the 5 good GCSEs, but if they can’t be personable, if they can’t communicate with other people and get on with them, well, there’s not a great deal I can do with that." All of those things that were part of what, certainly, my mum and dad tried to teach me, and your parents will have tried to teach you, in today’s world, a whole lot of things push against it, you know. And I think it’s very singularly sometimes when we talk about how communities are today. I grew up in County Durham and, you know, the time I grew up, in the early 1960s, there was a fixed set of communities all built around the mining industry. And, as a result of that, everyone did all those activities, based around the community. And, you know, when I was young, I don’t suppose we ever really thought about locking the back door or worrying about anti-social behaviour, was something, if you talked about, people would have wandered what you were saying. The world changes and it moves on. And there’s no point in some nostalgic spasm trying to get that world back. The pits have gone and, actually, a lot of people had a very miserable time down there, so, that’s good and that’s progress. We have technology, we have higher living standards. People have got their motorcars and their TV sets, and there are all these huge leaps forward in individual consumer aspiration and attainment. But, every so often, we need to step back and say, "well, what is it in this great process of the modern age that we have lost? And how do we retrieve that and make it life for today’s world?" And I sometimes think that is really the whole basis of what we try to today, if we’re intelligent as a country. So, in the same way that we need to try and recreate the bonds of community for today’s world, so, with the types of activity that we used to engage in, just playing sport out in the street, kicking a ball around, you know, knowing that the thing you would do straight after school is to change into some sports gear and get some of your friends and go down to the playing fields and kick a ball around or have a game of rugby or whatever it was. You know, today, it’s a lot tougher to get those things happening naturally. So, what we’ve got to do is work out new, creative, imaginative ways of doing it. And for too long, for reasons I described earlier in my speech, sport in our schools went into decline, the investment wasn’t there, and we kind of shrugged our shoulders about the consequences, and yet the consequences have been quite serious. I sometimes say to people, "the best cure for anti-social behaviour amongst young people is sport," you know, the best health policy for young is sport, the best way of teaching them interpersonal skills, as we call it nowadays, is sport. So, when we decided to engage in this big, big programme of changing not jut to the specialist school system but to have specialist sports colleges, and we asked Sue to be the person who really led this for us, it was - yes, of course, it was to do with the new type of school system and specialisms and, of course, sport had to be part of that. But there was something far more profound that we were trying to achieve. We were trying to achieve a situation where, in a different world, we recapture some of that spirit that many of us found in sport and what it could do for us, recapture it for the world in which we live today. And I don’t doubt that all of you, in your schools, will face immense challenges in different ways, but I think what is happening is one of the most exciting things in our country. And although it won’t hit the headlines, nonetheless, there will be a difference made in the lives of the pupils that have that new experience that you are giving them in your schools. And that is a wonderful thing, because, as I said when I addressed the Specialist Schools Headteachers’ Conference just a short time ago, the fact is, each one of our young people, in their school days, gets a life chance of a certain quality. And if that quality is really significant, if it’s high quality, then they get a start in life that gives them the opportunity, at least, to make the most of their ability. Now, after that, the state can’t do it for them, no one else can do it for them, they’ve got to do it for themselves, they’ve got to find it from within themselves. But, if they don’t get that life chance, if they never get the opportunity, then sometimes they never get that opportunity again. And that’s a loss for them and it’s a loss for our country. So, ten years ago, when I said, "education, education, education," some of you may remember, I did it because, in the end, I knew, with a privileged background, what education meant for me, and I know that I would never have done any of the things I’ve been able to do in my life without it. And I think there’s no more inspiring, no more wonderful, and should be no more honourable position in our society, than teaching our children to make the most of their God-given ability. And I think that when you do that, and when you make a difference to their lives, that’s something that I think is, just quite simply, the very best thing that anyone can do. Day in, day out, you’re making that difference. And so when I look back on my ten years as Prime Minister, and I look back on all the things that have been difficult and hard, and the thins that we’ve got wrong, as well as the things that I think we’ve got right, I think this is something that I look back on, in my part, my small part, with pride. And it kind of, for all the difficulties and challenges, makes it all worthwhile. But it would never ever have happened without you. And so when, ten years ago, instead of 2,000 people, this conference had, I think, about 40, I don’t suppose people then could have thought that, ten years on, there would be this magnificent gathering of 2,000, and that’s progress. And progress is made by people who are optimists, people who are prepared to take the difficult decisions, to stand up and be counted, and you’ve done that, and I thank you for it. Thank you very much.
[applause]
Female:
So, on behalf of everybody here at the Sports College Conference, Youth Sport Trust, and my role as a national school sport champion, we’re actually privileged to have you here, to give us your time and, ultimately, the dedication and support you’ve given to everybody to enable them to have passion about their jobs. So, thank you very much, Prime Minister.
[applause]
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