Youth sport can never again be discarded as superfluous

➤ Dramatic about-turn by the Government finally acknowledges importance of physical activity for kids

As the nation emerges blinking into the light from the latest mass house arrest, there are but two certainties about how life will have changed in a fortnight’s time.

The first is that you can finally reach out a gloved hand to an elderly resident in a care home, so long as you return a negative Covid test beforehand. The second, markedly more ambitious shift is that on day one of schools reopening, children will return en masse to the sports of which they have been long deprived.

It signals a major victory for The Telegraph’s “Keep Kids Active” campaign, established last November in protest at the state-sanctioned wipeout of outdoor activity for under-18s. It should also, let us hope, herald a philosophical reset in this country, where sport for the young is treated less as a dispensable luxury than as an essential element of well-being.

At last the Government has awoken to the damage that its restrictions have inflicted on children already grappling with profound disruption to their education. Sport matters at this age to a degree that cannot easily be graphed in a Downing Street slide show.

As case studies conducted by this newspaper have shown, it can serve not just as a release valve, but as a protection from the myriad hardships that the coronavirus calamity has unleashed. One table tennis coach reflected how his students returned from the first lockdown looking “physically diminished”.

Never again can there be such a glaring indictment of a generation betrayed.

From the moment a second lockdown was announced, The Telegraph, backed by sporting icons from Lord Coe to Mo Farah, Jose Mourinho to Denise Lewis, Jonathan Edwards to Baroness Grey-thompson, has highlighted the children’s health crisis staring the Government in the face.

For the past seven weeks, it has organised online PE lessons in conjunction with Loughborough College, in response to the dismal decision to criminalise grass-roots team sports for the third time in a year. Finally, the Government’s hand has been forced. The restoration of school sport on March 8 demonstrates a recognition, better late than never, of physical education as a central plank of the curriculum, not a superfluous add-on.

It is difficult to exaggerate just how dramatic an about-turn this is.

Throughout the first lockdown, the fanaticism with which any outlets for exercise or pleasure were closed off verged on the cruel. Council orderlies patrolled the playgrounds, tying up the equipment in orange tape lest any six-year-olds should be tempted to leap on the slides. The November sequel was less fundamentalist, but it still involved the rank stupidity of the Government assuming children could maintain their fitness with an after-school run around the park, even as darkness fell at 4pm.

These are errors of policymaking that should never be repeated. Finally, perhaps, this can be a country that treats sport as a force to be nourished at every level, not just as a crutch for political glorification when the Olympics is in town.

The Prime Minister, when he was still a Telegraph columnist, wrote in 2015 of how he hoped to capitalise on the Games over which he had presided as London mayor.

“We are seeing a generation of kids growing up with health risks exacerbated by the lack of physical exercise, and those most affected – the most obese – are naturally the poorest,” he said. “It is a scandal.”

Sad to relate, but many of Boris Johnson’s decisions over the past 12 months have compounded the problems he once so clearly diagnosed. A year-long cycle of lockdowns has not just exposed children to the health problems associated with a sedentary lifestyle, but disproportionately harmed the disadvantaged.

The commitment to school sport returning on March 8 is a welcome sign of redress.

Across sport, frustrations with the roadmap out of lockdown will remain. Do golf and tennis truly need to wait another five weeks for their freedom to restart, when almost 18 million of society’s most vulnerable have been vaccinated? But such cavils need to be balanced against the benefits that children will enjoy much sooner.

For their belated reacquaintance with sport is today acknowledged by the Government as a priority of the greatest urgency. It marks both a remarkable vindication of The Telegraph’s campaigning and a hugely important shift in the way that sport is valued.

It is not just release valve but a protection from myriad hardships virus calamity has unleashed