Teachers told: Get your pupils fit
AROUND 17,000 teachers will receive extra coaching to help get children fit in a new blitz on school sport.
Sport England is spending up to £13.5million on a teacher training programme – the first ‘significant’ investment in secondary school PE since 2008.
The move comes as Education Secretary Damian Hinds this weekend revealed he is launching a fresh drive to boost competitive sport in the country’s schools.
However, critics claim that the latest initiatives fail to address ‘the root problems’ hampering school sport.
The Sport England scheme is designed to help secondary school PE teachers ‘foster a more positive attitude to physical education’ among pupils. It will give free training to staff in newer activities such as volleyball and zumba. A 2015 Sport England survey of pupils aged 14 and above found that 19 per cent said they disliked or hated PE at school.
Record numbers of children are now severely obese when they arrive at secondary school, leaving pupils at risk of serious health problems including type-2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Last year the Government doubled the funding for PE in primary schools to £320million a year. But critics say secondary schools have lacked major investment and high profile schemes in the subject for the past decade.
Jennie Price, chief executive of Sport England, said the scheme will ‘help schools and teachers design a wider range of opportunities to increase young people’s enjoyment of sport and PE’. Meanwhile, Mr Hinds is set to launch an action plan to increase primary pupils’ participation in competitive sport.
Speaking ahead of the Tory party conference, he said that the Government wants to make sure ‘that every child has the opportunity to explore different kinds of sport and take part in competition in the one – or the many – that they enjoy’.
But Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the proposed initiatives do not address key reasons why sport has run into difficulties, including the sale of school playing fields.
He added: ‘A lot of sport takes place outside the normal curriculum hours and teachers taking that haven’t been sufficiently rewarded.’
no parent could fail to be moved by the tragic story of natasha ednan-Laperouse, the 15-year- old girl who died after an allergic reaction to sesame seeds in a Pret a manger baguette.
Her inquest heard that despite six previous incidents, the company exploited a legal loophole to avoid putting allergy labels on its products. Worse still, it was two years before Pret’s multi-millionaire boss even sent a letter of condolence to natasha’s parents.
And even now, the firm has only promised ‘meaningful change’ over its labelling, without specifying what.
This is simply not good enough. They should stop dragging their feet and immediately put warnings on all their products containing allergens. Anything less is an insult to natasha’s memory.
THE mail welcomes education Secretary Damian Hinds’ drive to ‘foster a more positive attitude to physical education’ in schools. But with an obesity epidemic and troubling levels of unfitness among the young, shouldn’t teachers be doing that already?