Doing sport makes you smarter yet over half of school children do not achieve the 60 minutes of physical activity every day recommended by the Chief Medical Officer, says a leading sporting charity.
A study by the Youth Sport Trust (YST) has revealed that physically active children achieve higher levels of academic attainment than their less physically active peers.
The sports charity has called for an end to outdated PE lessons and to create a well-being-led sports curriculum that will boost the number of children who do sport, which in turn helps them concentrate in lessons and will help them achieve better academically.
Figures from the YST show children now do less PE than ever before. The trust says that only 44.6% of young people (3.2 million) averaged at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day. This is down from 44.9% of young people last year – a drop of 94,000.
While 2.3 million young people (32.4%) averaged less than 30 minutes per day.
The gap is even wider with ethnic minorities, with only 36% of black children being active compared to 45% of all children and young people.
Ali Oliver, CEO of the YST, admits, “There are some schools where… PE is the first subject to be cut from the curriculum if there are [exam] pressures. Sometimes that goes hand in hand with a more traditional, slightly outdated PE curriculum, which perhaps isn’t as relevant to young people today.
“Only 30% of children really like PE. Lots of them don’t bring their PE kit, they don’t enjoy it. It makes it an easy target to deprioritise.”
She adds, “When PE is focused on well-being and life skills, it plays directly into the main school agenda of teaching and learning and it equips young people to have a greater capacity to learn.”
The sports charity say they have undertaken a survey of parents and carers in 2020 and 2021 and it shows two-thirds of parents believe well-being at school is more important than academic results.
To that end, YST is calling on Ofsted to judge schools on their PE curriculum with an onus on well-being and for a new national target of mandatory 60 minutes-a-day activity and two hours of PE a week.
Labour has said that that half their sports budget has been cut since 2010 by Tory governments and that their extra funding created a more level playing field for athletes – 56% of medal-winning Team GB athletes came from state schools at the Olympics in London 2012 and 60% in Rio 2016, but this has slipped back again in Tokyo 2020.
The Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, says Labour will commit itself to introducing more time for sport during the school day. She says, “Sport is vital to young people’s development. We want to see a more balanced curriculum that allows young people to take part in sport, in art, music and drama."
Keen to ensure better take-up of PE of children left behind by competitive sports, Ali Oliver says, “If it’s about technical competence and pure performance, finding out who’s got the best ability and might represent the school, or go onto a higher level, it tends to exclude many young people.”
However, Team GB medalist, Greg Rutherford, warns, “There is a slight danger in the UK now where sport is under-championed. Winning and losing go hand-in-hand with sport and they are important life lessons. If we remove that from children as they go into the big wide world, it is going to be a huge shock for them.”
Comment by Yi-Toong Yee, sixth-form student, Milton Keynes
Traditionally independent schools have always valued sporting prowess more than the state sector, but there is now clear evidence that physical activity leads to better academic results.
A lack of provision has usually meant that state schools, like mine, are often left behind by the independent sector in certain sports.
Football and rugby tend to produce a greater number of state-schooled professionals, while fencing or rowing are dominated by students at private schools. But independent schools sell themselves on their gold-medal winning sporting facilities, so it’s hardly surprising they represent our country in far greater numbers at the Olympics.
In contrast, state schools have often chosen academic success over sporting, and PE has been left behind in order to focus on getting the best exam results and topping the league tables.
I hope this new study linking physical activity to academic success and encouraging Ofsted to rank state schools by their healthy attitude to sport will be the key to creating a more level playing field between state and private in the future.
And if sport is valued more by the state sector, with a new PE curriculum placing an emphasis on well-being, we could once again see a return to state-schooled Team GB taking podium places at future Olympics.
