Jowell pledges boost for competitive sport
Tessa Jowell has given the clearest sign yet that sport will play a high profile role in Labour’s next election manifesto.
With rising concerns about obesity, ministers are keen to ensure that the UK’s youth remains active, with sport in schools seen as a key factor.
In addition to exercise, Labour is likely to push more competitive sport in schools to encourage the UK’s future sporting champions.
In an interview with The Guardian, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary said she hoped that she would be in the position to make “firm commitments” on sport in schools.
Saying she strongly backed competitive sport, Ms Jowell argued: “We have got to move beyond the politically correct nonsense of the 80s that competition damages children and sports days are undesirable. You only have to look at what young children do in the playground to see that they thrive on competition.”
Her comments come only a week after the publication of an Ofsted report into specialist sports colleges, set up by Labour, which aim to give talented sporting children extra help.
It found that despite the teachers and schools involved being enthusiastic, support for gifted children needed to be improved and recommended that the Department for Education and Department for Culture, Media and Sport work together more closely.
Competitive sport has been declining in the state sector since the 1980s, with the teachers’ dispute leading many to withdraw from coaching extracurricular sports. With the increasing demands of the national curriculum some MPs are known to be worried that teachers might resent being asked to spend more time on sports.
To counter this fear, Ms Jowell emphasised that she was talking about “properly-trained PE teachers and sports coaches going into schools”.
“You can’t assume an English teacher can also teach tennis, and you can’t run the scale of expansion we want to see under the type of good nature and volunteerism. Relying on volunteerism of teachers is too fragile a basis for something as important as this.”
This policy appears to echo that of the Liberal Democrats, announced last week, who suggested the creation of specialist PE teachers to go into a number of different schools within an area and promote and coach a specific sport.
Competitive inter-school sport is still an important part of the ethos of private and public schools, and the Government is aiming for this to spread to the state sector with schools competing against each other in local leagues, with potentially the best of these televised as in American college sport.
