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Let’s not lose the momentum

August 13, 2012 9:38 am

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When London won the bid to host the Olympics, a simple promise was made. The pledge was not just to deliver an amazing Games, but to ensure that young people had the chance to follow in the footsteps of their sporting heroes.

To inspire the next generation, it’s not just enough to give a young person a goal to aim for, you need to ensure there is the support and quality coaching to get them there.

I’m never going to be the next Mo Farah. But I have met hundreds of children who have improved not just their health and happiness through sport, but also improved their academic school results.

Whether you are destined to be a gold medal winner or just play Sunday league, sport can break down boundaries and gives young people a way of letting off steam and avoiding trouble.

That’s why I’m angry that David Cameron and Michael Gove have cut funding for school sports by 69%, are selling off playing fields and have scrapped the requirement that pupils do a minimum of two hours sport a week.

It’s frustrating that they don’t want state school pupils to have the same opportunities they had at private school. To fulfil their charitable status, private schools must do more to ensure they are supporting local state schools.

That could include allowing local state schools to use their playing fields and sports equipment, as well as providing expert coaching.

Some private schools already do this, but we want to ensure far more do. If they don’t fulfil their charitable status, we will look at whether they should be entitled to the tax breaks that come with that.

While it’s great to see athletes like Jessica Ennis and Bradley Wiggins doing so well, there are still too few Olympians from state schools.

And I want to see more children doing competitive sport. The numbers of pupils taking part in competitive sport had increased by 2010, but of course more could be done.

The Prime Minister says he wants primary school children to do competitive sport. Labour supports that, but he got rid of the network – School Sports Partnerships – which allowed primary schools access to facilities, staff and equipment to do competitive sport.

And simply blaming teachers shows how out of touch David Cameron is.

So let’s end the blame game and put sport first. Labour is offering to develop a 10 year cross-party plan for school sport. This would agree long term support to increase the time young people have to play competitive sport.

Everyone who loves sport agrees we have to plan for the future. It’s been an incredible two weeks for Team GB and the country as a whole. Let’s not lose that momentum.

Stephen Twigg MP is Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary

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  • John Dore

    Hi Stephen, 
    Thanks for your article. It is important to know that Labour brought the games to London and largely shaped them.

    I agree that when it comes to our kids future we need this to be cross party, taking the kids away from being political pawns. 

    Keep up the good work.
    John.

  • Mark Houlbrook

    Stephen,

    Your point on keeping up the momemtum is very important, all be it, an obvious one. The Olympic Games and its legacy will feature in many peoples minds for years to come. You are right to suggest that future planning is key in maintaining interest in participation in schools and grass root level. You focus on schools but any future plan must go much wider into the grassroot community. Easy access to state  of the art facilities must be available to all in ex pit villages  and old industry towns. Sports facilities in London are important to London Citizens but as the games have shown the majority of medalists are from the North, particularly Yorkshire and other Home Countries. Given that the capital has perhaps has some of the better facilities this has not had the impact on the medal table as one would have wished.

    Coaching is very important if an individual has developed talent. The only way for individual to develop talent is to give them a ball and a playing field and let them play. You are right to say that this should be stimulated from school sport. Talent is developed individually, coaching develops the talent collectively and then individually.

    When you observe the children on the streets of Sao Paulo, Rio or the outskirts of South African shanty towns playing in bare feet with a ball at three, there is little access to coaching.

    Who are the best footballers? Nurture or Nature?

    The idea of a plan is very interesting indeed

    • http://twitter.com/mistyblulabour dave stone

      It’s a matter of culture. As celebrated Jamaican running coach Michael Carr said: “To run is a cultural thing for Jamaicans – as Brazil sees soccer that’s how we see track and field.”

      To replicate something similar in the UK will require easily accessible facilities which can be used outside school hours by the whole community.

      The ‘cap in hand’ approach to private schools will deliver very little.

  • Casio

    Prior to the 1997 election win didn’t Labour pledge time and again to release the capital receipts from council house sales to allow local authorities to build more council houses that were desperately needed? Why was that pledge not honoured? And do Labour pledges mean anything at all in the real world post-Blair when they can be reneged on selectively without a second thought?

    • Alan Giles

       The same thing happened on the day (June 27th 2007) Gordon Brown succeeded to the throne. He promised “a widespread programme of council house building”, which never materialised.

      Blair also promised (among many other things) back in 1996 to renationalize the rail network………still, we must never forget what a great man he was :-)

      • Casio

        Apparently when Blair heard the news that the London bid to hold the 2012 Olympics had won he “… did a little jig”. But then he’d been dancing on the grave of council housing for many years, right from the off after moving into public housing himself… 11 Downing Street… which he occupied for ten years rent free without a thought for the many struggling against all odds to find somewhere to live and bring up their families themselves. What a guy.   

      • Francis Deutsch

        Can a crypto-tory be a great man?

  • uglyfatbloke

    So are we suggesting that it is in any way reasonable that private schools should get to keep charitable status?
    For most of us the London PE Festival has been an excuse to pump ever-larger amounts of money into the area bounded by the M25  No doubt the rest of us should be glad of yet another opportunity to club together to provide another slab of cash to what is already the most heavily subsidised part of the country…lovely.
    Still…it’s made several athletes and their agents, managers and coaches very wealthy AND given Cameron and Boris a bit of space in the news so that’s all right……. 

    • jaime taurosangastre candelas

      You do realise that the Games cost you – in whichever part of the UK you live – £14.69 per year for the last 7 years?  £103 over 7 years does not seem to me to be too much.  But that’s the full £9.3 billion.

      Now, in context, you pay about £157 a year to keep the Indian Space programme going (or any one of DFID’s increasingly inventive and ridiculous ways to give away our money), about £235 each year to give away to various EU institutions, and about £640 in debt interest on all of that lovely deficit spending that Gordon and his predecessors racked up.  That’s interest to “banksters”, not buying back the capital.

      Strange set of priorities that you have, to be whining about the Olympics in the context of everything else that is wrong.  Maybe your choice of screen name reveals why you may not like sport?

      • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=671176264 facebook-671176264

        It’s not interest to banksters: that’s gold buggery.

        It’s interest to depositors.
        Chris Cook

        • jaime taurosangastre candelas

          Well, Chris, it is paid to the “banksters”, some of which they skim off and return a smaller amount to their depositors, most of whom are other “banksters” and pension funds, each of which also skim off an amount before returning some fraction to the depositors.  Mrs Smith the Fireman’s widow would probably be surprised to see what her late husband’s money had been funding, and how little of it (or in technical terms, how “inefficient” it is) that she gets back in her monthly pension.  With no disrespect at all to Mrs Smith, pension “investment” appears to be a fool’s game in the UK.  People are better off by cutting out the chains of middlemen. If I have understood your previous writing, that is something you would probably agree with, although your solution of mutual credits may not be the same as mine of buying and holding stores of physical value..

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