Girls shamed by 70s-style gym lessons
GIRLS are being failed by school PE lessons which are ‘stuck in the 1970s’ and leave them ‘humiliated’ and ‘shown-up’, according to researchers.
Despite three decades of research showing girls become less active in their teens, secondary schools have failed to fix the problem, they say.
Issues that humiliate them include being forced to borrow clothes from a box if they forget their kit.
Professor David Kirk, head of the School of Education at the University of Strathclyde, said the narrow range of activities available to girls had to be addressed.
For a year, he has been trialling a new PE teaching method for girls aged 13-15 in four Glasgow schools, alongside Kim Oliver – a professor of physical education at New Mexico State University, in the US.
His methods involve teaching less conventional sports, such as touch rugby and urban orienteering, instead of activities such as swimming.
He believes in making single-sex classes the norm, to make girls feel safer, and in giving pupils more of a choice about what they do.
Speaking about Scottish PE, Pro- fessor Kirk said: ‘We are like a stuck record in physical education: we are still doing stuff that was common practice in the 1970s when I was at school.’
While teachers in the classroom were careful not to ridicule pupils for getting things wrong, he said, PE was ‘a very public display’.
‘PE teachers will tell you, “We deliver a broad curriculum so that people can find something they are good at and continue to do it for the rest of their lives” and they have been saying that for years.
‘But all surveys of adult physical activity show that [school PE lessons] have been miserable failures when it comes to what they say they are there for.’
However, some school leaders have disagreed with the findings.
Jim Thewliss, general secretary of School Leaders Scotland said: ‘To say that physical education has not moved forwards in the past 30 years is not true.
‘There has been particular improvement with regards to health and wellbeing – and understanding about how wellbeing can affect intellectual and emotional intelligence.’
He added: ‘My perception, having worked in schools for close to 50 years, is that physical education certainly has moved on.’
Russell Imrie, principal teacher in PE at Lenzie Academy, Dunbarton- shire, also disagreed. Speaking to an education magazine, he said: ‘It’s about preparing them to be physically literate.
‘If we moved away from developing these skills, in five years’ time the national governing bodies for sport would be saying: “What’s happening to our sport?” and David Kirk would be writing an article about the skill level having dropped.’
A 2015, a Scottish Government study found that 63 per cent of over-16s were doing enough moderate or vigorous activity.
But men were more likely than women to meet the guidelines – at 67 per cent, compared with 59 per cent.
‘A very public display’